I run a telephone answering service. I answere for appox. 150 coustomers, doctors, plumber. lawn care and heating and air customers. I am trying to write a program in filemaker 5.5 and having some luck. But, i realy need help, I must be able to pull up my customer information, take messages for the office or email messsage to cell phone and a copy to the customer company also. Or if a person responds to a page to view message and deliver the message. they must be time/date stamped when i take the message and time/date stampted when i deliver the message.

I also need to be able to fax messages taken to the customer each day so they have a printout of what messages we have taken since they closed. Any help would help put me on the right track.

thanks

jim

Not that you cannot do this yourself, but why do you want to do this yourself?

I would seriously consider hiring someone to write this for you or buying a standard "contact management" template and have it customized for your specific needs.

What you are asking for does not seem that complex, but could easily turn out that way, especially if you want to integrate faxing and/or e-mail.

Start by picking up a book or two on Amazon.com or your local bookstore. This will help you understand the basics of Filemaker and developing databases in it. Then, BEFORE YOU TOUCH THE COMPUTER, make a plan of how you want the screens to look and how you want to move around, including what functionality you want and where you want it.

Exhaustive planning first will save lots of time and money later.

Kurt has a good point. If you needed a new phone system would you get out the soldering iron and study up on electronics? We live in an age when the software marketing people make you believe all you have to do is buy a bunch of Adobe products to become a graphics artist or FM to become a database designer.

If you are doing this as a hobby, have no definite result or schedule in mind and have a lot of time, go ahead and do it yourself. It will be a great educational experience. If you really want a functional product for your business in some near term time frame, first look at what is out there. An answering service isn't exactly a unique business. I'm sure there are turn-key products which will do most of what you wish. I'd look in the industry trade magazines and for FM solutions at www.filemaker.com.

What you wish to do in FM is a complex project for someone who has worked with FM for years and completed dozens of involved projects. The chances of producing a usable result as your first major FM project are pretty small.

-bd

Hi,

If you're to follow Captkurt advice, I recommand you have a look to the Giuseppe PUPITA's "FileM@iler" at http://www.buliga.it/f_mailer.html and his eOffice solution also, which recently got updated with fax/email/SMS functions.

Hope this little "help" to our member doesn't hurt anybody . It's really worth the visit.