It would be very useful if some script steps could be set to execute in the context of the server, not the client. In particular, I'm thinking about script steps such as:

Send Email

Save as PDF

Import/Export

DoAppleScript

Shell Script

It would be even more useful if FMServer could schedule a FileMaker script to execute on a schedule.

With these two features, it would be possible to have a server setup be a lot more powerful, e.g. a script could be run on the server every night to print a bunch of reports to PDFS, and move them to a webserver directory.

Or, a user could trigger an action which would send an email, from the server's email account (rather than trying to use the client's email).

Now, to be fair, it is possible to do some of these task by using "Robot" users, but this is not very elegant.

Here here!

I agree this would be great, as I currently use the "robot" method. What I've been wondering is if the server-side plug-in cabability was somehow supposed to make (perhaps) some of these things possible? To date I don't know of any server-side capable plug-ins that are available.

FileMaker's techbrief called "FileMaker 8: How to take advantage of the new server model and capabilities" says... None of the plug-ins that are currently available for FileMaker Pro 8 are "server compatible" so we can expect a flow of new plug-ins as the plug-in developers take advantage of this new opportunity.

Along the same vein would be to allow the sever to store and use ODBC data sources not just to move away from "robot" data imports from other systems but also to hopefully add an ODBC data source as a file reference thus negating the need for most if not all of the duplicated data across systems.