 Hello everyone and thanks for attending. My name is Ryan Minook. I'm a Solutions Consultant here at FileMaker and I'm really excited to be your host for today's WebDirect webinar. Joining me today is Richard Carlton, the CEO of RC Consulting who's been providing specialized custom database solutions saving time and money over the past 24 years. I'm going to spend the first three to four minutes to cover some brief housekeeping notes and chat about FileMaker as a platform and then I'll hand the presentation over to Richard who will cover best practices and tips of deploying the FileMaker WebDirect. For the best experience, it is strongly recommended that you participate in this web seminar with at least a broadband connection. If you have any problems or require online assistance at any time, please contact Sickter's Technical Support at 888-259-8414. Now throughout today's presentation, you will have the opportunity to type in and ask questions and let's talk briefly about how to do that. So go to the control panel, click on the questions section, enter your question and click send. And we'll try to answer as many as time allows at the end of our presentation, but remember you don't need to wait until then to submit a question. We're also giving you the opportunity to submit a question via Twitter. So you can tweet your WebDirect questions using the WebDirect Q hashtag and we're actually extending this Twitter Q&A session to all day today to about 3pm tomorrow. So what is FileMaker? Really, FileMaker is a platform that gives you all the tools you need to create custom business solutions that go everywhere your business takes you. You create and design your solutions with FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advance that doubles as the desktop client. FileMaker Server is the hub of your solution. It hosts your files and provides security, backups and reliability. And to access your solutions on iPad and iPhone, use the free FileMaker Go app available from the App Store. And to access your solution via a web browser, use the new FileMaker WebDirect technology that is available as part of FileMaker Server. So we're a complete platform for developing custom solutions for Mac, Windows, iOS or a web browser. And today we're going to go under the hood a bit and focus on the best practices for deploying WebDirect. And with that, it is now my pleasure to hand this presentation over to Richard. Hey, I appreciate it, Ryan. So a little bit about me real quick, everyone. My name is Richard Carlton. I'm the CEO of RC Consulting. We have a staff based out here in California also in Texas. I'm a video trainer for the FileMaker platform. And we also have a new seven hour training course for FileMaker Go 13. And we are in the process of getting that released out to the community. Information about that is at FileMakerVideos.com. We're also working on a training series now. We're starting that getting that in production on WebDirect. And that'll be available as well coming up. Information on that will be out at FileMakerVideos.com. So if you're interested in more training on WebDirect, look to see that in the future. Also today's demonstration is largely revolves around our experience with converting FM starting point for use with WebDirect. And a lot of redesign and efficiency that we went through in bringing this tool up to speed for 13 and specifically WebDirect. And there's a lot of under the hood things that went on to make this possible. So going along with that, we made FM starting point for available. We shipped it last night. We will continue to ship updates for this product, but it's been greatly re-engineered under the hood. And we're going to talk about really what we did today to make that happen. It's a kind of a big deal. So first off, I want to set kind of everyone's expectations. What are you going to get out of this presentation? Well, I don't, you know, for an hour of your time, we want to make you successful with WebDirect. That's the bottom line. And what is this technology? Well, in order to do that, we're going to have to explain to you what WebDirect is and kind of frame the conversation about when to deploy WebDirect and maybe when not to. I need to show you some techniques for optimizing your layouts, especially if you have legacy layouts, how to basically re-engineer them under the hood. And if you do this, you may be able to speed up your layouts in terms of their download across the internet. Your performance may double. Certainly the weight of the layout will be half as much as it was. Now, depending upon your network situation, you may see based on a stopwatch the performance or the time of that load be half as twice as fast. So just keep that in mind. It's a pretty impressive improvement. So who should be watching this Web webinar today, right? The people watching this webinar will be folks who want to look at deploying basic web browser solutions without PHP programming. This is really a major step for FileMaker, and it's all part of the new FileMaker 13 platform. These are people that typically have been using FileMaker Pro, but they historically have come from the Excel world. Maybe they've been using a lot of post-it notes and organizing their lives that way. And while they've been successful with Pro on the platform and maybe go, they want to take the next steps. Intermediate and advanced users are going to learn a lot, too. I was talking to some very senior FileMaker developers the other day, and even they were not aware of some of the things that I was covering in this session. So please be aware that if you pay attention, you're going to learn something most likely that you did not know before. Also, I'm going to assume that for most people in this presentation, you're already familiar with the FileMaker platform. And when we talk about Pro or server, you kind of understand what these products are about. If you're still brand new to the platform, I'm going to recommend that you visit FileMaker.com and visit their FTS training. They have a whole series of basic training that's completely free. And I recommend that you visit this. Ryan's a big fan of this, and we've talked about this. And so it's a good place to start in your training of learning about the FileMaker platform. So what is WebDirect? WebDirect is the automatic rendering, and this is important, automatic rendering of FileMaker layouts and behaviors to a web browser automatically. It's a completely new capability for FileMaker solutions. It's a big deal. It is a complete replacement for instant web publishing. Now, if you don't know what instant web publishing is, that's fine. Don't worry about it. But if you're a historic FileMaker user and you used IWP previously, instant web publishing is gone, and WebDirect is now the new replacement for that technology. WebDirect