is FM the best alternative?

[digitalman]

I am not sure if this is the right place for this, please move it to the proper forum if there is a better place for it.

i work for a small company of 4 employees. 3 are at one location and the owner works from home. we attend many conferences over the course of the year and collect names and addresses of people who come by our booth. we have over 2000 so far and i foresee this # getting much bigger. Currently the names are being put into an excel spreadsheet. Several times a year we print off mailing labels from the spreadsheet to send out info to them. There is not much data other then basic contact information that we collect from people at the present time (and probably not much more in the future as all accounting information is being done in quickbooks).

what i would like to do is import the existing spreadsheet into a database and setup something so all four users can log into one data base and add new potiential clients to the mailings database. here is our needs:

1. allow one remote user to access internal database (we are not running a real server os nor vpn, although that could change if it is the most cost effective method) or securely run it over the internet so all 4 users can access the db.

2. import existing excel contact list

3. filter out duplicate contacts if created (not a high priority)

4. create mailing lables from entire list or by basic criteria (like locality)

5. something that would be easy for people to enter in new contacts with out having to worry about them messing up the entire database (a current worry with using excel)

6. be a reasonable cost. i am not sure if i can justify the advanced server price for this project unless there is a really compelling reason. it would be easier for me to justify a vpn server as we could use it for other things too.

7. (this one is completely extra and not required) be able to interact with quickbooks customer info to be able to send out special mailling to perfered clients and other simular activities

This would be my first expierence creating a database. I am the one who handles all of the computer stuff and while i am knowledgable in most other aspects of computers, i have not had a need to work much with databases. the other poeple in the office are not tech-savy, so the final product would have to run very smoothly and not create new headaches for me. Or is FM even the way to go for something like this?

While i am not asking for handholding to get through this process, if taking on this project is going to be a nightmare for a novice, that would be good to know too. any help or insight that can be offered would be preferred.

Thanks

Eric

[aaa]

You may not afraid, and if you want to learn you must to begin.

[Ted S]

Digitalman,

First off, good job on explaining your situation. Clear, concise, tells the whole story. Nicely done. Welcome to the forums!

I see you're on a Mac. I'm not a Mac guy myself but if your office is 100% Mac then FileMaker 'MAY' be your only real choice - other than spreadsheets.

In my opinion, the situation that you describe is a perfect fit for FileMaker. Programming FileMaker is often easy enough for regular folks to learn and become good at. If you were to leave, someone else could probably pick up where you left off and at least make minor changes and tweaks. If you were to go with the MySQL / PHP route for instance, non-technical folks would probably be in much deeper trouble. They would likely have to go outside the company for any type of change.

The three systems in the office should be able to be connected without the need for FM Server at all. I don't anticipate any problems there.

I'm working for a much larger company and we run a VPN and it works like a champ with FileMaker & MS Terminal Services. You may not have this option and unfortuneately I don't have any experience with 'smaller' network configurations like you need. There are a lot of FileMaker savvy folks on this board that can give you some advice here.

One last piece of advice; don't use FileMaker 6. Go with the latest version (7) right from the get-go. You may be tempted to use 6 because of the cost difference but v7 is radically different (and better) than previous versions and you will be able to build your database from the ground up using all of the new functionality that 7 has to offer.

Good luck,

[BrentHedden]

Considering how many contacts you have, ANYthing is better than keeping that info in a spreadsheet. Importing spreadsheets into Filemaker is super easy. If you only wanted to create a program that kept this contact info, building it should be quite simple. If you only have 4 employees, then using FM Server is not necessary, especially if the cost is prohibative.

[Fenton]

FileMaker has very good speed over a WAN connection, from remote connections, many times faster than 6. I often have to tweak client databases from my home, and it works fine. You can do practically everything remotely (not that I'd want to so real development remotely). Especially for simple databases, 2000 is not a lot of records.

FileMaker 7 security is very good, so that's not a problem. The simplest safe solution would be to run FileMaker Server (not Advanced) on a good host machine and let people log in remotely. You could even use regular FileMaker for that few people. But Server would be better and safer, as it can do automated backups, remote administration, etc..

[digitalman]

so i am assuming that making mailing labels are going to be no problem, is this correct? also i was looking at the filemaker pro training video from VTC. Is that a good resource for a beginer? If i started the database in just the pro version and then down the line we we realized that server or advanced server would be more apprpriate, is there any problem miagrating over to a dfferent version of fm7 (or higher in the future).

Thanks Again

Eric

[Fenton]

When you create a new layout in FileMaker, one of the options for the type of layout is "Labels". The next dialog lets you choose from just about every Avery label there is, and a few Dymo (on mine anyway). Or design your own size. Labels are just a layout with custom sized parts, and a few fields (inserted as Merge type, which is non-enterable, and well suited to printing, but otherwise just a regular field).

There is no difference in the files themselves whether you host them with regular FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Server. You always design and build the files with FileMaker Pro (or FileMaker Developer, which is nice, but may be overkill for what you're doing).

So, go ahead and begin with FileMaker Pro, but save your pennies for Server -] Remember, if you use FileMaker Pro to host, you must go to the host machine and use Save A Copy As to backup the files. You can do this in 7. It is safe to use Save A Copy As. Or close the files and zip them. NEVER duplicate or zip a file while it is open in FileMaker!

If and when you get Server you just put the files where they should be (important), then start up Server. At that point FileMaker Pro must be closed, because: 1. They share the same network port, 5003, and 2. If the same file is open in both applications, it could get corrupted.

If you later need to do serious work on the files, you close the Server files, stop the Server, then open the files again with FileMaker Pro. But you can do almost everything from a client machine while the files are actively being served, so that would be usual method for tweaking.

[Reed]

One point about automated backups:

It is possible to do this with plain Filemaker Pro using "Save A Copy As..." in a script. There are a couple of different ways that you can schedule the backup script. The way that I do it is using a plugin (Like MMScript from CNS, or Events from Waves in Motion) The plugin runs the backup script on the "host" machine at regular intervals. (every hour in my case) Then you edit the crontab (either in the terminal or with Cronnix) to run a one line shell script that takes the backup file and zips it to another volume. (In my case, two additional local disks and one remote volume) The zipped files could be named with timestamps like this:

zip ~/SampleLogBackup/mslabbak`date +%y%m%d%H%M`.fp7.zip ~/Documents/MSLabBackup/mslabback.fp7

This way you don't really need server for a small client server setup. (Unless you need event logging, external authentication, remote administration, custom web publishing (advanced), ssl encryption, etc.)

Hope this helps,

Dana