FileMaker: Explore
by Jeff Turner on Dec 22, 2011,
filed under: Success Stories
The Support Group Helps Mass Insight Help Schools
Mass Insight is a Boston-based group that works to benefit education and provide competitive advantages to schools on multiple levels. The organization is comprised of two segments: Mass Insight Global Partnerships, a consulting firm that unites schools, companies and government agencies for the purpose of building competitive advantage, and Mass Insight Education, a non-profit affiliate that works to improve public school performance in the maths and sciences as well as help to revive the schools themselves.
The organization uses a FileMaker Pro database to store every one of their contacts for both sides of the business. As of the spring of 2009 the system was still running on 5.0, the version it was originally built in. It was a single flat file that had grown haphazardly over the years and was now a mass of entry layouts and hard-coded checkboxes that the staff used to categorize their records. The system was confusing to use; some of the labels were so old that “no one knew what anything meant,” says Joanna Manikas, VP of Business & Information Systems. “There was no common language or identifiers.” Furthermore, accurate searches were nearly impossible for users that needed to be able to pull up a set of contacts at a moment’s notice. Manikas wanted to do a lot more with the system but it was clear that a massive overhaul was needed before any new functionality could be added.
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Enter The Support Group, Inc.‘s J Caprioli, who took over as Mass Insight’s lead developer and continues to work with them to this day. J’s first order of business was to upgrade the system to FileMaker 10, and then begin a complete restructuring of the file. He condensed the 50+ category fields (along with their 50+ matching value lists) into a much more manageable four - for program, sector, type/level of school, and district - and converted all of their data to related records so that users could enter more relevant categories and perform more targeted searches. He streamlined the data entry process and created more flexible reporting tools. Once the initial work was completed many new features were added as well, including the ability to log notes for each contact, track fundraising efforts, and schedule meetings with multiple attendees. The meeting component in particular “has been huge,” says Manikas. “We can now facilitate gatherings of leaders and track the invitees with ease, as well as record if they accepted, declined, or attended. We can easily pull attendance lists, send emails to a group of attendees, and see all meetings for a contact and all attendees for a meeting. I love it.”
Manikas says she is “thrilled” with J’s work and everyone she’s dealt with at The Support Group. “The relationship has been great right from the start. Every touch with company has been terrific - whether I’m going to a training, working with J, or just contacting their sales team to put together a proposal for another project. J has done a great job; I haven’t thrown him any curve balls that he hasn’t been able to figure out for us, and very quickly. He goes right at it and immediately understands what we’re trying to do.” Manikas looks forward to the relationship continuing and says there are already plans in the works for additional modules.
Most importantly, says Manikas, the team at The Support Group has been “extremely responsive and helpful in getting us to think about how we use data and what data can do. A lot of times people have a hard time knowing what they want. These guys ask the right questions.”
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by Rich Coulombre on Nov 28, 2011,
filed under: FileMaker Go, Reflections
Like a lot of people, I am the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone 4S. Now, that may not sound unusual (I mean, Apple has sold MILLIONS), but the guys and gals I work with are saying “OMG!!!”
You see, for years, I’ve had an old LG 9900 ENV. Those that know me have always wondered why I’ve never upgraded my phone. The reason I did not upgrade to an iPhone years ago was simple: I never warmed up to the onscreen keyboard. It just didn’t seem the same as the “real” keyboard on my trusty old Env 9900, with real buttons to push. Text messages have become the primary method of communication with my three kids (their choice, not mine). I quickly realized they would generally reply to a text message and ignore all other forms of communication. Sometimes you’ve gotta go with the flow. But it made a real keyboard that much more important to me.
But with the iPhone 4S, it’s no longer an issue, because of Siri. I can get things done via voice command and control. I can add items to my calendar, make phone calls, send text messages, get stock quotes, and my new best friend: I can set reminders and timers. Which has me yelling OMG!!!, but in a good way.
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I spend 60 to 90 minutes a day in the car, and sometimes more. It’s my downtime, when I can both collect my thoughts and break out in a panic over the things I’ve forgotten to do. But now, while tooling around on old New England roads, I can actually DO something about those gremlins that slipped through the cracks, like set a reminder to do them in the morning. I can even set a location-based reminder to do them when I get home. Or, if I realize that I need to call someone next week, I can set a reminder for that too. All via voice. All without looking at the iPhone screen at all; all without a keyboard! The iPhone 4S takes a time during my day when I’m most alone with my thoughts, and allows me to capture and schedule it. OMG!!!
Apple recently announced that 70% of their revenues came from iOS. Here’s an industry that’s only five years old, yet already it provides many tens of billions in revenue for Apple. Some claim that iOS devices are supplanting their desktop/laptop counterparts. For personal and business communications and basic day-to-day organization that is likely true. I’m using my trusty MacBook Pro to write this article; iOS devices aren’t designed as well as a tool for the creation of larger documents… authoring so to speak. Well, not yet anyway.
