Having had time to explore Claris Connect ourselves, we agree that it is living up to its promises and is a delight to work with. Portage Bay Solutions has nearly thirty years of experience creating FileMaker and 4th Dimension solutions and we’ve found Claris Connect to be an attractive, intuitive, and helpful option for many of our solutions. Because of our experience with these expanded capabilities, and our desire to keep learning and help others learn about Connect, we have launched a Claris Connect Meetup and we invite you to join.
Due to COVID-19, we recently had to invent a way to sign forms on-site without sharing devices. Part of the conversation went like this:
He thought for a minute and replied, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll make a way for a user to sign a form without ever touching the iPad. How about we create a record just for signatures? We can send a link out to the client that will open a WebDirect interface. It would present them their signature record on their own device, and boom! Touch-free signatures.”
“Brilliant!” I said happily. “Let’s go! I’ll grab some pizza.”
Kanban boards are useful project management tools to help visually depict work. They visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. For instance, one of our clients, VN Graphics, uses them to track the flow of a graphic design job through the initial order, design, pre-press, and production. I love Kanban boards so when I found out that Claris had included one in their free Add-Ons, I was excited to try it out.
Barcodes are an essential tool in the modern IT world and being able to add them into your solutions without a plugin or barcode font is a welcome addition to native FileMaker functionality. Our clients use barcodes to identify products they’re selling, to apply a serial number code to a manufactured item, and to build a scannable shipping manifest among numerous examples. Documentation is limited at this stage, so I’m hoping this blog post will assist others in implementing the Barcode Generator add-on.
One of the most exciting new features of FileMaker 19 is the ability to create custom add-ons. Beyond the set of default add-ons available with any FileMaker client installation, developers now have the ability to design and deploy custom add-ons through the Claris Marketplace. Before putting our first add-on into the marketplace, we are providing it for free on our blog. You are able to download this add-on by clicking the link at the bottom of this article.
FileMaker has always included starter solutions, simple databases with basic structure that allow anyone to use as a starting point. Through the years and various versions of FileMaker, the solutions have become more advanced and complex to show the new features of FileMaker.
