Learning Claris FileMaker

Like most of the world I have spent large chunks of the past 18 month living in lockdown and working remotely from home.

I’m currently in week 7 of another lockdown here in Sydney, Australia …

As well as the standard video meetings Zoom also has a number of other products including Zoom Webinars where you can host online webinars/presentations to much larger audiences.

This means you will also be generating a lot of new data, including:

• Webinar Details
• Lists of People who Registered
• Lists of People who Attended

At some point you are going to want to get some of that Zoom data into your FileMaker business app so you can then follow up with registrants/attendees or update existing records with the details of the webinars they have attended.

Luckily Zoom has ...

Read for more on the blog !

The FileMaker 18 Platform was released today and we’re pleased to report that all Databuzz products are compatible with the FileMaker 18 Platform.

fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) is a FileMaker solution that integrates between FileMaker Pro and WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a popular plugin for WordPress that powers over 39% of all online stores. fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) allows you to exchange data between FileMaker and WooCommerce via their API (Application Programming Interface). fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) is completely unlocked allowing you to integrate it into your existing FileMaker solution.

No more double data entry of WooCommerce Orders in FileMaker – save your Company time and money.

... at Databuzz we’re longtime fans of Twilio, the company with the strange name that offers a Cloud communications platform, providing the building blocks to add messaging, voice, and video in your web and mobile applications.

Developers have been requesting the ability to generate PDF files server-side for many years, and from my conversations with FileMaker, Inc. engineers it was the number one feature request.

FileMaker, Inc. were finally able to deliver on this with the release of the FileMaker 16 platform earlier this year, which included the following new features related to PDF and printing from FileMaker Server: Print, Print setup and Save Records as PDF

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Read more on Databuzz' blog

As part of National Small Business Week in the United States PayPal today announced PayPal Business in a Box aimed at U.S. small business owners who would like to take the leap into online sales.

You might be just starting a business for the first time but you don’t have web design capabilities to develop an online store or know how to set up online or point of sale payment methods, or an established offline business looking to move online.

PayPal have partnered with two of our favourite companies WooCommerce and Xero to deliver a simple, integrated solution that gives you the tools you need to start an online business.

If you’re using the FileMaker platform to run your existing business you can also take advantage of our solutions that integrate WooCommerce and Xero with FileMaker:

• fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition)
• fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition)

FileMaker, WooCommerce and Xero make a great combination when it comes to running your business – we should know as we’ve been using these platforms for many years to manage our business, online store and accounting needs.

We’ll be publishing a new article shortly about the benefits of integrating FileMaker with WooCommerce and Xero and how you can save time and money and avoid unnecessary double data entry.

Since we released v1 of fmSMS many years ago we’ve been approached by customers from all around the world to work on integrations between FileMaker and other APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Customers love using FileMaker to send and receive SMS/TXT messages, but they have also asked us to help them send faxes, MMS/Picture messages and to make outgoing voice calls from their FileMaker solution.

We’ve done a number of voice call integrations with FileMaker over the years – having FileMaker initiate a series of outgoing voice calls can be useful in a number of situations, including:

... read more on the blog (and see the video)

Recently we (Databuzz) wrote an article about the benefits of automating the processing of credit card payments using your FileMaker solution and why you shouldn’t be storing unencrypted credit card numbers in your FileMaker database.

We wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to tokenise a credit card number and then charge that token when processing a transaction so we put together a short video demonstrating this. We’re using the eWay Payment Gateway in this example.

You can watch the video below or directly on YouTube

Do you process credit card transactions manually and wonder if there is a better way?

The good news is that there is a better more automated way that can integrate with your custom FileMaker solution and save your staff time and your business money.

In Part 2 we showed how you eliminate any double data entry by making your online store visible to your FileMaker solution by using the ESS (External SQL Data Sources) feature of FileMaker Pro/Server, allowing users to see online orders on a normal FileMaker layout.

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I recently wrote about the number of bugs that were fixed in the FileMaker v15 platform (Pro, Server, Go and WebDirect) – over 150 by my count.

Now I would like to cover some of the “sleeper” features of the FileMaker v15 release – some of which are included in FileMaker’s marketing to highlight the new version and some that are not mentioned at all in any of the release notes.

FileMaker Inc. have published a list of Behaviour changes in FileMaker Pro 15 which you should all read (I’ll be mentioning one of the items on this list).

