This is a fairly easy problem that most languages/systems handle gracefully, but I'm relatively new to FM in general and can't figure out a more streamlined process than the extremely-time-intensive method we're using now.
The situation: We're constantly developing a rather large FM solution in-house. We have 30+ clients who purchase our solution. We then host a separate instance of our solution for each client on a server we control running FMS12. Everything works fine BUT -- Let's say we release an updated version every 2 weeks that includes scripting/layout bug fixes and new functionality. Right now, our way of upgrading all clients to this new version is to manually Close each client's instance by hand, download it from FMS to the desktop, manually replace the old db file with our new one while leaving the external container folders intact, rename the old db file to "Source", then manually run a large script that imports all of the client's database data from "Source" into our new version. We then have to re-upload this 'upgraded' version to FMS and restart it.
This *DOES* work, in that it keeps client images/data intact while replacing the FM scripting/layouts with our new versions, but I'm sure you can tell just how outrageously long this takes to do by hand. As we gain more clients, the time required is becoming entirely unmanageable and I feel like there HAS to be a better way that I simply don't know about.
Help please
