Category: Filemaker Development

Last month, this blog reported the story a Mississippi dentist who used FileMaker to develop a database to make up for the lack of records in developing countries, including Haiti. Now, that country is benefiting from another FileMaker app designed by three IT support consultants at the University of Iowa. The app, called TEBOW as a portmanteau of the names of developers Steve Bowers and Ted Fitzgerald, helps track HIV patients.

The lead developer, Stephen Yagla, began working on TEBOW after a trip to Haiti with Chris Buresh, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Iowa. There, they observed a rudimentary and ineffective system of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and paper records being used by health workers, often visiting volunteers like Buresh.

TEBOW has the dual aim of being functional and very easy to use by health care workers with limited IT knowledge. Patients are photographed with an iPhone, their name and phone number are recorded and they are assigned a unique ID number. Workers can track specific patients and analyze the data to draw useful conclusions, such as how much medicine to bring on each trip.

“It’s amazing how powerful it is and how much it helps,” said Buresh to The Daily Iowan. “It’s critical that we can prove to ourselves and everyone else that we’re not wasting our time and money. It has definitely changed the way I look at what we do and changed the way I look at people in IT.”

Certified FileMaker consultants can help businesses achieve similarly successful results by building customized databases and teaching employees to maintain and update them over time.

Kyo Logic president John Mathewson will host the next FileMaker Academy webinar on Tuesday, December 16. The webinar, titled "Design Awesome Applications with FileMaker Themes," will focus on the customization of applications built on this Apple-owned relational database software.

Mathewson will explain the advantages of theme- and style-based customization solutions over free-form customization with a detailed look under the hood at the finer points of FileMaker development. He will also provide a guide to building these themes along with tips to make the process easier and get the most out of the software.

The webinar will present solutions for both desktop and mobile versions. Along with an introduction to themes in FileMaker 12 and 13, Mathewson will deal specifically with how to optimize them for the iOS-based FileMaker Go and other cloud and network solutions. He will also expand on the use of styles and themes for WebDirect, a system for creating custom FileMaker solutions for web browsers.

Themes were introduced with FileMaker 12, and version 13 features 51 of them. Theme customization makes apps more user-friendly, which has a direct effect on their performance and network traffic.

The hour-long webinar will begin at 2:00 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT) on December 16. Developers, FileMaker managers and users who want to learn more about the benefits and logistics of themes can register at this link. Mathewson will also be presenting at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as at a meeting of the Boston-Area FileMaker Developer Association.

The FM Academy has seven members throughout the United States, all of which are platinum-level members of the FileMaker Business Alliance. Based out of Westport, Connecticut, Kyo Logic serves companies in the Northeast by providing help with FileMaker customization, development, implementation and support.

The number of countries and industries benefiting from FileMaker software continues to grow as more companies learn to adapt the database tool to their specific needs. Vinepower Limited, a contracting firm for the viticulture sector based in Blenheim, New Zealand, is furnishing its employees with iPads to keep better track of its operations.

Vinepower provides vineyards with workers for year-round tasks such as pruning and thinning and employs up to 250 during peak season in the Marlborough Region, a well-known producer of Sauvignon blanc wine. The company used FileMaker to build a database they affectionately call “Vinny.”

For field work, supervisors carry iPads where they enter information on vine rows and workers, and later sync all the data in the Vinny database. This work used to be done manually in a much more time-consuming and tedious process. The new solution has had both operational and financial benefits.

“We’ve got better knowledge of our production and how workers are performing,” said Vinepower director Jono Bushell to The New Zealand Herald. “It’s also allowed us to do invoicing before we even do payroll, which improves our cash flow.”

GE Capital says that the use of custom solutions is on the rise worldwide among mid-market companies. Software like FileMaker is more available than ever to businesses that don’t have large IT departments or budgets at their disposal.

FileMaker developers can help companies by creating and customizing databases to fit their specific needs. Training is also available for employees, even those without extensive IT knowledge, to learn how to update and manage their own systems.

FileMaker has joined forces with Network Rail, the operator of most of Great Britain's railroads, to help students at UTC Reading in southern England develop their design and other skills. UTC Reading provides technical education to teenagers as an alternative to a traditional high school, and counts Network Rail among its business partners.

