The Support Group Blog

If you've ever planned an event, you can appreciate the immense amount of organization, coordination and communication required to effectively manage all aspects of the logistics. Technology, when leveraged effectively, can be extremely helpful in the process. Oftentimes event planners don't understand when and/or how to implement technology to streamline and automate tasks and information.

The prestigious University of California at Berkeley (UCB) came to us to help them streamline their event planning and management systems. The University Development and Alumni Relations department is responsible for generating and maintaining support for the university through various outreach initiatives including events for the Chancellor and fundraisers. The benefits of these programs circulate back to resources for the students and help the university to maintain its position as a world-famous institution.

As you may know, The Support Group has been offering FileMaker consulting services for over 30 years. So when it came to finding the best software platform to run nearly every aspect of our business, where did we turn? To the FileMaker Platform, of course!

We needed a framework for tracking our sales leads and customers, managing our projects, invoicing our production plus layers and layers of reporting. Our Vice President of Technology, Vince Dolan, was given the herculean task of architecting and building the system we affectionately call, Harry.  The name was inspired by a dog from the animated television series, Stanley.

You've taken the plunge and purchased the FileMaker Platform software and now you're eager to build your own custom app. But where do you start? If you're completely new to the world of FileMaker, training might be the best place to start. Or, is it?

FileMaker, Inc. certainly offers a variety of support resources as do their partners, but we all learn and process information differently because we all have different experiences and expertise. The resounding theme of the FileMaker Platform is customization so it's reasonable for users to expect personalized support. We thought now was as good a time as any to offer a FileMaker support assessment. This is not like the FileMaker certification exam. True to an assessment, this quiz is not about right or wrong answers, but an evaluation of your proficiency with the FileMaker Platform so that you understand the support options that will help get you up and running as quickly as possible. 

The thought of actually building your own custom business application might sound impossible. We get it, it's an investment, not just from a financial perspective, but it also involves a good deal of your attention and time. However, most of the easily automated tasks that you do regularly can save you time and money when you perform those workflows with a custom app.

These are some of the signs that a custom business application might improve your business productivity and profitability.

The introduction of the new FileMaker 17 Platform brings many new and productive improvements to the software. We have the ability to attach multiple files to email messages, copy custom menus, create directories on the fly and more. Those are all very exciting features but I would say one of the life-changing enhancements is the new FileMaker data migration tool. The data migration tool isn’t strictly a version 17 feature, so you don't necessarily have to upgrade to FileMaker 17. It's really a stand-alone command line app that you can download with a FileMaker Developer Subscription, just like the iOS SDK.

It amazes me how easily we adapt and respond to visuals. Not only is functionality important to software development, but design is also pretty important. Because time is a limited commodity, usability and intuition are important factors when encouraging users to adopt a new system. And generally, the visual elements of the system determine how quickly users are able to learn a new application. Design includes many different aspects – color, layout, fonts, sizes, etc. You have to be strategic with your design elements, including those micro-images we call icons. Those seemingly small symbols ultimately make a big impact on user navigability and comprehension.

Who else but Google has created a style guide for all of their applications and shared it on the interwebs for everyone to use. Material Design is basically a design language that Google created to unify digital interfaces and experiences. They offer lots of good UI/UX design ideas in this document and a bunch of free resources. Who doesn’t like free stuff? One of those free things is a whole set of icons, nice ones. You can browse through them here: https://material.io/icons/.

Behind the Gloss

Gloss Studio provides photo re-touching services to a number of well-known brands within the fashion and beauty industry. An eye for detail and quality are essential in this line of business, but running the business as smoothly as possible is also important. A lot goes into creating the attractive images we see in marketing materials, a lot of communication, that is. Once the photos are received from the photographers, there is a slew of messages between the producers and re-touchers at Gloss Studio as they turn raw images into digitally re-touched works of art. Documenting, tracking and reporting the work became cumbersome within FileMaker Pro and so they asked The Support Group to help organize and streamline some of their workflows.

We are an office divided, Mac or PC. Some of us prefer to do our FileMaker development on Macs and others prefer PCs. We are given the option to choose our systems when we join The Support Group and many other organizations probably pose the same question to new hires. FileMaker, Inc. is an Apple subsidiary and FileMaker Pro works just as well on PCs as it does on Macs. Some menus might look a little different, but the functionality is all the same. FileMaker 16 actually goes a long way to achieve parity between the two systems. The new interface in FileMaker 16 allows Windows users to interact with the program as if in a typical Windows environment. Windows users are able to remove menus in order to maximize screen real estate and use multiple monitors when developing custom applications in the latest version of FileMaker Pro.

The Kleening Business

RideKleen is a national mobile car wash and fleet management company. They leverage proprietary technology to conveniently offer eco-friendly cleaning processes to both their fleet and corporate customers. Their nimble team of managers and leaders are able to provide efficient, reliable and quality service to customers large and small while fulfilling an altruistic purpose of preserving the environment and serving the community.

One of the things our clients often request is for us to set up their custom application so that it is mandatory for users to fill in certain fields. You all know what this looks like, right? You go to a website to sign up for a service and next to the places you have to put your email and password, you see a little red asterisk. And then at the bottom or top, or somewhere on the page, it will be explained that these fields are required. Now you can specify required fields in FileMaker Pro quickly and easily.