Finding a new gear for your business

Are you stuck with a FM solution that won’t scale with your business?

A lot of businesses run on FileMaker systems built out of necessity,  gumption, and determination. At some point in time some ingenuitive employee or business owner was unable to find a solution that fit their business model and found FileMaker, which let them build their own custom solution. Before long their entire business was running through the system, and it has helped them grow, but now it is holding their business back.

FileMaker is a remarkable piece of software that has fit the niche of custom software development for small to mid sized companies beautifully, but it has some problems.

Issues that come with FileMaker systems

• A lot of amateur development

  • One of its strengths, its low barrier to entry, can also be a weakness, as inexperienced developers can get way in over their heads very quickly, leading businesses running on a digital Rube Goldberg machine that is horribly unoptimized and is next to impossible to maintain and build upon.

• No version control or patch functionality

  • Once a company hires a professional developer, updating systems like this can be extremely difficult because there is no good way to manage versions. There are 3rd party options for pushing updates, but the update process can take hours and in our experience has the chance of damaging the FileMaker files. The other option is to develop in live files, which can cause a litany of issues.

• Poor performance

  • Even after being optimized, FileMaker just doesn’t scale well and hasn’t kept up with the times. Its draco engine is slow to query and pull data from, especially across multiple tables. Its “chatty” architecture, which processes data client side requiring constant back and forth with the server, is also incredibly vulnerable to any dip in latency. This means it does not perform well when client machines are geographically close to the server, making it a poor choice for any business with locations spread across the continent or world.

Our business had shifted away from FileMaker development into MySQL/PostgreSQL and Laravel based systems with a focus on improving automations with AI.

These web based technologies let us bring a huge variety of tools to bear on finding solutions for customers, moving past the limitations of FileMaker.

The possibilities of Web Technologies

• Version Control

  • Version control platforms like Github allow for each update to the system to be thoroughly reviewed, deployed on test servers for testing beforehand, and rolled back if necessary. Deploying updates also has zero down time, and multiple features can be worked on at once by different developers on different branches.

• Responsive Design

  • Responsive design is ubiquitous with the proliferation of mobile devices. Unfortunately there is no good way to make responsive layouts in FileMaker, but in the web there are a plethora of tools to allow us to make solutions that work on any device size.

• Server Redundancy and load balancing

  • There are various ways to implement server redundancy and load balancing for clients so that if critical systems are overwhelmed or fail the service is switched to another server. These servers can also be distributed geographically to help with performance across the globe.

• Automated Testing

  • There are tools that allow you to set up automated tests for both the back-end and user interface of web applications. Any time the system is updated the tests can be used to find any bugs and knock-on effects the update may cause in the system, greatly enhancing quality control of deployment pipelines where these kinds of tests are implemented.

Switching from FileMaker to a focus on web-based applications has allowed us to provide higher quality systems that can support hundreds of thousands of users.  Better scalability, quality control, flexibility, performance, and reliability. We still remember our FileMaker roots, though, and can use that expertise to analyse FileMaker systems, consult with the clients, and rebuild those systems on the web with improved functionality and performance.  If it feels like your company is being held back by your FileMaker system, give us a call and let us see if we can help you break free and bring your systems forward into the 21st century.