Solution Updating

by Matt Petrowsky

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Automation is one of the primary keys to reclaiming your valuable time. You're taking it back from any manual process or a system where it requires your direct involvement or supervision.

When it comes to your solution, and the deployment model you pick, you're always going to have to invest some level of effort into releasing a new version. If you're doing this on FileMaker server alone, then the process may be exporting data from an older file and importing into the newer version. This can take many hours of time and also requires some downtime.

Obviously, you can't have users adding new data to the older solution while you take the time to import from a copy into the newer version. So, one potential solution with FileMaker is to use the Client Deployment model, also called the Separation Model. I covered this in the video just previous to this one.

In the Client Deployment scenario, you simply need an automated way to deploy new versions of the client which is used to access the data hosted on the server. This is the topic covered by this video. The method I personally use to update my commercial product the Theme Studio. The concepts discussed in this video apply to both a hosted solution and one which is deployed entirely on the desktop or device.

One thing to note is that getting the new version of a client to a user's device can be handled in many different ways. Via a FileMaker container in the data file, via HTTP, via a web link, via FileMaker's own AutoUpdate or some other creative way.