During the great Halloween storm of 2011, pretty much all of New England lost power to one degree or another. My daughter’s a junior at Mount Holyoke College out in Western Mass, where they had lots of trees, power lines and branches down across campus. She texted one morning after a full day without power that her phone was almost out of juice. Later that day she texted that she was charging her phone off her MacBook. What does that tell us? She finds her phone more important than her laptop, particularly when there’s no Internet access. The phone is her lifeline, and limited power resources are going to go to the device that keeps her connected.
In a conversation recently with one of my managers, I noted that iPhone reminds me of the early days of the Macintosh. I worked at Apple in 1984 and 1985 and was there to witness the beginning. Here’s the thing: the Mac’s interface was revolutionary; it changed the way we worked with computers. It kindled a flame deep inside, making technology accessible to the masses without their having to type long, ugly, syntactically sensitive strings of DOS commands. And that’s what Siri and the iPhone 4S are doing too… it’s the next revolution in technology that will drive major innovation.
Certainly Apple did not invent voice recognition. They didn’t invent the graphic user interface either. Instead what Apple has done is taken existing technologies, smoothed off the rough edges, and made them available to the masses. Yes, Android had this ability earlier, and yes, I tried it. But I just never warmed up to Android’s implementation. It didn’t work as smoothly or elegantly for me. And that’s what Apple does best.
Although Siri isn’t available on older iPhones nor iPads, we’ve seen a staggering increase in businesses using these devices to improve their productivity. Wherever there is a distributed workforce, there’s an opportunity to use these portable technologies to review or collect information outside the office. Our clients are using iPads and FileMaker Go to collect inspection information for ships, to review and enter information on sales activities, and to check in guests for bus trips and tours. The future is here! And hey, you can even use voice dictation on the iPhone 4S with FileMaker Go too!
Years ago the late, great journalist Don Crabb was at our home for a party. At one point I asked Don if my kids would ever use a keyboard in their business careers. He felt that they would, but not forever. He said the keyboard was a very crude method of getting our thoughts and words into a computer. But it was the best we had.
Well, Don, I wish you were here to see this and to read your thoughts and insights, ‘cause the new revolution has just started.
OMG!!!
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by Chad Novotny on Nov 15, 2011,
filed under: Announcements
If you love FileMaker, we’re a GREAT place to work!
The Support Group is one of the largest and most successful FileMaker consulting companies in the world, with offices in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re looking for seasoned FileMaker developers in our Boston-area headquarters in Natick, Los Angeles, and San Mateo
Our team consists of full time, salaried professionals who design and implement attractive and functional FileMaker systems for our clients in business, education and government. We have some leading, industry-recognized FileMaker gurus on staff here, who work with ALL our developers as part of a team of true, high-caliber, FileMaker experts.
Interested? Head over to our Employment Opportunities page to learn more.
by Chad Novotny on Nov 15, 2011,
filed under: Get ( Answers ), Tips & Tricks, General Tips, FileMaker Go, Downloads
One of our customers recently needed a field to be both non-editable and scrollable in FileMaker Go. Here’s his request:
I need to build a system for someone to read a form on an iPad and capture their signature in a container field. The forms are of variable length and will change over time. So I want to put the body of the text into a field for each form for each signature.
Since the form can be very long, the user will need to scroll to read the whole thing. But, when you click into a field, the keyboard pops up on the iPad. Is there away to suppress that?
Well… no. Not with a field. But... yes. With a web viewer.
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There’s no way to stop the virtual keyboard from appearing as soon as a user clicks into a field in FileMaker Go. On top of that, the cursor will jump to the end of the text in the field; if you’re trying to present a large amount of text with many paragraphs (such as one of those End-user License Agreements I’m always skimming over), the user will have to scroll back to the top. We need a way to allow the user to scroll through the field contents without actually entering the field. Adjusting the field in Layout mode to prevent entry in Browse mode gets you part of the way there. But if the amount of text exceeds the size of the field, you end up with hidden and inaccessable text, as there’s no way to scroll the field contents if you can’t enter it.
But there’s a simple workaround to create a scrollable, non editable area displaying text field contents. Enter the Swiss Army knife of layout objects: the web viewer. Pages in a web viewer can be scrolled through, and even copied from, without ever invoking the iOS keyboard.
We normally think of the web viewer as a tool to display web pages. But you can also feed a web viewer raw HTML for it to display using a data URI. If the web viewer’s web address starts with “data:text/html,”, whatever HTML follows will be parsed and displayed.
So, don’t use a field to display your form’s text; use a web viewer. To get our field’s contents as HTML, we can use the GetAsCSS() function. Our web viewer’s calcuated web “address” is a simple:
"data:text/html," & GetAsCSS ( formTable::textField )
This is a trick we use both in FileMaker Go and on the desktop in FileMaker Pro when we need to present a “field” that can be scrolled or from which one can copy (meaning we have to allow entry in Browse mode), and where using access privileges to restrict editing isn’t the right solution (if, for example, they can edit the field on other layouts).
Log in or register to download the sample file.
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