 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffiths, and today's webinar is FileMaker Right for Your Organization. We'd like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series, and also thank presenters Kevin Mullins and Glenn Suarez. Before we get started, I'd like to tell those of you who are new to TechSoup a little bit about our organization. We are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. Pretty lofty mission. I'm very excited to be working for TechSoup and sharing this wonderful resource with you. Here's a screen grab of our homepage I wanted to point out some things that are really important for you to check out at TechSoup.org. Get products is where you can request donations of software like FileMaker, Adobe, Symantec, Microsoft, and 36 other vendors make donations to TechSoup and redistribute those to the nonprofit and library sectors. Also in the Learning Center you'll find the webinars that are recorded as well as articles. We have a blog. We have some newsletters you can sign up for, and a community forum. So if you have questions you can post those there and volunteers will answer them. So if you get a chance, go to our website and check out all the things that we have to offer. Now I'd like to welcome Kevin Mullins who has graciously provided a wonderful presentation for us today. So Kevin, can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, thank you, Kevin. Kevin Mullins, I am the technical director at Angeloar and Pregnancy Services which happens to be a non-paid position. And the thing that I've done mostly for them is use a FileMaker database that I created for running the annual auction. And I've been doing that now for the last six years I believe. Great, great. So if you could, there's some comments about your voice. Okay, great. So thanks Kevin. And I'm also wanting to thank Kevin Lowe for answering chat questions, and also Matthew Halden, both from TechSoup for answering chat questions, and Glenn Flores from FileMaker who will also be available to ask to answer chat questions. And he'll be answering questions live at the end during the Q&A. So quickly to go through our agenda, we're going to talk about what is FileMaker and why you'd use it, how you get started, developing a database, and then managing and maintaining your data, a little bit about staff training, and then online access and security. And we'll also then have about 15 minutes for Q&A at the very end. But before we get started, we would like to know a little bit about our audience. So if you could select yes or no, do you currently use spreadsheets to track anything regularly? So if you're tracking your donors, or you're tracking addresses, or you're tracking vendors, click through, just waiting for people to click through, and skip to results. There you go. So almost everybody listening is already tracking things regularly using spreadsheets. So Kevin, why don't you take it from here. Tell us what is FileMaker? So this is the marketing answer. This is actually from FileMaker's website. FileMaker is an easy-to-use cross-platform Windows and Mac database system that allows you to build solutions that will meet many, many needs that you may have. FileMaker comes with 30 built-in starter solutions that pull them up and you can start using them right away. You can create custom databases, produce reports, publish data to the web, and share data very easily with others with a few clicks. I also included the real-world answer, what I feel FileMaker is. FileMaker is a tool. It allows you to design solutions to your problems, but you have to be the one that is designing it. You can use templates, but you're still choosing to develop it, think through the things that you need to have. It's not a built-in solution. It's not a silver bullet. It allows you to organize your data, create related links among your data, create process workflows, and provides a system that can enforce consistency of your data. It allows you to create drop-downs for specific things. So if you've ever used a spreadsheet and shared that with a few people, the different people may enter things differently, and sometimes it's hard to find things if someone did something different than you intended. You can scope all of that in FileMaker to be exactly the way you want. So why would we use FileMaker? Mainly because FileMaker is of the competitors in its market. It really is the ease of use champion as FileMaker has coined. It's designed from the ground up from non-technical people. I'm amazed at the sheer number of administrators, executive administrators, and those types that have made amazing databases with FileMaker. And they started with very, very little knowledge of computers. The other thing is it works on Macs or PCs. It's one of the only solutions that does a very good job of working on both systems. You can design one system and you can design one database and run it on both systems. The other thing is in the industry, it is a known good piece of software, a PC Magazine named FileMaker. It's editor's choice for databases in May. So it has a very good product, has a very good following, and is a very good solution for many people's problems. So what are the business problems that nonprofits face that can be addressed by a database? There's a number of different things. Basically any problem that you may have that technology may solve can be solved with FileMaker. The question in the beginning was do you use Excel to track anything? Excel is really good as a number crunching system, but a lot of people overuse Excel for managing contacts and keeping track of project schedules and those types of things. Any of those things that people may do with Excel or other solutions can very easily be done in FileMaker. I've included a couple of samples. The first one I have up is the actual auction planning system that I've developed for Angelorum. So what this system does, it