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We Invite You to Join Our Claris Connect Meetup

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.

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FM19 Add-On Spotlight: Kanban Board

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.

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FM19 Add-On Spotlight: Barcode Generator

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.

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FileMaker Free Templates

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.

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Selecting Teamwork

Is Portage Bay a software development company that does project management?, or a project management company that happens to do custom FileMaker and 4th Dimension work? Interesting question. I often feel that our success as developers has as much to do with our skills in communications and project management than in the nitty gritty of writing code.

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Insert From URL V2

A few years back, we released a demo to discuss/review the cURL functionality introduced into the “Insert from URL” script step in FileMaker 16. While the cURL implementation introduced some data transfer standards into the FileMaker framework, the real magic happens in the “Insert from URL” script step.

In this new version of the cURL demo, we took the same demo from the cURL blog post and gave it some updates, applied a new theme, and added the feature to send HTML emails using the SMTP(S) protocol introduced in FileMaker 18. We’re also using a navigation module we’ve built that utilizes the JavaScript functionality introduced in FileMaker 19.

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