An introduction to Unlimited needed please

[Nicnacs]

Hello

I've designed databases using filemaker pro and shared them by either individual computers hosting them or by using the server version. But I'm not trying to get my head round Unlimited.

Here's the situation:

we currently have two databases - one used internally (using First Point an access based database - pah!) and one published on the web which is hosted by our web people and is for public consumption. The two hold similar data so this is a silly situation.

What I want to do is combine the two - is this possible? Can you work it so that the public only have limited access to the data - finding the relevant contacts they want but nothing more? I'm thinking we would continue to use the workstation and server versions but that the data would also be available on-line. How does this work? Would the database sit on our server running Unlimited and ?? what else? What hardware would we need?

I'm familiar with computers and FMP but if people could refrain from using technical jargon that would be much appreciated!

Thanks

[Jeff Spall]

Hi, if you have FileMaker server then this all falls into place.

The Filemaker server hosts the database and your webserver has a copy of unlimited, connects to the server as a client which provides the web interface, either directly or through web companion. Internal users can still connect to the server with FMPro clients if you want them to.

Normally the webserver would have an address on your internal network and be accessed by the outside world through a one-to-one address map on your firewall.

There are always going to be some security issues if you want to publish only part of the data in a web database but don't want to make a password logon mandatory.

Limiting the fields in your web layout to only the ones you want published will help.

If you really need to protect data, maybe have "internal" and "web" versions of the database running on the FMP server and schedule scripted updates from one to the other or use a relationship to bring in just the data you need.

I think that this is the way I'd go because web is not secure and allowing a business-critical database to be accessed from the public internet always carries some risk.

regards, jeff

[Nicnacs]

Thanks - that all makes sense. Just one additional question! The 'webserver' you mention - that's a bit of hardware yes? I'm guessing we don't have one at the moment - although we do have a server. Is there anything special about a webserver or is it just the way it's set up? Would we have to buy a new one? We do have technical support here it's just I'm trying to put a proposal together with costs and so on. Would we need two servers - the network server we currently have and the webserver?

Nicole

[Jeff Spall]

Hi,

you need to run the FMP unlimited and FMP server on two different machines. It's the unlimited machine that I'm calling the webserver.

You don't need an extravagantly specified machine to run unlimited unless you are expecting a lot of traffic - like many hundreds of users each day. It'll run happily on Mac OSX, Classic or Windows 2000 or NT and I think (though I havn't tried) on Linux.

You may well want to run http-webserving software (like Apache) on the webserver as well, in which case you use the FileMaker web server connector or change the IP port within FileMaker web companion.

regards, jeff