Read more on Databuzz blog

With the move to remote working and the changes to social distancing since the onset of COVID-19 many businesses have been forced to evaluate their use of technology and quickly adopt solutions to fill in some gaps in their business processes that have changed under the coronavirus.

Companies that never thought they could function with a remote workforce have been forced to adapt quickly – I’ve spoken to many employees at other companies who have helped their organisations transition to a remote workforce in under 2 weeks.

...

We've put together a short video showing how you can send and receive messages between FileMaker and WhatsApp using the Twilio API for WhatsApp

For many years we’ve (Databuzz) helped business both large and small with their workflow challenges, and one of the most common issues we see is managing the distribution and signing of standard business documents such as contracts, employee agreements, quotes and proposals.

The solutions to these problems vary depending on a number of factors, including the type of document to be signed, the number of recipients, volume of documents and the location of recipients.

Over the past few years we’ve helped a number of customers integrate with DocuSign, one of the most popular electronic signature platforms. 

DocuSign helps organisations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act-on, and manage agreements and allows users to sign electronically on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time.

With DocuSign you can ...

Read more on the blog

Gravity Forms is a popular Form plugin for the WordPress platform, allowing you to create simple or advanced forms to capture data on your WordPress website.

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Using the Gravity Forms Web API we can dynamically query Gravity Forms from within FileMaker to check for new form entries and download those directly into our FileMaker solution, all within a few seconds.

If you’re running an appointment based business you’re probably painfully aware of the cost of no-shows and missed appointments.

Whether you’re taking bookings for an office based business (doctor, dentist, hairdresser etc) or for onsite appointments (building inspections, electricians, plumbers etc) it’s important to have a system in place to remind your customers about the upcoming appointment in advance.

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One of our favourite features in fmSMS is the Chat View which we (Databuzz) introduced back in July 2015.

This shows you the sent and received messages for an individual Contact in a much more graphical interface compared to a traditional FileMaker view using portals.

The Chat View is similar to how iChat/Messages works on the Mac and iOS platforms - the messages are displayed in a threaded view so you can see them as a conversation and quickly type a message using the defaults without having to leave the Chat View screen.

Read more on the blog ...

fmEcommerce Link is our solution to connecting FileMaker to WooCommerce when you can’t make a direct ESS/ODBC connection – you use the fmEcommerce Link file to query your WooCommerce store for new orders, product inventory changes, new customers and also to push data back to WooCommerce such as new Products.

You can link the fmEcommerce Link file to your existing FileMaker solution to push orders from WooCommerce into your main FileMaker business app, or recreate the same functionality inside your FileMaker business app as the fmEcommerce Link will be 100% unlocked for you to explore.

Are you using FileMaker to run your business and also Xero for your accounting software?

Would you like to see how they can be integrated together so you can streamline your workflow and protect your sensitive Xero data at the same time?

Join Andrew Duncan from Databuzz and David Borgnis, Business Development Manager, APAC at FileMaker Inc. for an informative and explorative 60 minutes presentation.

In Part 3 of this series we’ll look into the options when you can’t use ESS and how you can still go about integrating your online shop with your FileMaker CRM.

 

Many of our (Databuzz) small business customers have both a physical presence and an online presence when it comes to selling their goods and services.

They  might have:

• a physical retail store where customers can come and purchase goods in person
• a mail order store where they take orders by mail, phone and fax and send the goods to the purchaser once they have paid
• an online store which takes orders, processes the credit card transactions and notifies the business to fulfil the orders
• a popup store/market store that runs every month or for short periods of time

When the business is starting up, or when they are adding a new method of selling goods and services, the tendency is for each of these stores to operate as their own silo.

This ultimately leads to a lot of data duplication/double entry in multiple systems as the business deals with orders coming in from multiple store presences.

Quite often we see the following workflow:

• physical and mail order/phone orders are processed in the central office FileMaker CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution
• online/eCommerce orders are processed via the online store attached to the customer’s website. The business is notified of new orders via email and these are then entered into the central office CRM system by customer service staff who then notify the accounts department to create an accounting entry in Xero or MYOB etc.

We wouldn’t generally recommend to customer’s that they use FileMaker to run their online eCommerce store, so there’s no problem with having the physical presence and the online presence separate (and it’s highly advisable from a security standpoint).

However this leads to the problem of scattered information and ad hoc processes – wouldn’t it be better if all the information was in one place and you could see all the physical orders and online orders from the central FileMaker CRM?

Could you save time and increase productivity by not having to manually re-enter all the online orders in both the main FileMaker CRM as well as your accounting software?

...