Going multi-office, multi-country, multi-language... your experience?

[samgiertz]

Dear all,

 

We have developed an internal Filemaker solution for our shipping company for the past two years. It has evolved to become the very heart of our business. Now the other offices around the world want to share our joy!

 

Today we run it only in our New York office with twelve users. We have create about 10k records per month and have about 200k records in the database spred over three four main tables. Worldwide we would need to be able to scale to 100k records per month and 2M+ records in the database and 100 users from 10 countries.

 

My first question is could filemaker support this from one server? Since management love world wide consolidates reporting there are many obvious advantages to hosting one main server for all countries. Do you have experience from this?

 

Secondly, I need convert the one-country solution we have today, into multi office, multi language. If I do host everything on one server, in one database, what do you suggest for optimal performance and security if it is important that users only see their country specific information?

 

I am already today using the login name in a relationship to filter out data to be seen by each particular user, i.e. my customers, my tasks etc. Should I try to apply the same logic to transactions, adding a "HomeCountry" field and then create a relationship which using a global variable "CurrentHomeCountry" set at login to filter information pertaining to your country?

 

Any input is greatly appreciated!

[zebbyz]

What are the other Nations ? and whats the breakdown of users per country ?

 

How many languages do you speak /write /read ? and what are they.

 

Why is all nation access to one database necessary ? If you answer sharing data... how on earth have you been sharing until now with you guys having the only FMP system.

 

Even as I finish writing this message to you, I know the answer... your database might have been useful for you but it will prove to be a nightmare for the other offices. In short - go to SugarCRM.com and signup... there you will find a system that you can customise and cut back to make a far smarter system that all runs on webservers, needs little or no maintenance and is designed to run as a CRM. Language will be of no issue as each OS will already be in the local language. I presume the language used in Fields is english - it would be insane to use german for the German office and English for the UK when they are supposed to swap data - only the OS and UI need to be in the localised language.

 

Then all offices can connect to the server whenever they like... filemaker can be used to backup local datasets and to perform data cleaning when you need to... and for offsite storage. Well thats defn how I would do it all !

 

g

[Wim Decorte]

That's a very complex question.

 

Centralizing everything to one server has obvious benefits for having all the data always in one place.  The complexity then comes from:

- restricting / showing the users only their relevant data

- providing the users with a performant, secure and stable connection option.  WAN access can be slow depending on the user's locations.  A Citrix / Terminal Services solution can be expensive

 

Certainly do look at a de-centralized option where each location has its own server and the data is synchronized server-to-server (see worldsync.com).

That solves the connection issue for the users but makes the deployment a bit more complex.

 

In the end you will have complexity and cost somewhere, but to some extent you can choose where you incur it.