allows me to do everything for the auction from start to finish. We enter the donations that receive, we then build those into catalogs, those catalogs then get printed. So what you're looking at right here is this is where I build the catalog, do the name and the description of the catalog, and then I put the actual donation items that make up this catalog and put them over into that area. From that information, within FileMaker I'm able to create the layout that gets sent to the print shop, and the print shop then prints this, we bind it, and that's the catalog that we use for the auction. It's all done and managed and controlled within FileMaker. In addition to making the catalog, this is the bid sheet that I've created. Everything in the bid sheet is calculated from FileMaker. So these different numbers, it's all based on the value that was put into, it's actually the value that the catalog item is, and the catalog item is made up of many different donations that have individual values that all gets calculated up and is in there, and then FileMaker automatically calculates everything down for me so I don't have to do any of that. Here we've got the final checkout. When everybody's done with the auction, they come back to the end of the auction, they give me their bid number, I see what things they've won, and from there I print out their invoice. Again, all of this is happening with inside of FileMaker. Other examples of things you may want to do, contact management, very popular thing to do. This here happens to be a free template that's available called FM Starter Point. There's also a very simple version of this that's built into FileMaker that is available. You've got the first screen I had, I skipped ahead a little too much, is a detailed view, usually like a form view, how you may enter the data. The next screen is another way to look at that data. It's a list view. There are different ways for you to look at the data in there. It allows you to have more data right at your fingertips in certain ways that make sense to your organization, your initiative, or any of those types of things. Another thing that it can do is you can set up any types of reports or printouts. This is an example of just having a simple address list that you may have, the paper copy in case the computer crashes. All of that can be generated out of FileMaker. This is another contact management example. Again, it's another free example that's available. I pop it up just to show you that you can kind of design things the way that you want to design them, different looks and feels. This again is a detailed system, but it's kind of broken out into different tabs of different pieces of information. Again, to make workflows better, or to present information grouped together in a more specific way, and then this is again another kind of list view way of looking at it. It's all different ways of looking at information that you put into the FileMaker system. And it's all the things that you've kind of thought through or developed, or maybe business processes that you've tried to translate into FileMaker. Donation management is something that has come up a lot in the forms. I've actually replied to some of those messages about FileMaker. This is a free template that is available from FileMakerDonations.com which allows you to track donors, donations made, and your correspondence with those donors. So right here we've got the information about the donors, and here's where you would enter in each of those individual donations. This layout, again, it's thinking through what are the things that you could possibly do. This layout allows you to track any time you've talked to a particular donor and take notes about those conversations. It allows you to keep an overall view of your donors and how they interact with your entity or your nonprofit. This here is looking at it. Again, all the data is there. You enter it all once, but there are different ways of looking at it. This is a listing of all the donations you have, and if I had entered more donations, they'd show up here, and then you click on it and you'd see information about what was entered and who entered it. The other thing to note about FileMaker, just like with my auction system, you can create a layout that is a Avery 5160, I think is the most common, formatted label sheet comes from your database, prints right out to your printer so you're sending those mailings out. You're not doing a mail merge between Excel and Word. It's all done and set up within FileMaker. Other examples are inventory, expense reporting, and these are all built-in templates that FileMaker comes with. You can customize anything or you can build anything from scratch. Purchase orders, email campaign management, which is definitely something that a lot of nonprofits try to do. Music library, book library, lending library, any of those types of things. Again, any of that is possible with FileMaker, and they have a lot of built-in templates. There's 25 more that are available, and I have a link on the next page that can explain some of them that are available. Well, excellent. I know there's a lot of questions about these different templates coming through the chat, so we'll be answering more questions during the Q&A. But let's say I'm comfortable using Microsoft Excel. How can I get started? So one way to get started, if you have an Excel file that you've used to kind of manage everything, FileMaker has really, at bare minimum, two ways that you could do this. One, you could decide on one of the built-in templates that you may want to look at or use. Let's say the contact management one, and you've got an Excel file that you've managed all your contacts. You can start that template. It gives you a blank screen, and then you can import the Excel file, and you use just this little importer right here that allows you to line up your fields from your Excel file to the