only comes. It's published. It only is hosted by FileMaker Server 13. You must have FileMaker Server 13. You can't get WebDirect without this product. Also, keep in mind that while we're talking about the FileMaker 13 platform, this is really version 1.0 WebDirect. The first time WebDirect has been shipped. So like anything else, version 1.0, there's a whole future here for WebDirect where it will get better, faster with more features. But like I said, this is the 1.0 version. I remember us talking about 1.0 Go back about four years ago and look at where we've come in the last four years with that product. So just keep that in mind as we look at this product today. This is just the beginning. So I want to jump out real quick and give you a quick demonstration of where we're at. Now I'm in FM starting point. I've logged into a FileMaker server here. And this is the main menu screen here. This is actually a server that's about 75 miles from my main across the internet here. And I'm in Santa Clara, California. This is a different office. I'm actually across the internet. It's a wide area network connection. I'm in a browser here and this browser right here is reproducing the FM starting point in a web browser. So this is a WebDirect client that you see right here. I've got kind of limited screen real estate right now just due because I'm in a screen share here doing a webinar for everyone. And so you see the menu right here. We've actually recreated all this in WebDirect for you. There's no PHP programming. I can actually come over here and click contacts. And I can do the same thing over here. And so as you can see, I'm going to flip actually that's on record two, but I can go back to record one. We're on the same person here in real time. So it's shared data. Now of course, normally you wouldn't have the same person logging on to two clients at the same time. But for the point of demonstration, you can see that the information is being shared in real time. And so just to prove that this is all real, I could say, for example, make an edit to this person's record right here and no big deal. The information changes in real time back over here. So we're showing that we've reproduced the FileMaker Pro layout into a web browser without any programming. It's really, really cool. And Ryan's bobbing his head up and down there. He's very excited to see this technology, right, Ryan? Yeah, WebDirect is very exciting. It's truly a big deal for FileMaker. And it replaces the instant web publishing. So that just kind of gives you an idea, just a basic kind of concept of what it is at the outset. Keep in mind here at the top, though, that FileMaker made the effort of keeping us in our comfort zone with the status area here at the top. You notice that we have the new buttons and the delete and the record scroll control so we can scroll through the records. All these things are preserved over here in WebDirect. So we have the ability to flip through records and do this type of thing here. All of this is preserved. At the top of FileMaker, we have some of the menus that operate and make FileMaker special, what it is. As many of these things as possible have been preserved in WebDirect as well. And so you start to see these over here. So the whole idea is when people get exposed to WebDirect and they've used Pro previously, it's not like they landed on Mars and they're a different planet, right? They should feel comfortable with what they're seeing because it really is the FileMaker platform just on a different piece of software in a browser environment. But there are differences and there are limitations and that's what we need to talk about here in this presentation. So first thing to keep in mind is that WebDirect is not as powerful as FileMaker Pro because it runs in a browser. FileMaker Pro is a dedicated piece of software. And so what we're getting into this positioning, this conversation, because it's important as a consultant or as a developer, or as someone who's responsible to people who are developing solutions, your customers, you want to give them the best experience, okay? The goal is not to, oh, we got WebDirect. Let's make everything in WebDirect. No, that's not the right answer. The goal is if you have 20 people in the organization, you might have 10 on Pro and 5 on Go and might be 2 or 3 or 4 on WebDirect. I mean, there's going to be some sort of mix in your organization. And the goal for you as a good developer is to find that correct mix and deploy it appropriately. And so first off, for me to educate you here is to give you the positioning. WebDirect is not as powerful as Pro. Why? FileMaker Pro has a database engine in it. Server has a database engine. These two have been married together and working together for 20 years. The engineers here at FileMaker have been working hard for 20 years to make these work as well as possible together, interacting, giving great experience to the users, making the performance as quick as possible. If you think about how the performance has improved since FileMaker 9 all the way to 13, the product has been radically improved. So that's what the server to Pro product is, right? Pro is a dedicated piece of FileMaker software. Now, of course, we go to WebDirect. Well, there's no real product like WebDirect. That's a browser over there, right? And so there's no engine. So that means all the thinking, all the calculations, any sort of decision making that goes on like, oh, should this be a calculation? I got to calculate the sales tax in California for some reason, right? Or we got to do the value added tax in the UK, right? That has, if we're doing that in the WebDirect, the browser has to send a communication back to the server. The server has to make the thought, do the calculation, then send the results back for display back to the browser. Whereas in Pro, Pro would actually have helped us do that without even talking to FileMaker server for the most part. So now the engineering team has been smart. They've tried to cash on this information on the browser, but at the end of the day, there's only one engine helping us. And that actually limits the power of WebDirect, just in terms of the overall speed and snappiness of the client. So just keep that in mind. So major points, because it's not as fast as FileMaker Pro, you're going to want to use WebDirect for the occasional users or users who are outside the organization or maybe they want to deploy deployment issues with Pro. You can't get Pro into those users for some reason. Also, you need to be considering, think about the situations where people think about, oh, well, I have an Android device. I immediately want to go to Android. Well, the first release of WebDirect has not been optimized for mobile browsers. It's just the way this is. This is the 1.0 release of