FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Introduction / FileMaker 12 Family of Products
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Introduction / FileMaker 12 Family of Products)
I'd like to talk a little bit about the family of FileMaker products because sometimes it can be a little confusing. There are five different products in the FileMaker family. You have FileMaker Pro 12, FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced, FileMaker Server 12, FileMaker Server 12 Advanced and FileMaker Go 12 for iPad and iPhone. So let's talk about the basic differences here. I like to group the server products into one group and Pro 12 Advanced and Pro 12 and Go 12 into another category. The server is for deployment, in other words, once you've developed a solution, you put it on your server and you consume or access the data through FileMaker Pro 12, 12 Advanced or FileMaker Go. But there is a reason why there are five different products, because they all have different capabilities, different strong points. Let's go into the details, dive into them and see what the differences are between each one of these products. So let's talk about the workhorse which is FileMaker Pro 12. It does just about everything, you can create fully customized relational database systems from scratch. You can create calculations, automate with scripts, validate your entry, use Auto Enter, Web Viewers, everything that you've ever seen in demonstrations of FileMaker can be done or created with FileMaker Pro 12. In fact you can even make FileMaker Pro 12 a server of sorts, it can share up to nine simultaneous users of WAN or LAN with another FileMaker Pro Client. So that's pretty cool if you're a small company and you know you can't afford Server and you know, you just want to buy a couple of copies of FileMaker and share them, well this is a great way to go. It doesn't have some of the great advantages of FileMaker Server but it's a pretty good solution for a really small company. You also can share with up to five simultaneous users of a LAN or WAN and have web browsers access your solution via Instant Web Publishing or Instant IWP. So this is also cool too, you can share it with a web browser. We're not going to cover Instant Web Publishing in this tutorial so, but it basically it's just a, a way of interfacing other than Custom Web Publishing which we also won't cover, that's all in the, the web publishing courses that VTC offers. But it's a great way if you have an, an unknown audience and so you can have FileMaker Pro 12 share with a web browser or an unknown audience, the public or in other words. Now, what's the difference between FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced? Well, FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced has all the features of FileMaker Pro 12 plus a bunch of developer features. It can create stand alone, runtime solutions. In other words, somebody could download your solution, your FileMaker Solution from your website and use it without even owning FileMaker, that's pretty cool and it's royalty free distribution. But its also some great developer features, the ability to debug and troubleshoot with specialized tools. We have a Script Debugger to find where the problem is with the Debugger it slows down the, the script and we'll find out more about this later. You have the Data Viewer which is great, often used with the Script Debugger and the Database Design Report or DDR. We'll find out about all these things later on but they are specialized tools that you help you develop more easily. And there's other advanced features, I'm not listing them all here, but you have Custom Functions, Custom Menus and one of my favorite, Copy and Paste Schema. In other words, you know how to copy and paste an object on a layout or you're going to learn how to do it, but with FileMaker Advanced what you can do extra is, copy and paste a field, copy and paste a table. That's really handy when you're trying to go ahead and put a field that's in one table into another table. Right. Rather than having to copy it manually with all the options, FileMaker Pro 12 Advanced makes it really easy. Now FileMaker Server 12 is the server version that most people are going to have, once they go above let's say five or ten, for sure ten because they, you can't share with FileMaker Pro 12 then. It's a high performance server software for teams of FileMaker Client Guests, up to 250. It maximizes your performance and definitely if you have over ten, you're going to want to do that and it maximizes your security for larger groups. It has tons of automation tools for administrative tasks but especially for backups. It can backup while FileMaker is running, FileMaker Pro as a host cannot do that. It also has a Log Viewer with e-mail notifications, so if an error happens or a schedule runs, you can have it e-mail you. It has support for PHP for Custom Web Publishing and it also supports ESS or External SQL Data Source. So this is what most people get as far as server product, now what you're going to see next is Server 12 Advanced. It has all the features of FileMaker Server 12 but bumps up to a maximum of 999 guests on a network with FileMaker Pro Client. Now technically it's really unlimited as far as the number of guests, but I usually recommend about a thousand, that's pretty good. It supports ODBC and JDBC data sources. This is different than ESS and allows you to share up to 100 simultaneous instant web publishing users. You can't even do instant web publishing with FileMaker Server, the regular server version. And last but not least the newest addition to the family, FileMaker Go 12, it allows you to deploy your solution on an iPhone or an iPad. You can either drag a copy of your solution into iTunes and have it synch it there or you can actually connect from within FileMaker Go to a solution that you already have running FileMaker Server. It uses the TCP/IP Protocol just like that and you can do it over 3G or over a, a wireless network, whatever you want, it works just great. So there's two ways to do that but you have no ability to create databases, just use them, that's it. You can't create them on there and it's also important to note that when you're, have a FileMaker Go solution, you know or a FileMaker Solution you want to access on FileMaker Go, it's usually a good idea to program it specifically for that platform. You know, in other words, have different layouts for FileMaker Go than regular FileMaker Pro because although you can get them to work on the same layout, it's usually you want bigger buttons and you want different features and you want to limit what people can do. There's some things that you just, you won't do under FileMaker Go and so you want to tailor something specifically to a FileMaker Go Solution. So usually have layouts for your Macintosh and Windows people and then also layouts for your FileMaker Go people.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34323 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-046-6 |
| Release Date: | 2012-06-08 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 169 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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