I've been a Filemaker user since 1986 and a developer since the early '90s. In those years I've been responsible for more than six figures of licence purchases for Filemaker "seats." In the past few years, my advice to clients has been to upgrade for every second release. I'm ready to revise that to every third version.

No doubt the folks at Filemaker have a striptease of features to be trickled out over the next few versions. IMO, neither 10 nor 11 justified full-version upgrades, especially for offices with many licences. But to really get a clear picture, you have to look at some other items.

It's completely understandable that the runtime version doesn't support networking. This is a necessary limitation to avoid killing the cash cow -- networked solutions -- that is perhaps Filemaker's strongest suit. But to not support PDF saves natively because of "licence considerations" is specious at best. CutePDF and the Mac OS, to name just two, support PDF without paying any licence to Adobe. No, this move had a single purpose: to drive Filemaker licence sales.

Similarly, the marginal charting/graphing function in 11 isn't supported in runtimes. In my shop, this just killed a project to offer as donationware an application for people dealing with life-altering illnesses. People faced with these kinds of catastrophic illnesses need all the tools and support they can get. I know first-hand. But no charting in FMP 11 runtimes makes this project a non-starter. Damned if I'll pimp the ill for $300 for Filemaker Inc. Ditto for the whole ecosystem of plug-ins that, in many cases, provide functionality that arguably belong in the program itself.

Similar restrictions/limitations exist in Filemaker Server. No native PDF generation means solution providers like myself are forced to run robot copies of FMP to do the fairly simple task of generating and emailing a PDF document. Then there's the nonsense of no IWP support in Server. You can do five IWP clients in Filemaker Pro but none in Server unless you shell out an extra $2,000 for Advanced? Utter garbage.

I love Filemaker as a development tool but the company has become a little too greedy to keep my wholehearted support.

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Steve St-Laurent | <steve@holecomm.ca>
Hole-in-the-Wall Communications | Vancouver BC




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