WebDirect. FileMaker is acutely aware that the world is going towards mobile. They understand that everyone expects this. And so this is high on their priority list. That being said, the 1.0 product, because the limitation of the processors on these mobile devices and the fact that they haven't had time yet to optimize WebDirect for these devices, WebDirect has not been optimized for mobile browsers. But pay attention, stay tuned, because in the future, things may change. Third point, keep in mind, once again, we talked about having the right mix of clients, right? Not just, it becomes the WebDirect show. WebDirect is not free. You think browser is free, therefore it's free, therefore it's all free, free, free, right? No. Using FileMaker Go or WebDirect requires a connection license to be purchased for your FileMaker server. This is where FileMaker is getting into the business of monetizing their product line kind of universally across the board. You need to pick the right client for the right job. Don't pick the clients because you think you can get a better deal on one end of it. You want to pick the right client for the right job. Pick WebDirect because it makes sense to deploy into a web browser. Pick Pro because you need the horsepower because you need more complex reports or persistent connections, things like that. But WebDirect, when it first came out, people, I got a number of emails, oh, hey, we don't have to pay for Pro anymore. It's going to be free because it's a browser and then, you know, basically we don't have to pay for FileMaker. We just have to buy a server once and we're done. It's not the way it works. You really are not going to be happy just trying to go down that road. Additionally, once again, you do have to pay for these connection licenses. And there is additional information on FileMaker's website about that. So just keep that in mind. So positioning, once again, this is not a downer, but just understand positioning because people's nature is what they are. If they think they can get something for free, then they go that way. FileMaker Go and FileMaker Pro are dedicated pieces of software. So if you have administrative users who are in the office working in FileMaker all day every day, they're running reports, they're doing a lot of crunching day in and day out. Those people are always going to be happier using Pro or Go on their iPad as opposed to using WebDirect. WebDirect is for those limited sorts of situations where you have lightweight users who are out on the road with a laptop, maybe like a sales force that's out there connecting to the database. They need access to maybe client information. They want to put in a contact report. They have a new sales opportunity, something like that. They need to log in. They have a little bit of information they're going to put in and they're going to disconnect. But if you have a back office administrator who's managing all the sales staff or someone who's doing fulfillment continuously, those people are going to need to be in Pro all the time with a consistent, reliable connection. They're going to be doing a lot of work all the time. They don't need to be using WebDirect. Those people need to be using a serious connection like FileMaker Pro to be getting their work done. Another good area for use with WebDirect, remote users who are not part of your core company, trusted outside vendors, or other outside third parties, maybe people that you really can't for whatever reason say, hey, you must go by FileMaker Pro so you can be part of our team. Maybe these are suppliers that are going to be part of your supply chain. They're sending you inventory. You need visibility into the inventory situation with the supply chain, that kind of situation. They need to log on, see the situation within the database. WebDirect is a good answer for something like that. Also, we see this as if you've been around the FileMaker community for some time, you get into IT organizations some places where they will fight with you about getting FileMaker deployed. This is a guerrilla warfare kind of situation where you can use WebDirect to circumvent IT as necessary, right? That could be unpopular with where you're at or popular, depends who you are. But FileMaker Pro is a dedicated app and if you don't have administrative access to install it, you can't get it installed. WebDirect runs on a browser. As long as you have access to a browser, you're in, right? So you've just bypassed someone who was maybe standing in the way. So with all these kind of positioning things in mind, we've got that taken care of. I want to get into the optimization and the conversation about tuning your database. And it's going to get kind of a little technical here. And I want to keep track of our time. We're doing good on time. So first off, I want to say that simpler solutions are going to work just fine for the most part with WebDirect. But you want to keep some things in mind upfront. And first off is that solutions that are going to break are generally going to break fundamentally because you're operating in a browser as opposed to robust client like FileMaker. And what do I mean by that? Classic example. If you're a FileMaker developer, you know that you can pop a window open and then you can pop another window open. In fact, if you have a multi-file solution, you can have, every file actually has its own dedicated window, right? And so you get into a situation where you have a window open like this and then you have, well, maybe another support window open and maybe another support window open. That is not supported in WebDirect. It's actually not supported in FileMaker Go either. Both of these technologies are really single document interfaces. They allow you to have a single window open at one time. So this is all you get to see at one time. Now, you can have multiple windows that are open, but they're actually stacked on top of each other. You can't actually see them simultaneously. So if you want to see them like the person that has a giant monitor or you have two or three monitors and the windows are side by side, that's not supported technology of WebDirect. You're basically going to be stuck in one window at one time. Now, keep in mind in 13, that's also why FileMaker helped create popovers to help kind of alleviate this. So if you're familiar with popovers in 13, this helps us get around this to some degree. But just keep that in mind, this one window interface at a time sort of situation. Solutions need to be optimized so they run quickly. And that's really the focus of the rest of this presentation, right? So back in 2010, we had a similar sort of a realization and that is, and there's a lot of lessons we can learn if we just go back just a little bit in history here and I'm not boring. Trust me, there's a reason for