Claris Cloud Connect Online thingy?

Questions
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1

Hi there, I'm starting up a new client who's a public school and probably can't host their own solution. I have a couple of hosts I use regularly, but there's some sort of new Claris online thing.

Has anyone used it? Is it Filemaker light, or full Filemaker? Can it do things like run nightly imports and send emails from the server? Is it worth doing?

2

If you mean the Claris Cloud, it has some limitations compared to self-hosting FMS on, say, AWS. There is a comparison chart on the Claris site so you can see if the limitations would affect you.

3

Thanks... I couldn't remember what it was called. On paper it looks like the one thing you lose is plugins, which I use mostly on the client side. I might kick the tires on it...

4

You are probably referring to the new Claris product line. That is going to be feature identical with FileMaker Pro + FileMaker Server + (not airtable but pretty much airtable) + a lot of funky development tools designed to make life easy.

The other thing you may be referring to is the cloud. As @OliverBarrett mentioned, it's different to self-hosted.

The big difference being that Claris maintains the server. Because of that, you don't get access to many server tools that you might want. Running nightly imports and sending emails are things that you can do. However, getting your nightly data onto the machine can be tricky. I've done it but it requires planning and setup.

5

Here is a good comparison of Server vs. Cloud: ClarisPKB

From my perspective, the biggest missing feature on Cloud is the lack of Plug-Ins.

One thing I'm not sure about is "anonymous" WebDirect users. I frequently develop solutions for an organization where there are a fixed number of employees, but the org. wants to have a WebDirect website that is public facing. In the past, there were odd restrictions on this, though in the past year Claris has been more reasonable with license terms.

6

Thanks Malcolm, that new Claris product line is what I was thinking of. Seems like it's not ready yet. I'll probably just stick with a regular hosted server vs Filemaker Cloud for now.