MAS 200 integration with FMP

[stanley]

Hello all:

I'm meeting with a client next week who wants a system built which will connect with his current MAS 200 system. I know absolutely nothing about MAS 200 other than it is a SQL system, and I am hoping that someone here has worked with it before and can give me a general idea of what I'll be dealing with. I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone working with SQL and FMP - what plugins work best, if there are any pitfalls I should watch for, etc.

The system I'll be installing will be FMP 7 and FM Server 7.

Thanks

-Stanley

[Wim Decorte]

No idea what MAS 200 is. But here are some general comments:

- since the underlying database of MAS 2000 is a SQL based db there are no technical reasons why you couldn't interact with. But there may be political and other motives that they won't let you touch the underlying tables directly through xDBC. Make sure to find that out first. You may have to dump text files out of filemaker and trigger an import in MAS instead of being able to do xDBC.

- connection can be done in 2 directions: MAS as the data source of FMS(A) as the data source. If FMSA is to be the datasource then the scripting really needs to be done in MAS.

- AFAIK there are no native 7 plugins for xDBC. But I've seen reports that the clicWare one for 5/6 works will in 7. In a lot of ways it's superior to using FM's native capabilities

[slstrother]

Stanley,

We are using MAS 90 for part of our business. MAS 200 is more rubust that MAS 90 but has the same look and feel. There are two versions of MAS 200, one that that has same b-tree file structure as MAS 90 and the SQL version. The SQL version should provide superior performance over the other provided the implementation was done correctly. MAS 200 is published by Best Software the same folks who bring us ACT! and Peachtree. MAS 200 is a full accounting system with GL, AR, AP, PO, Inventory, Sales Order and Shipping. We use MAS 90 for the inventory control, which is excellent. MAS 200 has a tool called Visual Integrator, this tool creates import and export "jobs". These "jobs" can be scheduled to run on their own or run manually. We use FM with MAS 90 to prepare billing data and reporting. It is easier (at least for me) to extract the data via ODBC and work with it in FM rather than use the tools in MAS 90. We also FM to prepare data files for import into MAS 90 using the visual integrator tool. I have not tried using ODBC to import data directly from FM into MAS 90 because most of our users are still on FM 5.5 and performance as a ODBC data source is poor. Although, FM 7 looks promissing. Another feature of MAS 200 you should find beneficial is the ability to create multiple companies. Each company and its' data are separate from the others. This will allow you to create a test company for development purposes that is a copy of the live one.

Hopefully, this has helped some.

Good Luck,

Steve

[stanley]

Steve & Wim:

Thanks for the information; I've done some SQL/ODBC stuff before, so I won't be entirely lost there. I believe the client (or client-to-be) is using the SQL version of MAS 200, and they intend to use it for sales orders, inventory and shipping - that's all being developed by someone else, and is already behind schedule by a couple of months. Which, of course, means that I will be entering development hell, piggybacking my system (for internal job-tracking & job-status, etc) onto theirs.

Regarding the connection of FMP to MAS 200, I'm hoping for a bit more clarity. What I would want to do is to extract information from MAS 200 and put it into FileMaker. I don't believe I need to return any data to MAS 200 - however, in the development process, that will probably become a requirement once some exec or other decides he wants some other functionality. We all know how that works.

Thanks for all the info.

-Stanley