this. FileMaker Go, we had this realization that Go iOS layouts and FileMaker Go benefit from purpose-built layouts. If you just take desktop layouts and FileMaker Go, you're not going to be fully successful. If you're still getting into FileMaker Go and making mobile solutions, you're going to figure this out. If you've already done this, then you know this. WebDirect is the same way. WebDirect really benefits from purpose-built, dedicated layouts. Even FileMaker in their starter solutions, if you dig into them and you actually look at them, the starter solutions that are provided in FileMaker 13 have their own dedicated layouts. Why is that? Well, there's just enough of a little bit of a difference in variation between the clients and how they operate that they benefit from having their own layouts. So how do we go about making really optimized layouts even for Pro or Go or WebDirect? How do we do this? Because everything that we do here is going to benefit the entire product. Well, first off, we need to review our deployment plans. And deployment plans, we're going to start off kind of at a very high level here. We're going to work our way down to very technical. It gets into user workflow. And I know that one of our esteemed FileMaker solution consultants, Andy Locates, is here staring at watching me across the country at this. And he knows what we're talking about here. This is what we call a directed workflow or workflow. The idea of what are your users doing? We just don't give them a giant screen with all sorts of crazy information on it. We're going to give them the idea. We're going to talk to them about what is your user doing specifically to A to B to C? If they log in, what are they specifically doing? If they log in, we're going to give them a custom layout of a workflow that's going to meet their specific needs. And with WebDirect, that's really a perfect situation to tune your layout to meet the customer's needs. FileMaker developers conference back in 2013. There was also on TechNet now, the videos are there. There's a lot of sessions where people talking about user-centered design. And user-centered design is this idea where as a user is going through their workflow, the developer builds a solution around their needs. And so that's not really the focus of our conversation here, but TechNet is a community that FileMaker has. If you're not familiar with it, it's completely free. You sign up. Once you sign up, you can log on and get these additional free videos. And some of these are the DevCon sessions from 2013. If you miss DevCon, you can go back and watch some of these sessions. It's great. And some of these deal with user-centered design. So I highly recommend that you go ahead and take a look at TechNet and look at user-centered design. But that's kind of what we're talking about here. And so we want to look at building layouts that are specifically optimized for workflow and FileMaker WebDirect. And how do we do that? Well, the tips that we're going to dig into here are mostly new and specific to 13, but a couple are older, but most of it's brand new. So the first item that we want to talk about is this idea of why we want to lighten the layout. We want to lighten the layout. And what does that mean? Well, up above here, and we're going to get, and this is where it starts to get a little deeper. And you'll understand why this is as we get towards the end of the presentation. Here's a field. There's a label. There's a field. Why is this important? Well, under the hood in FileMaker is a block of XML. What is XML? It's a bunch of code. Just take my word for it. If you're a technical person, you know what I'm talking about. This stuff is under the hood. It's what makes FileMaker work. Every time that an object is sent down through the network, it has to shoot this stuff through the network out to the client. So up here at the server, it shoots it down to the cloud out to the client. So if you have two objects, it only has to send two blocks. But otherwise, if you have 28 or 30 or 50 or 100 objects, all that XML has to be sent down. So we want to minimize the number of objects that we have with these blocks of XML. Right? Does that make sense? So that's the idea. We want to minimize the number of objects that we have that are going down the network. So if you minimize the number of objects, now check this layout out. This would maybe not be an ideal layout. Now, this is an old legacy database that we have at my company. It will never see the light of day for WebDirect, right? As is. It's just not going to work very well. There's this way too many objects. We kept tacking on and kept tacking on and kept tacking on. It's just so many things in here. It just would never work very well. And every little item in here has a block of XML. Now, if you look at this starter solution layout from file makers, part of 13. Now, this is very limited in terms of the number of items and the number of blocks of XML that are under the hood. But the reality is this is much cleaner in terms of sending down to the network. Now, is this a good solution for your organization? It might be way too simple. It's too simple for me. But just to give you an idea of, if you understand that shooting all these little blocks of information down, this is way too much. This might be too simple. So you need to be thinking about minimizing the objects on the layout. Well, then giving all these things, what's our first hot tip? Well, here we go. You want to break the objects into functional workflows. We're back to this conversation about workflow. Break them across multiple layouts if possible. Some WebDirect users may not need all the layouts. They don't need all the pieces of that complex layout. So why put all those pieces on the layout for them to load in the first place, right? So here is a contact data entry screen from starting point. Let's just say, for example, this is information in the office that we all need. But the people out in the road only need some of it. Remember, we talked about that sales team that was out there. They only need some of this information. And so we identify the different sections that are kind of functional. And this is fairly arbitrary. It's just for the point of conversation, but we identify these sections here. And we say that we only need like section upper left, maybe up here and maybe this section here. Or maybe we do need these two sections, but we don't need all these other sub tabs. They only need this, this, and then the notes. They don't need estimates and projects and all this other stuff. And they definitely don't need the photo because they know what the person looked like. They just met them. So then the idea is that we build separate layouts here. And it only draws one layout at a time. So when you're in WebDirect, you see this one