fields that are in FileMaker, and then you just hit import, and it starts to basically suck in all of that data into your FileMaker file. Once done, you now have all that data inside of FileMaker. If you happen to have a pretty simple Excel file, like a contact management Excel file, you can actually just take that Excel file and drag it and drop it on the FileMaker icon. FileMaker will then open up a new database with all of those columns imported and all of the data imported into a table view so that you can then start building your custom system from the ground up. Great. So what do I need before I get started developing a database? Some of the things to think about when developing a database. Like I said, there's a lot of built-in templates, and it kind of gives you a starting place to go from, but really to design a robust database solution. It doesn't matter what your tool is, whether it's FileMaker or any of the other tools that are available, you really need to think about what it is that you're trying to accomplish. FileMaker is just that. It's just a tool. You still have to know what it is that you want to do. So some of the things in proper database design is you define a mission statement and mission objectives. You also, since you may be building from something that was already in existence, you analyze what you're currently using and try to think about the things that you may need to improve it or to work on it. Identify your data elements. Separate those elements, or entities, using the proper terminology by type. Identify how those entities relate to each other, what their relationships are. Define your business rules that you're trying to accomplish or the processes that you're trying to follow. And I can't say this strongly enough. You really need to think about what reporting you want out of it. What's the reporting that you need on the back end? Because if you don't think about those things up front, you could be in a lot of pain when you're trying to think of this complex report that your data didn't get entered to allow you to do it, or you didn't design it to get you that reporting. So if you think about the end result in the design phase, you then have, you'll then have the foundation of a good system. So what if I need to have multiple people using it? What do I need to think about? Things to think about on a multi-user system. One, FileMaker allows you to share your data easily with others. It does it in a couple of different ways. The first and the most simple way is with a single copy of FileMaker that you use to develop FileMaker with that can share out your FileMaker file with nine other FileMaker users. So let's say you have an office, you have three people in the office, you've developed your FileMaker solution, it's managing your intake of donations. The computer that's running FileMaker has that up, and the other two people that have a copy of FileMaker connect to it, and everybody's using it all at the same time. You can also do what's called instant web publishing, which allows you with that copy of FileMaker to convert your file into a web format, connect to it with IE, Internet Explorer, or any web browser, and you're seeing pretty much with a little caveat pretty much the same layout and the same structure that you created and used with FileMaker. There are some issues with viewing it on the web that you kind of have to think about when you're designing, but you're not having to design twice. You can design once and share it via the Internet. Via the Internet it's possible. I would say that's really more an internal network, so you're sharing it between computers in an office. The recommended way to really share FileMaker gets into the FileMaker server product. FileMaker server will host the file. It backs up the file. It allows for consistency of data. It's really a much more robust solution, but the nice thing about FileMaker is with the individual product you do get some of those options right out of the box. You've got a dedicated server that you can put on-site that can host up to 250 to 900 connected users with FileMaker, depending on which version of server you use. You can also, instead of buying the server software and buying an actual physical computer to serve it on, you can host your FileMaker file on a third-party server and connect to that either with FileMaker or via the Internet web publishing feature. Other considerations, security and permissions. FileMaker allows you to set up security based on individual user or based on groups. So you need to think about how you are going to do that. If you're tracking finances but you don't want your everyday volunteers to be seeing people's financial donations, you can segment the data in FileMaker so that you have one area that someone may use just to track information about clients that come in, but another area that's the financial information. And you can set up the permissions so that one user does not see the other user. So the other information so you kind of have to think about that. There are a few things in FileMaker that you also have to think about within a multi-user solution like global fields and how those interact with other users. You need to think about your network performance depending on if you are hosting the file on a server on site versus using a hosted solution. What your network performance is plays a big role on those types of things. The number of users, like I said, there are different products that allow for a greater or smaller number of connected FileMaker clients onto it. So those are considerations. And the other thing to consider or the benefit what I would say of a multi-user solution in FileMaker is what I had said before, the data consistency. Being able to have a drop down that's set up with all of the states so you don't have to worry about someone using the wrong abbreviations. Having specific category or subcategory items