This webinar reminds my of my staying in Kuwait as a Construction Engineer, when I and Charles, an american structural engineer where listening to a meeting behind closed doors. Me, not very experienced in english language back then asked what the Minister of Public Works is saying. Charles said, he wouldn’t understand since the guy speaks arabic. A local passed by, laughing at us and said: “You’re wrong. He’s speaking english!”
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Not fair.
It's my understanding that the engineers for FileMaker are not working on Claris Connect. That is a different team. In fact, they just hired a long time FileMaker / Web developer to join their engineering team specifically for Claris Connect. Lui de la Parra. Super great guy. Great developer. Great insights. https://www.linkedin.com/in/luidelaparra/
For me, the FileMaker platform really had a re-awakening with the advent of v16 and everything that came with that… many many great things introduced since then including my list of 5 above, and it really wasn’t that long ago… With the platform looking like it’s going to continue this new dawn at a rapid pace with all the announcements this year then exciting times ahead for sure 
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@skywillmott - looking at your top 5, all of them were pushed very hard by the steering committee that existed at the time. I had talked with more than one of them, and these are the things that were pushed really hard, and FileMaker agreed and got to work on them.
well…
- updates every 3 or 4 month
– only the latest will get patches if it goes the way it goes now
– how to deal with that if a companies processes do not allow to do patches without testing?
– until now, we had 3 - 4 month (at least) until we could go ‘live’ with a new version - leaving the mass of todays filemaker developer out
– most of the fm application I came across, are pure fm, local server if any - many new features but almost no one for filemaker pro advanced
– what about current problems with 18, what about ooold wishes (printing, developing in a team, etc, etc.) - new licensing modell (again)
- nothing, really nothing shown, only diagrams (keynote sheets)
I had really problems with understanding. Why did they ship a webinar that is that hard to understand? (I am not nativ english, I need clear voice and dialect - Rick was perfect)
I am afraid that @Fred is right, was my first impression
Everything has also good sides: Android…
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A quarterly upgrade creates constant cycle of change. I don’t think that is appropriate in many situations. In addition, the length of the support period is being reduced from approximately three years to approximately two years.
I’d really like to see a long term support version. In the present market that would be an assurance to support the LTS product for three years.
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Updates are the patches. So they won't update a previous release. That's the purpose of the release model. It's very similar to most other software. It allows them to focus on the next release, and keep moving forward.
This is definitely a completely different model. There will no longer be a version number after 19. And you can test and upgrade as needed.
I'm not seeing how this is a bad thing. We won't update every release, likely. Just ones that fix substantial bugs or have features we need. That gives us 2 years to handle testing and hardware issues. Seems completely reasonable to me.
Well, there are new features. Can't say I was a fan of how they focused so much on the marketing buzzwords, which are meaningless to me. But I've seen 19, it has nice features, and there will be a lot more to come. FileMaker still has it's engineering team, and plenty of focus from the FileMaker side of the business. Claris Connect and Claris NexGen Apps are additions to the company, not replacements.
They serve a slightly different market, with some overlap that will benefit anyone that can use it without killing the other products.
New licensing models are a pain, not going to argue that one. Hopefully it's better.
Hopefully there will be one more version rev before 19. But I don't know. As for old requests, they will be handled as they always have been, but with a different set of eyes on them, in addition to the product managers. And to add to this, listening to and talking with the Product Managers, like Robert, they have a good sense of what's needed and where things are headed. It will be exciting to see.
I'll be honest, I wasn't a fan of presentation. Some of the presenters were very hard to follow and understand, and English is my primary language. So that's not just you.
I'm not a fan of marketing-buzzword-heavy roadmaps, and that is what this felt like. Sometimes I wish they would move HQ out of Silicon Valley and interface more with the rest of the businesses around the country, and the world. But I feel that way about may software vendors. LOL
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Your are not alone, my native language is French. I turned on CC to see if I can better understand . . . the poor guy, er I mean computer had a hard time generating the text. Each time Claris was spelled a different way. I even saw sir coughs 
I couldn't guess what that meant.