here. And then you say, yeah, that's great. I finished this one, go next. And then you draw, then you get this screen here. And it's very simple. By you drawing a very simple layout, the performance is very, very, very fast. And so instead of giving someone a giant layout with a million objects, and it sits there and grinds while it, you know, it sends this to them, you send them a very optimized experience, very optimized. And so that's the idea here. This is kind of this idea of optimized workflow, or as we used to talk about directed workflow, you're directing them through a specific process. So something to consider as you're building the system. And the reason for this, once again, just to summarize, WebDirect is sensitive to a lot of those blocks of data being sent to it, all that XML being sent to it down through the network. More specifically, it's not so much WebDirect, the browser is sensitive to the amount of data being sent to it, right? People, you know, I remember, especially in the old days so much, but you used to hear this, oh, those websites so slow, or your website so slow, I want a fast website, you know? And well, why would websites be so slow? Well, there was so much stuff on it, right? And so to make the website go faster or make WebDirect go faster, put less stuff on it. I know it seems really basic, but Ryan's giggling here, but yeah, I mean, it's kind of the way it is, right? You can't put everything on it. So overview of where our plan is. So we're getting, we started basic, high altitude, reviewing workflow, we're limiting our objects. Now we get into custom themes and shared styles, custom themes and shared styles. And this is really where the rubber meets the road, as we say. Hardcore optimization. If you're a legacy developer or someone new to the platform, the classic theme is not your friend, okay? And this is where I want to get into things. If you have come forward from FileMaker, you know, and I've been in this for now 24 years, if you've come forward, it doesn't really matter. This conversation is useful even if you're brand new to FileMaker 13 and then 13 is your first version. It doesn't matter. What we're going to show you here matters either way. But if you're bringing a database forward, especially if it came forward from 11 or earlier, what you're going to get as a database that, as the layouts are converted, they come forward in classic and the classic theme. And what you're going to see up here is, I'm going to highlight this up here. And instead of looking at all the red lines, this focus from my point is that right here, you know, this is the classic theme. The classic theme has a couple unhealthy things for you as it comes forward. The classic theme was designed to be compatible, bring forward compatibility with FileMaker 11 as you converted from 11 to 12. And so in doing that though, it was very inefficient with some of the under the hood XML and CSS. And so let me explain this and let me tell you how to optimize it. Okay. First off, there's no coding that you have to do here, but what I'm doing is I'm showing you what happens. First off, if you just converted for your FileMaker 11 file to 12, and now you're using 13, every object that you have has, you have a big block of XML. Well, part of that is a block of CSS. CSS is this descriptive language that tells the browser or FileMaker how to draw it on screen, how to draw that object. It tells how big it is, what the font size is, what the weight of it is, all these sorts of attributes to tell you how big an object is. A field has it, a label has it, a slide control has it. Every object on FileMaker layout has CSS. Well, with the classic theme, every one of these little objects has its own block, its own separate block, none of it's shared. And so as it sends all this information down, it shoots this all down separately. And so you go, well, of course, this is kind of every items unique, right? Well, in FileMaker 13, you don't have to go this way. In FileMaker 13, we can have them all share one block. And imagine if you shared one block of information, FileMaker sent that down through the network once, once, right? Then all those other little blocks wouldn't be sent down, you send it down once. The network performance would be vastly improved. Well, how do we do this? Well, first off, we take your layout, and I'm gonna walk us through this again in a second, but I'm staying in PowerPoint because it's got this animation here, so you can see this visually. You switch your layout to one of the built-in styles. We did a vibrant style, and then we customized what we called it RCC, but this is in starting point once again that you can download for free. And then we decided that we would customize a field style here, and we called it Field Primary Blue Text, right? And then we would select each of these fields, and we would say, hey, let's use this shared style. So as we start to take objects and we share them, we call it a shared style. So we have a theme, a custom theme, and then we start to share the styles. We're sharing this block of CSS. And so you never see the CSS. I'm showing this stuff to you right now. Unless you're a tech person and you dig under the hood, you'll never see this stuff again, but I'm showing this to you because it matters. And at the end of this, in just a minute, I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna actually get a stopwatch out. I'm gonna show you more or less what we did to show you what we saved. Now, we can do this with shared styles with fields. We do shared styles with buttons. Every group of similar objects in FileMaker 13 can have a similar shared style. A style is not specific to a field. How about labels? So all these labels are a specific font. They're a specific gray. They're this kind of thing. And so they have this label main, and we use Tahoma. So we labeled that, right? And so we created this whole experience like this. And so that was the whole idea here. And so I want to do a quick demo here and show you this of what we did. And so I'm just gonna minimize this just for a moment. So I'm gonna drop out of a web direct here because it's not so critical at the moment. But if we go into FileMaker 3, or correction FileMaker 3, starting point three, this is the version that we had before it was optimized. And if I fire this up, I can go into like accounts here and I go into layout mode. And I can look at the inspector up here under styles, right? And I can see this is a classic theme. I can see this is a classic theme. And so we know by digging under the hood and by timing things that each one of these has a highly inefficient block of CSS that we need to optimize. Well, what was the procedure that my team went to clean all this up? Now over here is starting point four that we did all the work on. We've done a ton of work on this. The number of hours is like a lot. And we're giving it away, which is crazy. I'll never quite figure that out. But anyway, so this is what we came up with. Now the fonts of colors are a little bit different just because we wanted to change things a little bit, but we could make them identical if we wanted to. As you can see, how do we go from here, which is classic, to a custom theme over here, which is RCC Vibrant. How do we do this? Well, what we did is first off is that we went to themes and we actually picked Vibrant and we switched. Okay. And it kind of, from the standpoint of the boss, that's me, it destroyed it. