intranet and extranet

[mallikai]

I have filemaker 5.0. I have a peer to peer network with

2 Windows NT

1 Mac OSX

1 Mac 8.6

1. Windows 98 (serving as the server)

I would like to develop an intranet for all the employees to be able to access our timesheets database, projects database, etc.

i.e. i would like to develop a filemaker database company intranet to run everything. I have tested a sample database and was able to publish one on our local area network.

However, I would like to know the best filemaker version to use so that the 9 employees would be able to access our network locally and for the database layouts to be web published without losing the format or sorting, searching layouts.

Also, is it possible to to access the intranet from the outside? so that employees can access from their own computers?

thanks...

[Steven H. Blackwell]

This is somewhat dependent on the number of files you have in the solution you are deploying.

With nine employees you're going to be better off PROBABLY using FileMaker Server 5.5 to host the files. This requires a dedicated CPU. THen on a second dedicated CPU, you will want a copy of FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited connected to that server's hosted files. This amchine will broadcast to the Intranet, Internet, etc. (wherever you tell it do do so) for access by web browsers.

Your users need to be running Internet Explorer 5 or 5.5. Layout replication will be very faithful using FIleMAker Pro 5.5 Unlimited; but it will not be exactly the same as if connecting by FileMaker Pro itself. Since web transactions are not persistent connections, you do have issues with multiple users. The best plan would be to give them read only access to these files.

See the information on the FMI web site about ways to set up FileMaker Pro for access by web browsers.

HTH

Old Advance Man

[Jeff Spall]

hi, we're using a FileMaker/Webstar combination to do a very similar task for about 300 employees - still running fast on a single machine with some databases on seperate servers.

There are complicated security issues with combined internal/external access that we finally have nailed like protecting some parts and making it impossible to access pages by url - mail me if you'd like some details of our build.

regards, jeff

[Garry Claridge]

A couple of my clients are running FMP Intranets (CDML based) just using the standard client version of FMP5.5 as the server.

They have no problems.

All the best.

Garry