Hello all FM users out there:

Stupid simple question........we have purchased several copies of FMPro6 for our little department, and would like to evenually publish our work to our intranet.

Question being which product should we get? Server SEEMS to be if we have everyone running FM. Is it Developer we want? The lion's share of our users will not have FM.

Thanks for any responses

Andrew Mills

Filemaker Server is a database server for your LAN users, it has no web serving capabilities.

Filemaker Unlimited is a client version of Filemaker which connects to a Filemaker Server and makes those databases available to the web.

"Filemaker Developer" is a specialized version of Filemaker Pro which has some development features, such as Database Design Report and Script Debugger. "Filemaker Developer Tool" is a utility app that allows you to create and distribute runtime copies of your databases, as well as a host of other functions (such as renaming whole solutions, adding and removing the .fp5 extension, locking out changes, etc).

Basically you need one license of Filemaker Pro for each of your LAN users, one license of Filemaker Server to host the databases, and one license of Filemaker Unlimited to serve your web clients.

Even I would not recommend that -- you could use one dedicated FM client as low performance server and try to host web from another client.

Well, you "could" use a single copy of Filemaker Pro to do all of your internal and external hosting, but that is NOT the proper way to do it.

As a business consultant, I always advise my clients on the "best" way to do something and am will to fight with them to make sure that they do not take shortcuts.

So I should 'serve up' the multitude of bases using server and run a copy of unlimited as the intranet 'gateway' as it were.

Please excuse me if this seems to be a silly question I just want to make sure I have Kurts suggestion straight. Yes indeed 'shortcuts are not an option in our enterprise, as all hell would break loose if it were to fail and couldn't be brought back to life easily.

thanks so much

Andrew Mills

That is how I would configure the system.

visually:

Filemaker Pro <-> LAN <-> Filemaker Server <-> Filemaker Unlimited <-> Web <-> Browser

That is the best.

My recommendation is OK just for testing or really for tight budget>