Experts from both companies will be training students to code, design, draw and manage finances over the course of 14 weeks. During that time, the students will be working on designing a theoretical railroad crossing. They will use FileMaker to gather information on maintenance, terrain and traffic flow, among others, which they will then analyze to determine the ideal location for the crossing. They will create a model with a 3D printer and the best projects will be presented to Network Rail.

Network Rail's manager of education programs and the school's principal highlighted the value of projects such as this one to develop the STEM fields in the United Kingdom. With high-level technical education at young ages, they can ensure that their nation remains an engineering leader on the global stage.

"We're seeing students from the ages of 14 to 18 taking on and providing the solutions to everyday problems we face in our business, managing projects and teams of people of varying age and ability," said Filemaker's Northern Europe director, Tony Speakman. "The skills we are working with them on, such as report writing, are things that they won't learn from an undergraduate course."

FileMaker consultants can provide direction to businesses that wish to take advantage of the many possibilities this software provides, training employees to gather data and customize and update their databases to fit their companies' needs.

FileMaker Inc. has published an online guide to creating high-performance custom FileMaker solutions. The guide, titled simply "Performance," is the first in a series of solution design guides that will be made available for download from the free-to-join FileMaker Technical Network. Through the Network, users can join a community of FileMaker developers and experts to share ideas and solutions, as well as download articles, scripts, software and technical briefs.

The 30-page guide outlines how to create custom solutions that are not only efficient but easy to use, both in terms of their visual design and for subsequent maintenance and updating. The guide is suitable for both Apple and Windows users, and it focuses especially on mobile support. Readers will learn how to automate tasks through the FileMaker server to improve the performance of FileMaker Pro for iPad and iPhone.

"The Performance guide helps new users to optimize their new FileMaker solutions and experienced developers to tune up their existing solutions," said vice president of marketing and services Ryan Rosenberg. "High-performing solutions are easier to maintain and more enjoyable for people to use."

Additionally, the company announced that a free webinar will be held on October 28 on "Eight ways to make FileMaker databases run even faster." The webinar will be co-hosted by FileMaker technical marketing manager Matthew O'Dell and certified developer and authorized trainer Mark Richman of Skeleton Key, a St. Louis-based company that, like Kyo Logic, is a member of the FileMaker Academy. There will be two sessions on that date, at 11:00 am and 2:00 pm ET.

Relational database application FileMaker is helping businesses greatly reduce costs by allowing them to closely track and streamline their operations. British management services company Eversfield Consultants reports that its system development expenses were slashed by half by hiring a FileMaker developer. Eversfield specializes in providing cost and strategy support to construction and property management organizations, and uses databases to gather information about each building in its portfolio.

Eversfield attempted to create a FileMaker solution to enhance its property lifecycle management services by categorizing buildings by type, making it easier for employees to search through available assets.

"As we haven't got a lot of experience with FileMaker, it was very time-consuming for us to prepare our application," said Eversfield director Nick Woolcot of the process. "For this reason we couldn't focus on our core business. What's worse, we weren't happy with the performance of the app we created. Because of all that we began to consider hiring for this work a company specializing in FileMaker custom business solutions."

By turning to a certified FileMaker developer, Eversfield received expert services and an app that fulfills all of the company's needs, and they are already reaping the benefits. As well as being able to focus on core business processes rather than software development, it was of vital importance that the app be accessible from mobile devices, since many of Eversfield's business is done in the field during meetings with clients.

Custom database software can help companies in any industry by organizing all the information they need in a manner that is easily accessible. Developers can also provide instruction in how to use FileMaker so that IT managers can expand and update their own databases in the future as their business evolves.

The RunRevLive.14 conference, centered around app development and coding, began on Tuesday in San Diego and will run through the end of this week. One of the first announcements at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel was the introduction of FmPro Migrator 7.34, a piece of software designed specifically to convert FileMaker information to the LiveCode programming language. The new software will allow users to take metadata not just from FileMaker Pro 13, the latest edition of the most widely used version of FileMaker, but also editions 11 and 12. The data can then be manipulated with the upcoming LiveCode 7, whose development is the end result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that began last year.

New features include saving files in Excel and PDF format, and the ability to work on several layers and axes, allowing for increased versatility and adaptability. Said FmPro Migrator developer David Simpson, “Realizing the importance of the LiveCode 7 development cycle, I have been diligently testing FmPro Migrator with LiveCode 7 releases since early 2014. My app now looks razor sharp on Mac OS X and Windows Hi-DPI displays, improving the professional look of FmPro Migrator.”

