Filemaker to create a CRM?

[J.Kincade]

I have purchased filemaker and filemaker 7 server advanced, and after playing around with it a bit I was wondering if anyone had heard of it being used to create a sort of CRM of sorts, I haven't gone to much indepth development on it yet but from what im thinking I could catal. all of my clients and my other partner could log into the db from the field thru a browser and pull up any info that would be pertaining to the clients at hand and also relay info back via the db. Any thoughts or suggestions would be helpful as to a possible yay or nay on my thinking here. Thanks.

[Deep Thought II]

well i dont seem to grasp what u are trying to ask. but if u mean that all users will have same access to the db? u can control that using access priviledges and accounts.

other than that, if u want to run an internet-based business by providing a CRM web service, u should really think about the number of ur clients and the amount of traffic u will have.

FM isn't built to be an all-powerful web service-oriented database software. it has very limited capabilities.

if u have a small amount of clients that meets to what FM can do (only 100 simultaneous users), u can probably go for it. otherwise u will be having multiple servers if u have large amount of clients.

else u can try to implement the legendary PHP + MySQL + FM combo, which would increase the amount of work and time of development... plus more costs.

[H.P.]

What's the advantage of combining FM + MySQL + PHP? If you use MySQL & PHP, there's no point of paying extra to use FM right? You can development the complete solution with PHP & MySQL already.

[Deep Thought II]

yea... that's true. it only happens when there are different databases are in the play, and u happen to have to somehow make different databases communicate with each other rather than making everyone use the same database.

[J.Kincade]

a crm is a customer relation management thing, essentially it's a db pretty much that allows you to do multiple things like have all their contact info, things you guys spoke about, assign an account number to their entry, stuff like. Imagine an address book but with a few more nicer options.

As for users, nah we don't need 100 people logging into it. Try 5-6 heh. And at most that would be as many as would be logging in at any time anyways. I had been contemplating it for a while then i said we should get 7a, we have that and it seems like it can allow me to have the type of access I want to set up, but im more questioning if you can create something like I just described.

[J.Kincade]

anyone have any ideas?

T.c.

[Vaughan]

Why not put together a simple database in FMP and see how it looks on the web with IWP.

[bruceR]

Ideas about what? People/orders/action items/call logs - all of this is bog standard stuff people do every day with Filemaker. What is your question?