laid out exactly so you don't have to do it. And then also having radio buttons or check boxes. Again, the data goes into the database exactly as it's entered there, but you don't have to worry about misspellings or someone doing things that you didn't expect to do. So how can my employees get access to the data? So there's a couple of different ways, kind of touched on it before. One, another copy of FileMaker. So again you have FileMaker, the FileMaker file hosted in the version of FileMaker you designed it with. And you have another user in the office that's using FileMaker to connect to it. You can also do the instant web publishing via the local network. And this is a screenshot of Internet Explorer using my auction planning database. So again, it's a web page that is hosted from the FileMaker software that allows someone to start entering data right from there. FileMaker also this year released FileMaker Go for the iPad and iPhone which are both fairly inexpensive basically client versions of FileMaker that allow you to either run a FileMaker file on the device, so actually on the iPad or iPhone, or if you host the file on a server those devices can connect up to that file just like they were another copy of FileMaker. Also if you get more technical into FileMaker, FileMaker is able to publish its data to the Internet via PHP which is a scripting language and allows for you to create a dynamic web page, HTML based web page using PHP connecting back to a FileMaker server. So very much good information. We have plenty of time for questions and answers and there are quite a few. But just to give, before we jump into Q&A, Kevin if you could just give us a recap of what we just covered. Kevin Yeah, really again the way that I look at FileMaker it is a tool. It's a tool that allows you to come up with the right things that will meet your business objectives, your business needs, your organization's specifics. There are a lot of solutions out there that are pre-built. There are solutions out there like Donor Perfect for tracking donors and they are very good in what they do. But if you have a business that needs to do more than just the basic stuff there is some benefit for you developing that yourself and coming up with the solution. FileMaker is a great tool to do that. It's one that I happen to have chosen over a lot of different others and I've tried to do a lot of things in Access or in Alpha 5. But I keep going back to FileMaker. One because for me the FileMaker software is very easy to use and I can more quickly develop something that meets my needs in FileMaker than a lot of other solutions. The other thing about FileMaker is that the FileMaker community is amazing. The number of resources that FileMaker itself has through they have a TechNet service that you can kind of join to get more white papers or connections to other people that are doing a lot of different things. They also have a great form for asking questions. There's actually a couple of other people that have created forms. One of my favorite is FM forms. Any question you could think of asking about FileMaker if you go right in there and someone is almost instantly responding back to you. So just the sheer community and number of people that are using FileMaker and how helpful they are really keeps me drawn to it. You can start building by importing your existing Excel files very easily. I haven't found another solution that imports Excel as well as FileMaker. Also with FileMaker 11, their latest version, you can set up an ongoing import from a specific Excel file. So if there's some sort of information that you keep in Excel that you cannot completely move over to FileMaker but you want to use FileMaker to do reporting off of the data, or do some other things, you can set up a process where FileMaker will go out and get the latest version of whatever data is in Excel and pop it into your FileMaker system. Really, really nice feature that they added with 11. With proper planning and design, you can build a very solid solution quite quickly in FileMaker. It does take time. I do want to stress that it is not a silver bullet. You can't get it and just be up and running right away. But with the templates, there's a lot of problems that you can solve pretty quickly and then you can modify those. You can customize those to meet your needs. And the way that it allows you to do that is really quite impressive. I kind of jumped ahead. Like I said, there's many different resources for learning FileMaker as well. So you've got all the blogs, you've got the support groups. There's also quite a lot of video tutorials and I've included links to those. There's some really, really, really good books that are out there. So the sheer number of resources to learn the tool and learn database development within FileMaker really are good. One of the other things, I kind of didn't mention it in the presentation, but one of the things with the security that FileMaker has, the ability to identify groups and individual users and protect data from specific users or from specific groups of users, allows a FileMaker solution to meet HIPAA and PCI compliance standards. Every single solution would have to go through that because it all depends on how you have developed and designed it. But FileMaker as a system gives you the necessary things that you would have to have in order to meet those standards. And there's some questions about some of the links that you've referred to. So I'm just going to pop to this next slide and apologize for how small these are, but you'll be getting a copy of this PowerPoint. You can then click on these links. But Kevin had mentioned FM forms earlier. So that's what you couldn't quite hear that. So there's all these links available, an article on TechSoup, and then links to the FileMaker support. So check these out. I'll include these in the post-event message as well. Another question that