mjm7496

Great help guys! Well one thing you have made easy for me is the decision to go ahead and hire a filemaker developer to do this work. I think I'd be getting in way over my head. I really don't have the time to do this AND implement all the new hardware we just purchased. (We just decided to switch from Mac's to PC's) Anyway... I'm going to print out these posts so I can discuss this when I talk to a Filemaker Dev. (Anyone know one?) Thanks again for the help!

Oh and thanks for the help guys! I hope I didn't sound unappreciative.

Yikes... Sorry I was so vague. I am pretty new to FM. I am just starting to learn and unfortunately wasn't the one that created all of these individual databases. My job is actually as Deputy Sheriff, but I am wearing a 2nd hat as the IT guy. My background is in hardware and networking so this database stuff is really greek to me. Anyway I'll try to exlain it better. Essentially what we have is several completely individual databases that have been created over time. There was no rhyme or reason to their creation other than to just start storing data. This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing being we have TONS of wonderful data. The curse being we have no cohesion whatsoever. For example: If I want to do a search for a person's phone number or address I open up our "rural emergency" database and do a search in the name field. If I then want to see if a person has a criminal record I open up the "criminal reports" database and do a search in the name field. THEN if I want to see if that person has a warrant out I open the "Warrants" database. Obviously this can get a little time consuming - especially if they are sitting in the car next to you. There was never any thought put into using a "customer ID" for each of our contacts so therefore some of our databases may have a social security number associated to a person's name, but some do not. Being we have thousands of contacts at this point I don't want to go back into each database and add the SSN to each contact that doesn't have it. Anyway... You are right on Fenton. We do NOT have a master name file or master person file. I suppose the 1st step would be to somehow create this by pulling the information we have into that central file. Now the million dollar question is where do I start?

We are a small sheriff's office that uses filemaker for everything. We have individual databases for several different collections of data including the following: 1. Criminal Reports 2. 911 Database of all registered phone users 3. Warrants 4. Civil Process ... And many others What we currently do is open each individual database and then go to a name field and search. Well some of our forms have names in several spots so we are forced to search each database multiple times. I think I found a way to enter multiple seach strings for a single database, but is there a way to search multiple fields in multiple databases from one place? Ideally what we want to do is create a master name database that would then search each of the other databases and display the results in a way that we could click on the results and view the information. Kinda of like a hyperlink search reult in a web search engine. Also... A side project: We have now added notebooks to our network. We would like to find a way to do 2-way synchronization. We need a complete and current copy of our database in our car and then we need the ability to sync anything we add to that database in our car with the main server (running FM server by the way). I know there is a product out called Syncdek (http://www.syncdek.com) that might do this, but I was wondering if anyone else had a solution for this. Thanks in advance!