What are your current projects and challenges? Share as much or as little you’re comfortable.
How busy compare to previous years or in perspective of your targets?
For my part, I have been doing renovations on my dwelling for the last three years on and off. Since work is slow at the moment, I have been focusing on finishing that personal project I’m eager to see completed. Also taking some entrepreneurship seminars. I will likely start working on an internal project in a couple of weeks.
Though the year started off slow, I am grateful to say that I've had steady work throughout this year.
Lately, my skills which are being used day-to-day have more to do with organization, project, and budget management, rather than the parts of development which have to do with architecture and writing/testing/thinking-about code.
In order to make sure I get my weekly dose of coding, I work on various personal FMP/Javascript projects and or lend a hand to colleagues when/where appropriate. Working with code inspires me to learn and grow more than the administrative/organizational work, and so I try to make sure I have a regular dose of it each week. That said, I don't turn up my nose to the organizational work, and I try to grow there, too. It's quite a skill to be able to keep projects on track and field the various changes, and there is lots of room for me to learn and grow there, too.
An "interesting" year. My current full-time job is an an in-house developer for a supplier of equipment to the trade fair and entertainment industries in german. As these industries are practically at a standstill the company I work for has been moth-balled. Most employees are at home on "short-pay" but the management have realized that this is an unexpected opportunity to re-build the over 10 year old FileMaker system, so I've been busier than ever, taking advantage of the down-time to work through 10 years of To Do lists in the system.
Currently working on a historical aircraft project as a project manager. There is a custom data management system involved, based on MS technology.
In complement of pm standard tools, I am using my customary personal fm solution for lists handling.
FM-specific, I am looking into migrating a customer’s system to v19, prudently moving forward.
Hi Cecile
Good to hear from you and hope you’re keeping well. As you asked, we’ve 3 projects due to go live before the end of the year, all of which we’ve been working on for over a year (or two).
One is a system we’ve been supporting (but did not create) since 2004, which is finally being converted from a multi-file system to our separated SaleFaith structure. This is a sales to delivery system that includes bill of materials for the product and project management/job control.
The second is a full manufacturing system from sales to international delivery that will again include bill of materials and full MRP (materials requirements planning).
The third is to replace a paper based system used for a care in the community project where people have live in carers in their homes rather than to go into a care home. This is a FileMaker 19 project; the system maintains versions of an iPad FileMaker Go app from within FileMaker that uses FileMaker’s new JavaScript capability and data API to create, maintain and distribute forms to the iPads, then receives ‘filled in’ form data back to the server and parses this back into FileMaker.
Unusually for us, all 3 of the above are less than an hour’s drive from our base, but we’ve a number of side projects alongside, which includes Sage integration for a UK hospital based app, changes to a system used to manage subscriptions for an international publication, document management systems, a production system for an existing customer, a calendar project and a module expansion for a client in Trinidad and Tobago.
Two of the above are on traditional LAN based systems, whereas the remainder are all within our cloud hosted systems.
Things continue to be flat out here and we’re not sure we can imagine life after the 3 ‘biggies’ have been installed. We’ve been very jealous of hearing people have done a lot of DIY and gardening during lockdown, but wouldn’t swap with them.
Kind regards
Andy
I’m very busy but not in FileMaker unfortunately. Since the move to Xojo I have landed three projects - the one I’m currently working on launching in the next couple of weeks is a Wood Mill job tracking and scheduling solution that interfaces with a legacy ERP system. This is being delivered as a web app and allows the mill operators to record the amount of time taken on a particular cut or edging job and record all the details against the job. Stage 2 will be an estimating module to try and give more accuracy to the quotations they give to customers.
All the above could probably be done in some way using FileMaker but this way there are no licences and the annual maintenance fees are are all my own.
This is a very interesting year!
There are even more projects in this year as in the years before.
We got customers who need to do homeoffice (a), we got customers who were in the lockdown (b), we got customers who need new tools for their projects (c), we got on-going projects with very interesting changes (d) - and there are new projects/customers as well (e).
Besides of customers with older FM versions who need to migrate to more or less current versions (f) and customers running their own applications who just need some support in some areas..
a) results often in webd solutions, partly brand new solutions
b) results in changing structure, adding modules
c) can lead to non-FM solutions
d) besides of maintenance, often in combination with API, implementing new requirements, etc. Some with ISO certification (ISO 127'000/1 / software development). One with the need of the data API (FMS)
e) from expanding existent solutions to brand new ones
f) is multi-problematic, some are easy, some discover issues we've never met before, some with issues only for v19
webd...
not so cute when adding webd to existing solutions, but could be really cool and a really fast development when starting from scratch. We do recommend webd instead of FMGo in the meanwhile, because it is more robust concerning updates... customers here just can not update to every new version for several reason.
Licensing is a mess. We got small, non-profit solutions for 3-5 people (no problem, there is the 5-user lic') with the 'obligation' of letting some third party partners viewing data or entering some data - what becomes way to expensive. There are open-source solutions out there that fit the needs for a price that covers just the FM licinsing.. (maria-db, ruby, etc.)
hosting...
the new, upcoming centOS version is promising! We suspect that the requirements are lower - so cheaper hosting is possible. A small centOS server is available for 10 bucks (we don't think that this 1GB machine would be enough...), a traditional FM hosting starts with 55 bucks or 75 bucks, depending on data location (in- / outside of our country) - often with limited access (only 2..5 files, etc.)
API (data API)
A whole new world. I'm using my centOS server for trying out - and postman. Eats a lot of time..
I even got a xojo project for getting some information - wich is another new world, hard to get, too hard..
19
We got only one customer who is on 19. While 19 seems to rock on my devices, many people can not go 19 because of hardware requirements and because of issues (I had to alter my own applications because of layering issues with tab controls, the current Go19 is too slow - I'm writing more stuff on a sheet of paper (!!))
Almost too much for one poor human
We are living in an interesting world (-:
(I'm sending this posting in the soup now - otherwise, it will be never finished...)
It's been a mixed bag for me. Started the year full of hope for building on the work done last year for a very large UK music festival - which obviously got put on hold. Then I managed to secure some wor delivering a proof of concept for a solution for use by the NHS, and now I'm back working on site for. a new client in London, so for the time being there's still food on the table, and the mortgage is still being paid - for now!...
I develop for in-house use, tools that will augment or enhance for deficiencies in our accounting software. The REAL data is in the accounting software's tables. I did create on tool for tracking the accounts of our data center customers. The invoices are created in Filemaker and uploaded to the accounting software.
I would like to create a dashboard. I have been experimenting with a tool for cash management. I need to get daily totals of specific general ledger accounts. I have not been very successful .. yet.
Maybe we can help if you ask specific questions for your project in the ER.
Otherwise, some experts can assist you for a fee. For example @bdbd does coaching if that’s something you are considering. You can pm them to find out their availability.
Thanks Cecile. Last Thursday my co-payables worker was laid off. So it will be a couple weeks before I can get back to it. I am thinking that while a regular calc did not work, I am thinking ExecuteSQL might.
The Accounting Manager wants to streamline processes because of the layoff. It is just three of us where a year ago it was five.
Sorry about that! I wish that things will stabilize and improve!
I've just started to integrate an extremely old finance system with the web, using filemaker as the glue/toolkit. It will have a web frontend for customers, probably WordPress, communicating with FMP through the data API. The backend will use FMP as the interface to provide oversight and controls for the company staff.