FileMaker is a useful asset for any business, as it is the most comprehensive tool for gathering and analyzing data, making it more effective than traditional spreadsheet software such as Excel. FileMaker developers can create customized databases for small and medium-sized businesses to keep track of all the information they need for their operations, and to analyze and get ahead of market trends and developments.

As well as providing help with FileMaker development, certified trainers can also teach employees how to use FileMaker, so that they may maximize the profit that can be gained by having all that data readily available and easily accessible.

A series of webinars and training sessions designed to boost the use of database application FileMaker will be hosted by St. Louis-based technology consultant Skeleton Key, a FileMaker Academy partner of Kyo Logic, between August and October. The training series was presented at the FileMaker STL meet-up on August 5, fresh off the 2014 FileMaker Developer Conference, which was held in July in San Antonio and saw Skeleton Key honored with two awards. The company received the Business Alliance Excellence Award for Leads, and in the DevCon Developer Cup Challenge, Christopher Schmitz took first place just ahead of Kyo Logic’s chief technology officer Tim Neudecker.

Neudecker himself kicked things off with a free hour-long FileMaker Academy Webinar for developers and IT and project managers on August 19, which served as a prelude to Skeleton Key’s two St. Louis training courses. Skeleton Key has spearheaded the effort to promote FileMaker among local businesses in the St. Louis area.

The Developer Essentials three-day course will be held August 26-28 with a second session October 21-23. Attendees will have a one-on-one interview before immersing themselves in learning the basic tools of FileMaker development, including data modeling, layouts, scripts and security. A final individual review will help would-be developers apply what they’ve learned to their specific area of business.

Path to Certification is a more in-depth five-day course, designed to prepare developers who already have an understanding of FileMaker development for the FileMaker Certification exam. Like the Developer Essentials program, this training series is book-ended by one-on-one meetings, where the conversation will be tailored to the needs of each aspirant, in order to address specific areas which may require polishing ahead of the Certification exam.

For many businesses, mobility is the next big investment in their IT strategy. Some organizations are already implementing mobile strategies, whether it is officially supported by the company or employees using their personal devices for work tasks without the IT department's knowledge. Unsurprisingly, Apple devices are the first choice.

According to the most recent quarterly report by enterprise mobile services vendor Good Technology, Apple's iOS platform holds an 88 percent market share when it comes to business apps. When it comes to the devices themselves, Apple remains on top, at least with the more than 5,000 companies that were interviewed. The iPhone makes up 51 percent of activated smartphones, while the iPad accounts for 90 percent of tablet activations. Combined that is a 67 percent share.

The report also found 70 percent of enterprises believe that providing mobile devices and support to employees will be a "high" or "critical" priority over the next 12 months.

"We see more spending shift to software for mobile applications and middleware as well as the necessary management solutions to provision and manage mobile applications," the report reads. "At the end of the day, we may talk about mobile devices, but in reality it's all about the apps."

This means more companies can benefit from quality mobile applications and Apple has several. At the top of the list is FileMaker, the popular custom database solution that is designed for mobility and comes with a free app version called FileMaker Go, that is only available on an Apple iOS platform. The right FileMaker developer can help any company optimize the software.

One certainty of technology is that at some point it will fail. Computers and mobile devices are machines that run complicated software solutions that require updating. Eventually that hardware will start to break down and a software upgrade will have a glitch that causes it to start acting screwy. In most instances they can be easily fixed and the impact is minimal, however, that is not always the case.

A recent article from RT covered a press briefing that was given by U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf. She spoke about the problems that the U.S. Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) at the State Bureau of Consular Affairs have had that caused consulates across the world to lose the ability to issue visas.

According to Harf, the problem was born out of a system update. For several months the database had been experiencing technical issues but remained functional. On July 20, 2014, a software update was issued to fix the problems but had the opposite effect. For the next three days, the database was completely offline and was only partially brought online.

"We believe the root cause of the problem was a combination of software optimization and hardware compatibility issues," Harf said. "We believe there was no malicious intent. It's hardware and a software issue that we are working to fix."

During this downtime, over 200 U.S. consulates from around the world were unable to issue visas. This impacted businesses, personal travel, vacations and much more.

It is critical for companies to find and deploy the right custom database software. With the help of a solution provider that can design and maintain the system, any company gains a hand to avoid potential glitches.