FileMakin' for the UN

Matthew Roscoe and Chris Stapleton of Foundation Business Software. Photo / Supplied

FileMaker is a database, but the fact of the matter is that it has so many capabilities for hooking up into web services, other databases, accounting packages and many other systems, it is incredibly extensible. This has, in turn, led to a large development community worldwide - and one that is well represented in New Zealand.

But where do developers come in? FileMaker out of the box is very powerful, and you can install it and start entering data pretty much straight away. FileMaker has loads of features, yes, but it's when entities start needing customised features and scripted capabilities to answer unique requirements that developers step up. And often, developers start by turning off many of the stock features.

One example is Matthew Roscoe and Chris Stapleton of Foundation Business Software, in Auckland.

Stapleton used to work at an English printing company that was Mac-based. They needed an accounting package and bought into an accounting system, but it did not work for them, so Chris tackled the project himself in FileMaker, starting with only a smattering of programming knowledge.

It paid off - literally. "It's still running at the company over there now." As it has been since 1996.

"Often," says Stapleton, "people who have used FileMaker for a while start to realise the power it has. They start to want more from what they've got, and they may not have the time or the experience to take it further. That's where we come in."

"Sometimes, when we come in, the first thing we do is point out that the way someone is using their database is just plain wrong," says Matthew. "We then rewrite the rules."

They're both excited by FileMaker Go, the new software that lets iPads and iPhones access FileMaker databases. The ramifications for company reps out on the road and anyone needing to access databases remotely is terrific. "It's fantastic. We're very impressed with it."

"We downloaded Go on an iPad as soon as it launched. I take it everywhere I go," said Matthew. "The response is amazing. People don't even really get that excited about the features I'm showing them - rather, they're seeing it as a great justification to buy an iPad!"

A recent job was installing iPod touches on individual screen printing machines with FileMaker Go hooked into the rest of the company's system. They use them for data to calculate time, ink and materials. "They can have these dotted around the factory on ten machines for a fraction of the cost of integrating five different manufacturers' sets of machinery into the system. That makes a really big cost and efficiency difference."

I hadn't previously thought about using iPod touches and/or iPads as, basically, wireless terminals into a system.

On the iPad, Chris says "It's horses for courses. We wouldn't dream of trying to program on an iPad, but what we would do is run out the office with one for a meeting, check emails on the go, check scheduling details, contacts ... and we'd have our system reporting to us on any issues relayed to us while we're out."

"Once you've got FileMaker in an organisation, it's so easy to bolt on extras. It's a dream - and that goes for FileMaker Go, along with all the other stuff FileMaker lets you do."

Matthew says "They've done a really, really good job with Go." He says that if your 3G connection is any good, FileMaker Go on an iPhone or iPad is a really workable solution.

"We're testing a lot at the moment. And we're on XT." It's pretty good if you're standing under a cell tower, but in other places ... "We can make it work well if we can get a download speed of 4MB, and 6MB is amazing. But we seem to average about 1MB so far. We're talking to Telecom on that but meanwhile if you can hook into a local Wi-Fi network at an office or a café, then you are really motoring."

About 70 per cent of Foundation's work is in the PC environment (FileMaker is cross platform, and can be developed on either for either). As Roscoe puts it, "We notice that in the PC environments, there will always be an IT guy, either internal or external. The Mac sites don't have IT guys. And the second aspect is that the Mac sites are always more demanding. They expect it to work intuitively, perfectly and first time. PC people don't."

Stapleton chimes in "Yes, the PC people are so used to being torn around."

I recounted how we got a guy in an office I used to work in. He had never used a Mac and was presented with one. After a few days, he came to me and asked to be shown harder ways to do things on it. "It shouldn't be this easy!"

Part of the reason FileMaker is so useful is that it integrates with other systems. It has robust lookups for Microsoft Excel and MoneyWorks, for example, while other applications need to run data through a text file interchange on an import/export basis.

Chris is a big fan of the xml format, which would also service online accounting like Xero with transfer and request. "For a lot of things, we use FileMaker's web technology - Web Viewer, for example, deliver and get back a success or fail result."

Matthew: "And various plugins let us do stuff inside the Web Viewer too. Except in Go." (Web Viewer works in Go, but not its plugins.)

Chris and Matthew handle most things themselves, but they have a programmer who comes in for the heavy duty PHP and SQL coding.

They're big fans of the Mac mini server - they've just put one into a Hamilton business as a FileMaker server, and were doing this with minis even before the new Server-spec units came out earlier this year.

Matthew says "For a small-to-medium office in New Zealand, that's a perfectly good device to run something." (In the US, various companies develop a 'solution in a box', delivering a Mac mini with the customised FileMaker database installed all ready to go.)

They're also fans of the latest FileMaker (11), although they're waiting for a printer patch on the Mac version. They say 11's graphing capabilities are spot on. Matthew says "The instant you start demonstrating it, it's the same as showing someone an iPad - everybody wants it."

They're currently playing with an intriguing piece of software from Edinburgh called Runtime Revolution. Chris says "It's kind of halfway between FileMaker and the web. It's a good product. Very interesting."

Foundation recently created a FileMaker solution for surveying for the Pacific Island Chiefs of Police Secretariat organisation. This is done in the field with Dell Latitude netbooks, which have rubberised cases and good battery life - Foundation originally looked at implementing the field survey on the iPod touch, but the way the touch plays sound from FileMaker ruled it out.

The survey had to be bilingual - English plus the local language of the survey country (to date: Marshallese, Samoan and Papua New Guinean'Tok Pisin' ). They needed sound for the questions, and multi-choice answers. It had to be robust in the field and able to collect those results - they were very diverse questions to do with policing, HIV/Aids, alcohol etc. The procedure involved daily file exports of individually named files onto USB drives, with upwards of 120 participant surveys needing to be exported from out in the field every day.

The whole Pacific Island Chief of Police Survey was project managed by the Institute of Public Policy from AUT University, which Chris became involved with after mentoring at AUT's Sports and Recreation Department for assessing in-gym activities and field trials.

Typically, surveys like this involved reams of paper, and the survey was required to be completely anonymous - a concern was that even participants' handwriting may become identifiable in the future, giving rise to privacy and security concerns, and this was solved by using the netbooks to gather the data.

It was a resounding success, with very positive feedback from all concerned. Many participants were first-time computer users, but easily completed the survey on the netbooks because of the survey's excellent technical design.

Pretty cool, what a couple of guys in an office in New Zealand can achieve with some good contacts, great FileMaker skills and a couple of decades of experience.

Matthew and Chris will be on a stand at CreativeTech, supporting David Head of FileMaker.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com