#soliant computing

FileMaker and Amazon Web Services (AWS)

FileMaker and Amazon Web Services Mike Duncan and Bill Heizer of Soliant Consulting presented at DevCon 2017 on FileMaker and Amazon Web Services (AWS).  First, kudos to both for tackling a large and complex topic in less than an hour.  By necessity, they had to take a high level view, meaning it’s not really a good primer for learning how to do all they show.  But it is a great roadmap of…

Executing Design, Data Viewer, Speech Recognition, and more

Executing Design It’s time for FileMaker’s take on UX design, brought to you by Chih Hsiao, Senior UX Designer at FileMaker: How do you incorporate design into your day-to‐day development activities? Design is not an afterthought but an ongoing practice of planning, testing, and validating your ideas. In this session, we look at examples that demonstrate key checkpoints, deliverables, and testing…

Upgrade to 15? More Date Magic, HTML, and FileMaker Licensing

Shawn Krueger at Cimbura.com answers the question many of our clients have: Should I upgrade to FileMaker 15 Now? Michael Rocharde does the thinking for you on taking reservations:   http://michaelrocharde.com/moredatemagic/ In this one, we’re going to take it a stage further and work with a date range. For our example, we are using a property management system to manage vacation rentals.…

FileMaker in Swaziland, Quickbooks, Dealing with Change

Soliant Computing (and Albuquerque’s Makah Encarnacao) just finished up a pro bono FileMaker project in Swaziland, and it’s a great feel good story for all: Way to go, Makah! Productive Computing’s new tutorial on pushing invoices and pulling balances to Quickbooks is worth the read if you need to do this for a client:  Productive…

Picking Colors, Splitting Repeating Fields, Raising Standards

Pulling data from repeating fields FileMaker is always a challenge. I’ve used virtual lists to do so with success, looping scripts, and now there is another way: Anders Monsens shows you how to use drag and drop plus Insert from Url on a file to split repeating fields. In a FileMaker solution, repeating fields as data storage are sometimes found in legacy database, and need to be converted to…

Speedy Data Entry for Users

Speedy Data Entry Many industries (medical, insurance, rentals, to name a few) need speedy data entry, but not at the expense of accuracy and detail.  As a result, database programmers have experimented with different “word or phrase” pickers to speed the process. A common form of this is to build a series of often used words and phrases that are clickable as buttons, which then paste the phrase…

FileMaker Server on Amazon Web Services Quick Start Guide

FileMaker Server on Amazon Web Services I recently set up a Simple Email Service (SES) account to use with 360Works Cloudmail, and it is truly a challenging learning experience that is not for the faint of heart. But it is much easier than it was a 18 months ago when I first tried it. The learning curve is steep and the terminology is challenging, too.  For example, Amazon Web Services…

Mike Duncan explores FileMaker 14 WebDirect, and offers some great tips and trick in addition to discussing new features: New Launch Center More Concurrent Users A Better Toolbar Expanded Browser Support Support for passing parameters and for deep linking Custom home page options Redirects in HTML I particularly like the discussion of bypassing the Launch Center and customizing the process of…