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is horrible. And then what I did is I sat down with one of my engineers and he went through and he slowly but surely rebuilt the layout to make it look like it does over here. Put the blues in, put the proper bordering, the rounding in, all that kind of thing. And then the idea was to select these items and they're already set up this way. But if you click these fields here, the idea was to select these fields and to give them a shared style. Now, if you look over here, they're already set to default. They're already using a shared style. But if you came up with a new shared style, like you came up with a new style, you could say this could be a blue text box, that kind of thing. You could come up with a new style. And that's what we've done over here. We came up with a, we have all sorts of additional styles in here, right? If you click over here, all these styles in here are ones that my team created and they're arbitrary. You could create your own style. So the idea is that you create your own shared style. So as I click over here, you see they're all shared, right? Now, every time you click on an object, this is the huge takeaway. You don't want to style these objects individually. You want to style one of them once to make it the way you want it. Then you want to select all of them together. And I'm, you know, I can select a bunch of them. And then you want to select it over here. If that makes sense. And that way they all take on that attribute. That makes sense. Now they all shifted here a little bit, which is fine. But you get the idea that you are going to make it once. You're going to create a style for it. And then you're going to click all these and share it. You're not going to style each field individually, because every time you style each one individually, you're giving its own little block of CSS. Remember the red where each one had its own shared set. It was crazy. It was all over the place. You don't want to get into that. You want to have it shared. And then they're shared. They're all together with one block. So if you do this, you're like, oh, this is a lot of work. This is a lot of work. This is a lot of work. I can hear the people groaning on the other side of the webinar. Well, what is the upside to doing this? Can we talk upside briefly? Let's do that. Let's talk upside. What is the upside? Well, I wanted to run a test. The test is, I figured the most common thing that people do with starting point is they start on the home screen here, and they navigate from the contact button there you see there, and they navigate to the contact entry screen here. And so basically it has to load this contact data entry screen. And so how are we going to measure it? We need some sort of a very technical way of measuring it. So we download a product from a third-party company. It has nothing to do with file makers called Wireshark. It allows you to measure the bandwidth that goes across the network. And so we got that going. And then what we did is we measured file maker starting point three with the classic. And we got everything installed. And so then, yeah, so right here you can see this. This is the model, how we measure it from file maker server down to WebDirect. And so this is classic. So this is a classic theme with starting point three. One press of the button resulted in 850K downhill. And that's with this WebDirect 1.0. This first version of WebDirect is a 150K data push. That's a lot of data. It's almost a megabyte. That's a lot. You're like, oh, that's a lot. Yes, it is. It's also a very old, I mean, in terms of design technique, it's an inefficient legacy kind of design. It looks beautiful. It's free. You can download it, but it's not very efficient. Well, what if we use our new and improved technique? What are we going to get for that? All this effort, what do we get? Anyone want to bet? Bets, Ryan, bets. Place your bets. A third. A third. Do we get a third? I can do better than that. How about double, double, double the speed or half the weight? It's like going on a diet and losing half your weight. I like that. I'm a big guy. I always like losing half my weight. That's great. So anyway, so we, the weight of the same layout and starting point four is half and went to 425 kilobytes. And so that's huge. So you go, well, then suddenly how does that affect other clients? Well, here's the deal. The technology that we're using at the CSS is shared styles. If you do this for your layouts, your remote users that are using pro and the remote users that are using go, they will benefit hugely too. It's not just web direct clients. Filemaker technology, this platform, the CSS technology is being used everywhere. So if you have a remote user on a white area network, if you have an iPad user on a 3G connection, oh my goodness, they're going to have a huge benefit to seeing this, especially if you optimize these layouts like this. So just for giggles, we decided that we would say, well, what if we just remember, we just did that layout and it kind of went black and white. What if we just left it like that? What kind of performance would we get? Well, when we did that, it went down to 225. And so the difference between 425 and 225 was us adding our customization to make it kind of look our blue and gray and a starting point-ish kind of look. And so we did add some weight to it, but it was still much lighter, right, than our original. So that's, this is it. So if you want to know how to make things work better, that's the key. It's you've got to use shared styles in your custom themes. And this is new in Filemaker 13. Filemaker does not really, you know, in terms of their sales literature and things like that, they won't tell you that if you do this, you can make your product go twice as fast and strictly speaking, it's not always twice as fast. It pins upon your network. If you're in a local area network, it goes so fast anyway that you, you know, you don't see the difference between, you know, 20 milliseconds and 10 milliseconds. But if you're out on the end of a 3G connection on an iPad, you're going to notice the difference. It's going to be huge. And so, you