Is Developer/Server right for me?

[colinwright]

I am currently using FM Pro 5 to run a small (< 500 records) database to hold information about students in my educational program. My plan is to both share this database with other faculty in the program (with both WinNT and MacOS platforms) over a network, and to create an online application to the program that would place prospective students' information into the database.

Two questions:

1) Is FM Server necessary for the sharing the database across different operating systems? I know it is necessary for sharing for more than 10 users, but for less than 10 users is Server still necessary for cross-platform sharing?

2) Is FM Developer necessary to accomplish our online application data entry? Our current plan is as follows:

- use java servlet/perl-based web-side applications to retrieve the data and store it in a temporary file or database.

- import the new information into our existing FM database from the temporary file or database.

- one option is to use a FM temporary database (or a separate table/file in the existing databse), allowing us to use JDBC to import the data from the website.

- otherwise we could place the data in a formatted file and have FM import the data, bypassing the need for JDBC. Is FM Developer 5 necessary for both of these solutions, or just the one involving JDBC? (In other words, for my purposes would buying Developer be just a $500 means of obtaining a JDBC driver?)

[Anatoli]

FM will work for both platforms. It must be TCP/IP network.