12 Days of FileMaker 12 – Week 3

Published April 23, 2012 by Susan Fennema

FM Academy, a collaboration of leading FileMaker development and training companies, is proud to announce the 12 Days of FileMaker 12 webinar series. Each Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks the Academy will host a 60-minute webinar on a new feature of the FileMaker 12 product line. This week features:

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2pm EDT
Webinar 5: Quick Table View. Table View might just be one of the least appreciated features in the FileMaker Pro product line. True, it hardly changed in versions 7 through 9, and the changes in 10 were welcome, but fairly simple. All that changed in 11 with the addition of two bold new features which allow a developer to quickly create a table and perform summary analyses, all without ever leaving the comfort of browse mode. FileMaker 12 brings welcome refinements to this important family of features, and makes Table View a tool worthy of a fresh look. Join our presenter as he demonstrates the practical uses of Table View and showcases changes to it in FileMaker 12.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker, Tips & Techniques, Training | Leave a comment

Creating Subsummary Reports

Published April 17, 2012 by Susan Fennema

Announcing MightyData‘s next free webinar “Creating Subsummary Reports” on Wednesday, May 9 at 12pm CST. The webinar is part of a series of one-hour lunch-and-learn sessions for intermediate FileMaker Pro users and developers.

One of the most powerful and useful capabilities of FileMaker Pro is the capacity to group and summarize data in a report format. You can aggregate, organize, synthesize, summarize, or otherwise manipulate data that users have entered. The skills needed for creating successful reports include defining fields, developing layouts, defining calculation formulas, and scripting. In short, it requires a combination of several skills.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker, Tips & Techniques, Training | Leave a comment

12 Days of FileMaker 12 – Week 2

Published April 16, 2012 by Susan Fennema

FM Academy, a collaboration of leading FileMaker development and training companies, is proud to announce the 12 Days of FileMaker 12 webinar series. Each Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks the Academy will host a 60-minute webinar on a new feature of the FileMaker 12 product line. This week features:

TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2pm EDT
Webinar 3: Layout Mode Enhancements. FileMaker 12 houses powerful new features to align, position and manage objects on your layouts. Join us to see how these powerful new features will help you design more consistent and graphically pleasing application. The presenter will take us through a review of these new features and show how they can be used to balance your layout designs and improve eye flow.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker, Training | Leave a comment

12 Days of FileMaker 12 – Week 1

Published April 9, 2012 by Susan Fennema

FM Academy, a collaboration of leading FileMaker development and training companies, is proud to announce the 12 Days of FileMaker 12 webinar series. Each Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks the Academy will host a 60-minute webinar on a new feature of the FileMaker 12 product line. This week features:

TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2pm EDT
Webinar 1: Layout Design Surface. When designing new modules or systems, one bottleneck to the turnaround time involves the development of Interfaces. The layout design surface of FileMaker Pro 12 has given us tools to streamline interface development, revamped layout themes, and give the Inspector additional control of objects. Join us as we explore and look at examples of these new layout design tools.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker, Training | Leave a comment

Java 6 Update 31 Not Compatible with FileMaker Server 11

Published April 4, 2012 by Kirk Bowman — 3 Comments

Short Version
Do not apply the Java 6 Update 31 to any computer running FileMaker Server 11 or the Admin Console.

Long Version
Today, FileMaker Inc. published a knowledge base article explaining that Java 6 Update 31 is not compatible with the FileMaker Server 11 Admin Console. It is especially important to note, if the update is applied to an operating system running FileMaker Server 11 itself, the Admin Console will not work locally or remotely.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker | 3 Comments

Game Changer: FileMaker Go 12 Is Now Free!

Published April 4, 2012 by Kirk Bowman — 6 Comments

FileMaker Inc. has announced FileMaker 12, the next version of its database platform. There are a lot of new features in this release. (Check out the free 12 Days of FileMaker 12 webinar series from our friends at FM Academy for more information.) While other features may receive more attention in the developer community, I think the real game changer is that FileMaker Go is now a free download from the App Store.

For years, FileMaker customers have been requesting a free client to run FileMaker solutions without the developer features of the desktop product. Now we have it, although in a different form than we originally expected. With the proliferation of iOS devices, FileMaker Go at no cost, and inexpensive FileMaker hosting ($50 per month give or take), a business can easily setup the infrastructure to run a mobile information system.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker | 6 Comments

Announcing the 12 Days of FileMaker 12

Published April 4, 2012 by Susan Fennema — 5 Comments

FM Academy, a collaboration of leading FileMaker development and training companies, is proud to announce the 12 Days of FileMaker 12 webinar series. Each Tuesday and Thursday for the next six weeks the Academy will host a 60-minute webinar on a new feature of the FileMaker 12 product line.

The series will begin on April 10th at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific). Chuck Melton of Anvil Dataworks will present the new Layout Design Surface in FileMaker 12. Chuck is a FileMaker Certified Developer and experienced presenter. Further topics will include Charting, FileMaker Go 12, Container Fields, FileMaker Server 12 and Execute SQL function.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker | 5 Comments

Interviewing: How Not to Suck

Published April 3, 2012 by Susan Fennema — 2 Comments

Kirk Bowman and I have been waxing philosophical on interviewing in our blogs lately. See mine about our process and his about sample files. Step 3 in the process is to interview with me. And, if you can’t get past me, the rest of the process is moot. I am the gatekeeper, so to speak. So, what’s the secret of getting past me? It’s actually a bunch of “don’ts.” Here are a few:

Don’t “forget” our appointment. Put it on your calendar. You should be ready at the time agreed upon. If you can’t keep a schedule when it is for an interview, how will you ever stay on schedule for a customer? If you have an emergency last-minute change, email me… call me. Let me know immediately. I will be flexible and reschedule – no worries. But if I have to hunt you down after the scheduled time to find out what happened, I will be a lot less eager to reschedule.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker, Tips & Techniques | 2 Comments

FileMaker Server-Side Scripts: File Paths

Published March 9, 2012 by Anders Monsen

In an earlier post I wrote about FileMaker Server’s ability to combine system scripts, or shell scripts, with native FileMaker scripts. This shows one of the many ways that FileMaker integrates with external systems, one of the great benefits of working with FileMaker. Yet aside from integration, FileMaker’s server-side scripting also runs native FileMaker scripts. This can off-load many tasks currently assigned to robot boxes, computers whose sole purpose is to connect to FileMaker Server, mimic a user and run various events. With enhancements in FileMaker Server 10 and 11, a veritable movement has risen in the FileMaker community to stomp out robot usage in favor of handling such events through FileMaker Server instead.

There are advantages to running regular tasks through Server. Robot boxes take up resources. The computer running scripts might be better served elsewhere. Security considerations also play a part. Where does the robot box sit? Is it a headless box in a server room, or on someone’s desk? If the robot goes down or fails, how quickly will this be noticed? What about backups? Moving the scripts to server might remove some of this concern.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker | Leave a comment

New Year’s Database Resolution: Backup! (Part 3)

Published March 2, 2012 by Kirk Bowman

To properly backup your FileMaker databases, the first step is to setup backup schedules in FileMaker Server. The next step is to use best practices with the schedules to make sure your backups are safe. Now you need to enable email notification to keep in you informed whether the backup schedules are running successfully.

To enable email notification, first configure the SMTP settings in FileMaker Server. In the Admin Console, go to Configuration > General Settings > Email Notification. Often, you can use the same settings in your email software (Mac Mail, Outlook, etc.). Below is a description of the most common settings.

Continue reading

Published in FileMaker | Leave a comment