know, it's one of those things your mileage may vary, but to me, this is a big deal. It's a really big deal. And so I just thought I'd share this with everyone. That's a big piece of this. Now, as we move along, I have some additional, and I have a typo there, of course. We'll need to fix that somewhere along the way. When making changes and tweaking and layouts and things like that, the Format Painter Tool. I don't necessarily recommend using the Format Painter Tool to paint from one object to the next because it doesn't really use, it doesn't preserve the shared style, right? So as the idea, if you're familiar with the Format Painter Tool, I've got to kind of highlight it up here. It basically, for the lack of a technical term, it makes a local override and it makes a unique local settings to each object. And so it makes each object totally with its own unique set of CSS. The official method for making shared objects is to select them. And I've talked to engineering about this explicitly, is to select the object and to select the style over here. That's it. If you try to go up here and use Format Painter Tool, you're going to make inefficient objects underneath the hood. The engineering teams will wear this. Maybe at some point they will optimize that one tool. It's kind of a legacy tool, so it works. But if you're trying to make something very fast and efficient, I wouldn't recommend using that specific tool right there. As we move along here. Yes, backwards compatibility. This is as common sense. FileMaker 13 features don't necessarily work in FileMaker 12, right? If you make a custom theme and shared styles in 12, generally they render most of the time pretty well, but every once in a while there'll be little variations in things. We ran into a situation where it would be little minor things where you'll notice that there's a little funky redraw issues here, little things like that with 12. Certainly, if you have a custom theme and shared styles in 13, you don't want to go into layout mode in 12 and monkey with it because 12 will not be able to identify the fact that you have a custom theme. It just doesn't understand it. And so you're asking for trouble, so I recommend you stay away from that. I would assume that's common sense, but I'll just state that for the record. Got it. Obvious statements here for those of you. If you're prone to putting big pictures into as background images or things like that into the backgrounds of your layouts, I recommend that you don't do that so much because big images in your layouts will push down through the network, could slow things down to some degree. Also, big tip here. Use the built-in tools at the top of FileMaker to do your buttons in your artwork. Stay away from using creating buttons in artwork in Photoshop, right? The buttons, basically FileMaker's buttons are basically vector-based artwork. If you don't know what that is, it doesn't matter, but the point is it's highly mathematically efficient in here, and this is not so much. So recommend that you use FileMaker's built-in tools and, if at all possible, leave Photoshop alone. Slide controls and tabs and popovers for that reason. You can use them, but keep in mind that the XML to describe these objects is a little deeper, and so if you want to use a lot of slide controls and tabs and popovers, you need to try them out after you put them in. Always test your work as you use it. Objects that are not exposed by tabs and slide controls and popovers, there's no penalty for non-exposed content, but as soon as you actually view the content, it's going to go back to the server, it's going to ping the server to bring back the content. So if you understand what I'm saying, so if you have a popover, it's just the object, the little button there, you're going to get some XML for that button, but as soon as you press it, it's going to go back to the server. Remember, we only have one engine on one side. It's going to go to the server, get the information, bring it back. Now, this is one of those really rare moments where I was very stoked about WebDirect because WebDirect generally is slower than Pro, except in one area, and then it's like just devastates FileMaker Pro being so much faster. The way FileMaker server works is that whenever you do a sort, it sends the sort information downhill to Pro, or to go and Pro and go do all the sorting down the network, which is an interesting conversation. You can have some time with FileMaker Engineering. I'm not sure entirely why that happens the way it does, but it's just the way it is. But with WebDirect, they can't do that. There's no engine to send it to, so it stays on the server, right? Well, the side benefit of that is that the actual sorting actually occurs on the server. And so we did this test with like 300,000 records or whatever it was. And it was 57 seconds with WebDirect to sort this huge block of data versus 227 seconds with FileMaker Pro. So WebDirect actually, when you're doing sorts in a database, actually is way, way, way, way, way faster. So that's kind of a cool thing. So it's kind of an interesting byproduct of the way WebDirect is engineered. So just keep that in mind. It's just one of those little things, and we thought we'd get the stopwatch out and test it. Of course, your mileage will vary, and we put the server specifications here if anyone's interested, but it was an interesting test. So that kind of, we get kind of into a Q&A section here a little bit. We've got kind of the overview of what we had. We had a review of the workflow. We limited the objects. Why? Because there's XML under each one, and then you do custom themes and shared styles, and that is the huge part of efficiency. Right, Mr. Ryan? Yes, sir. So what do we got for questions coming in from people? Well, first off, thanks for that presentation, Richard. A lot of great information there, and thanks everyone for submitting your questions during the webinar. We had a lot of great participation there. If you haven't already, please submit your questions now. And again, we also have the Twitter account with the hashtag WebDirectQ, if you want to submit them after today's session. All right, so let's go ahead and start, and we'll start with this question right here. To view a website containing tracking info, is there a way to make a URL link that will take the WebDirect user to a web browser? Yeah, that's the open URL commands one way of doing that. In fact, there's actually a little demo of that in FM Starting Point. If you download FM Starting Point and you click the video training, at the top there's an ad for our training, of course, which would be nice, our seven-hour training series. If you press that, it pops open a window and allows you to visit another browser. So yeah, that's built right in there. So yeah, that's an easy one. And kind