Since I am registered for tomorrow, I will watch again, hopping I can catch some more.
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Yep, that was very different compared to last roadmap presentations where there were three kind of changes: next version, version following next version and considered. Maybe the document to follow will be more like this.
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unfortunately, if You are a ISO 27K certified company, You might need test-groups etc. We do not have test-robots in fm, therefore humans needed - You won't find 'spare users' often...
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We have been considering Eggplant… 22k a year is a sharp licencing fee.
Well they talked a lot but said very little mostly re-hashed word soup from stuff they have been saying since DevCon. They would have been better off calling this a Strategic Road Map and save the product roadmap for when they were going to actually show some products lets hope they do more of that in the future. I don’t need to be told about the “next gen” I need to see it and I need to know it will work on prem or I don’t really care.
No examples of Claris Connect which was a surprise and no pricing info of course I’m sure it won’t be cheap so too soon to really comment further on that.
On prem price will be going up probably a lot which is bad news of course how bad we will just have to wait and see. I would advise them to actually make the product better before raising its’ price but they seem determined to do the opposite. JS in a browser well okay fine I suppose but there are at least 100 things I would like to see changed before that which may never happen.
The whole Claris/FM world is being turned upside down right now and the presentation I don’t think brought much clarity to the situation which was unfortunate and not in Claris’s best interest in my opinion. A famous Englishman in a time of great turmoil once said “It’s not the beginning of the end but it is the end of the beginning”
I don’t think it’s the end of FM per se but it is the end of what it always has been historically along with it’s historically relatively low license cost. Where it’s headed and what it may turn into at this point is anyone’s guess we just have to hope and pray it’s something that we and our customers can all live with and afford.
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• LayoutObjects Window
• SingleDeviceInterface for PC (same window behaviour on PC as on Mac)
That's at the beginning of the Q&A and the speaker was then saying DevSecOps, refering to one element of the slide deck early on (see below):
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I hope they are different teams, otherwise how can someone keep a pace if the resources are flying from one product to another.
That said, I am concerned about how much 'new blood' they are or are not getting. Because if they are not hiring more, they will have to re-allocate internal resources and those would be from one of Pro/Go/WD/FMS.
This dynamic does not only apply to development, but other areas like support and documentation. Even if I can be sold on the benefits of someone who can support be for the 'total package' (Cloud, Connect, FM - the full stack), if every support ticket lands in a single queue, we can only expect the answer time to take longer (same thing if resources are diverted from existing staff allocations).
I keep my finger crossed and I am willing give them the benefit of the doubt for now. But I am sure a lot of people will keep a close eye on all this. They already have to deploy a lot of effort to handle the message / perception about how the community transition went / is going. Cloud is not 'frictionless' either from what I am hearing up to date. They need to play their cards well, people tend to apply labels very quickly in the 2020 era. Not everyone reacts the same to change.
All I can say right now is I do not recall the last time people had so many reasons to both be hopeful and worry at the same time. Introduction of FM7 would be my guess, but even then I think it would come second (hard to recall as it is so many years ago and I was someone else back then).
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Did you look at Lui's LinkedIn profile? They just hired him to work on Claris Connect.
Sign Up | LinkedIn
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I was thinking at a different scale than just one person, and not limiting to dev.
I was surprised that Juliano did not bring along more team members from Stamplay.
I’m glad Lui’s joined in. He has a great track record in the community which is always a good thing. From his name, I guess he understands Italian well, something I hope is not a requirement to work in Connect’s codebase (I spent some time at SAP and they had to instruct devs to stop naming objects and commenting in German, so I know it can be an issue)
I guess they have to start somewhere and it is not like the phone lines will start ringing tomorrow, but if things turn the way they want, they will need an influx of staffers to maintain the growth. Their existing structure can only scale so much.
We often measure the scale of an action by observing the details of the few actions we can see. While not the best description, I know the mass of ants are active when I see one or two wandering around my kitchen.