Just curious, I have dealt with Databases in the past that don't react too well when using a client offsite through a VPN connection. Something about latency and packet drops causing corruption.

Does Filemaker suffer from this?

I want to have a Central Filemaker Server, access via VPN, then using the "open remote" access the database.

Is this risky? Or does the fmnet protocol over a vpn connection work well in preventing corruption?

I don't know the technical minutiae of how VPN works, but we support a number of our clients offsite using Open Remote over VPN.

By and large it works well, and doesn't seem to give us any more dropped sessions than Open Remote without a VPN.

However any dropped session is a dropped session too many... in my opinion the best (not to mention quickest) way to work remotely is over Remote Desktop, where you open the database on a machine running locally to the FM server, and control that machine from wherever you are.

RD is quick and responsive - much quicker than Open Remote. If your internet/VPN connection drops it matters not because the RD machine is still running the database without interruption at the other end.

What we have started doing is getting all our clients a copy of FM Pro Advanced and installing it on whichever machine we use in this way.

Hope that helps.

James