of going off of that, the next question, will web viewers work with WebDirect and web viewers are supported in WebDirect? Okay, the next question, can you use WebDirect for a solution built in FileMaker 12 and hosted on FileMaker Server 13? Yeah, I mean, 12 and 13 have the same file format, but the reality is you're going to have to basically use, you can't use Server 12. You have to use Server 13, and at that point you just might as well upgrade yourself to the 13 platform, right? So I mean, the short version is, I mean, there's no conversion process, but you're going to need to move up to 13 to do that. Right. Okay, the next question, can you hide menus or layouts from users with WebDirect? Menu restriction, yeah, you can restrict the status area across the top and you can't, can you do, and the menu bar in the status you can hide and lock? Hide and lock both of those, which is nice. I normally, with starting point, we normally leave the status area visible across the top because I don't want to reproduce the navigation, and I'm big on people learning to use the basics of FileMaker, but you can restrict that. So that's a good one as well. Okay, and the next question, are plugins supported with FileMaker WebDirect? Okay, this is a good question, and this gets into probably one where you'd want to go to, you know, download of training or something like that. Plugins, normally plugins, people assume you install it on the client. Of course, you're not going to install a plugin on the web browser. You can install some plugins. You need to check the vendor for compatibility. You can install some plugins on the FileMaker 13 server. Then you can call a script from WebDirect. That will run the script on the server, which will activate the plugin. So indirectly, the answer is yes. But the plugin has to be licensed and installed on the server. So if it seems normally you would install it on the client level, you'd install it at the server, and then all the WebDirect people share it, if that makes sense. Okay, how about, can you tell me just the main differences between Instant Web Publishing and FileMaker WebDirect? Yeah, that's a funny one. Instant Web Publishing always wanted to be what WebDirect was. It never could quite get there. WebDirect actually does render what the layout pretty much looks like. Instant Web Publishing had a lot of limitations in terms of the number of records it would show, the kinds of the way the layout would render things like that. It was kind of a train wreck from my perspective. But I'm not a FileMaker employee, so I can say things like that. But I can also be objective, and when I tell you that something's a train wreck, when I tell you it's also something else is great, you can believe me. WebDirect is finally, finally, finally what Instant Web Publishing should have been, and it is now. I'm very, very, very excited to see that. It actually does render the layouts really, really close, almost identically the way they should be, which is exciting. That's the whole point. Instant Web Publishing just had a lot of limitations. It just did. There's a long, long list, and a lot of people when they get into it were disappointed with it. Now, there's some people who made a living using Instant Web Publishing, but it doesn't matter at this point, it's going and it works so much better. Just the way it is. I'm pretty passionate about that one. Okay, so for the final question, is conditional formatting supported in WebDirect, and if so, is it advisable? Conditional formatting is, most of all the technology is supported. Conditional formatting is supported. A lot of the technology is supported. What happens is that every time that you do something like script triggers, most of the script triggers are supported in WebDirect. The rub is that every time you twitch or do something in WebDirect, if there is any sort of like mental thought, like you have to have a thought, WebDirect has to go back to FileMaker Server to have the thought. You can't have it on your own, right? You don't have a brain, right? The brain is at FileMaker Server. And so every time, if you start loading up your screen with all these little additional calculations, every time you trip one or you step over something and it fires, the browser goes back to talk to server, which causes this little bit of a delay. So you can put conditional formatting in there, but every time you add one of those, or every time you add a script trigger, you may actually cause a little bit of a performance delay. You need to test and decide at what point you're adding too much overhead to it. If the conditional formatting is a nice to have, oh, that's pretty. Oh, that's nice. Oh, it's blue now instead of green. You might want to just toss that over the fence and give up on it, because you're adding overhead to this, you're hurting your performance, right? If it's really mission, like you have a script trigger, it's really important if it hits the certain inventory level, it's going to put a big message up saying you can't sell anymore because you're out of this. That's an important thing, right? That's not a nice to have, that's important. So you got to decide what's really important and what's a nice to have, because it really needs to be treated that way. Well said. Okay, so let's talk about some next steps. I know Richard, you're talking about the FM starting point. Where can they get that? FM starting point is available at literally at wwwfmstartingpoint.com It's all one word. And if you have questions or comments or you find a bug of all things, feel free to email us back about that. We are working on it continuously all the time. But everything here in terms of all this efficiency stuff going through all these layouts, we did that to every layout and there's hundreds of layouts in there. So it was quite the workload. And so we've done that, so all the efficiency has been built in there. So that's a big part of it. Great. So this web seminar will be recorded and posted to the web seminar page on FileMaker's web seminar page on the websites. You can find it underneath the training section. And if you haven't already feel free to download the FileMaker and start exploring WebDirect today. As you can see on your screen right now, if you're ready to consider licensing and you want to purchase more than five seats, you want to contact your volume licensing sales rep and either the URL posted at the top of your screen or call 1-800-725-2747. As you can see FileMaker monthly prices start at $9 that's little for FileMaker Pro and $29 monthly for FileMaker server. Again, if you want to learn more about the pricing for the concurrent connections or the WebDirect connections, feel free to go to the FileMaker store and take a look at FileMaker server and plug in the amount of connections that you'll require.