Developing your own agency software in FileMaker January 26, 2009
Posted by Dan Stuchbury in : FileMaker, Software , trackbackFileMaker is marketed as being the world’s #1 easy to use database application, so is it not entirely unreasonable to think that you can buy a licence and get creating?
In theory, not at all. FileMaker is easy to pick up and have a fiddle with, and I’m fairly confident that you could have a basic database together to record details of your jobs and customers in just a couple of hours, probably less. But, if job management was as simple as just recording information, I wouldn’t be writing this, and I wouldn’t have been working with FileMaker for eight years!
Probably before even buying FileMaker, the first exercise is to sit down and plan in details what you want to achieve – what ‘entities’ of information you have (clients, suppliers, subconractors, invoices, purchase orders, etc) and how they relate to each other. You then need to consider the functionality you require from your solution, and at this point it’s often useful to get the input of everyone who will be using it – they will each have their own ‘wish list’ and ideas for how to become more efficient when it comes to non-creative tasks. It is important to have a clear understanding of what your finished solution will do before you go anywhere near FileMaker to start creating something. As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail.
As a professional FileMaker developer, I have been asked on a number of occasions to work with a solution that has been developed in-house to add functionality or just “tidy it up a bit”. Working with someone else’s database is naturally more difficult than your own, as everyone’s style is different, but working with someone else’s database with no documentation whatsoever is incredibly difficult, especially if they haven’t followed any sort of naming convention for tables, fields and scripts. When you’ve not looked at it from a developer’s perspective for a while, even your own work can be confusing, and for this reason I cannot stress enough the importance of documenting your work to a degree that it could be easily understood by anyone with an understanding of FileMaker. A couple of useful resources are the ‘White Paper for FMP Novices‘ and ‘Database Design for FMP‘ white papers by Foundation Database Systems (scroll down the download page for the second one).
Consider carefully if you have the time available to learn the skills you will need to develop a fully-fledged agency management solution in FileMaker. Bear in mind that a developer is likely to be reluctant to take a half-baked solution that you’ve been working on, and turn it into the fully-fledged solution you intended it to be – it is often easier for them to start from scratch. That isn’t to say you won’t be able to find a developer happy to work with you, in a consulting role, but it pays to have that conversation before you start, if you are unsure as to the time you can commit to the project.
There are many good books that can teach you most of what you need to knoe, not to mention the FileMaker Pro 10 Bible, due to be published in April and FileMaker Pro 10: The Missing Manual due ot be published in February.
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Great stuff as usual…