Integrating Filemaker with Capsule CRM

Hi folks,

First time posting in a while, in fact it's been so long that I have completely forgotten my login details and have had to re-register.

Hopefully I've managed to find the most appropriate sub-forum to post this in, whilst it isn't accounting related, it seems to be the best match.

At the moment, I'm using a rather long in the tooth Filemaker solution to run a smallish rental company. We've found Filemaker invaluable for putting together custom invoice layouts and the like, but it's becoming clear that we are outgrowing it. The biggest deficiency is in keeping track of customer interaction.

Our marketing guy has suggested we move over onto Capsule CRM for keeping track of the customers, but that we keep on a trimmed-down Filemaker solution for doing the invoicing and hire inventory etc. I'd redo this from scratch but should in theory be able to lift over a lot of layouts and calculations etc. so should save some time.

The trickiest bit is going to be working out how the two work together. Viewing and editing Capsule info from within Filemaker has proven to be pretty simple, using a web portal. However, that just lets me view the data from Capsule within Filemaker. What I'd like to do is to be able to pull Capsule data into Filemaker fields, so that, for example, when a contact person for a client is updated in Capsule the change is automatically reflected next time we print off an invoice.

The other thing I'd love to be able to do is take some Filemaker data back into Capsule, so we can, for instance, use the value of people's orders to "rank" customers within Capsule.

I emailed Capsule support with these questions, and the reply I got was as follows:

To get access to your contact details in Capsule you can use our API:

http://capsulecrm.com/help/page/api_gettingstarted/

Using the generated link functionality you can create links to export or update contacts in your filemaker system and a second link to show a page with invoice/order details pulled from filemaker:

http://capsulecrm.com/help/page/cases_faq/#how_do_i_include_a_generated_link_to_a_tracking_system_or_other_external_system

I've read through both the topics they link to. It's unfamiliar territory for me but I think I can just about get my head around it.

What I'm struggling to work out is how we'd actually go about the nuts and bolts of pulling the data into Filemaker. Is there some kind of Get function that can pull the info from a URL? Any ideas or pointers would be most appreciated.