came through on the chat, are we going to talk about how much this costs? Yes. So FileMaker has offered a discount through TechSoup. So if you qualify, you could get FileMaker Pro 11 or 179, and it's a 40% discount off of the retail. I'm going to go over the retail on the next slide. Or it's FileMaker Server which is 600, and again 40% discount. So this is eligible if you are a 501c3 inside the U.S., not the U.S. territories. You're eligible. It's only available for organizations, not individuals. They cannot be transferred or sold. And you can only request up to four licenses per fiscal year. So if you need more licenses, or if you don't qualify in this way, here's what's available through the FileMaker website. There's two links. They'll bring you either to volume licensing or for the single user. So for example, the single user FileMaker Pro 11 is $300. So we've provided those links there for you to check it out more. Just to be better informed, if this is a tool that seems like a right fit for you, you can do more research using these links. We've got about a half hour and a lot of questions. I want to jump into the Q&A right now. So first question, let me go back to my questions here. There are quite a few questions about access and how it compares to FileMaker. Kevin, have you used access and can you tell folks what the differences are? Yeah, I have used access. It is very similar, although I think Microsoft has not really done a good job of targeting and developing access to the small business to medium-sized business type world. Access I really consider to be a single user database. Now, there's caveats. There's exceptions to every rule. There are ways you can do it. And in their latest version they have synced it up with SharePoint so you can do some more things. But you're really getting into a lot more complicated things. And it still doesn't have quite the power that FileMaker does for very easily sharing out a system. Also, I found when using access to get a solution in a usable state was a lot, lot harder than it was in FileMaker. There was just a lot more. FileMaker was a lot easier to use and a lot easier to develop than access was. However, like I said, FileMaker is a tool. It's a tool just like accesses. Access is a tool and can accomplish most of the same things. It's just how hard is it to get it there? How much do you have to know? Or how much longer does it take? So their functionality is somewhat on par. But in my experience and when you read a lot of the reviews, a lot of people prefer FileMaker over access just because of those particular things. And Kevin, if you could remember to speak up a little bit, that would be great. Another question is, can graphics be included in the database? Yeah. Graphics are used throughout the database for design as you saw with my auction planning system that I'm using. Those are all done. But FileMaker also has a couple of different ways that you can store graphics inside the database. As a matter of fact, there are a number of print shops and design houses that will use FileMaker to actually track graphic assets. By default, FileMaker has the ability to include the graphic inside the file. It has a container field which can include any type of file that you want, a couple of files like a JPEG graphic file. You can actually view it inside the viewer. If you had a membership system and you actually took a photo of your members, that photo would show up on your FileMaker layout and that's in the container field. Sometimes that can make a file really big. So there are some third-party solutions as well. One is called Super Container that actually allows you to set up an external server and those assets link to your FileMaker system. So you've organized everything, you've tracked everything, but FileMaker allows you to present all of that up. So those are the two ways that I would say are most common. Great, thank you. And is there a text or word limit for description? For example, they are doing for auctions we often need to create a script like for live television auctions that may have a limit to the number of words. Have you found that to be an issue? No, there is no issue. The limit towards and Glenn may be able to give me the exact. I believe it's a terabyte of data that you can put in one single file, one single field. I don't know if I'd ever do that, but there is no realistic limit to what you can do. It's all about design. Like one of the things with my auction system, what I find is my layout for sending to the print shop, in order to make that look consistent, I limit the box that has the description to a specific set amount. So FileMaker isn't limiting me, but the way that I print that out and what I display is limiting me. So when I'm doing the auction and needing to print something out, there is some massaging of the descriptions that I choose to do because of the way that I've designed that layout. But again, I could choose to design a layout that was a little bit more free flowing and that would expand if the description was too big. I've just chosen not to do it, but FileMaker does not have any of those kinds of restrictions on any of its data types. I wanted to ask Glenn a question. So make sure that Glenn to unmute your line at star 7. I'm also wondering, great thanks, I'm wondering if they're on an older version of FileMaker and you're upgrading to a newer version. Can you address some of those questions? Sure. Is there any particular question? So there was a fundamental design change from version 6 which was on the FP5 file format to what is now, which covers FileMaker 7 through 11, the FP7 file format. In many cases, the files from previous can be open. It would be preferable to take a look at our data migration documents up on our website. You could type in over at FileMaker.com and the search page migration. If it is upgrading from a version 7 on up, then it does utilize the same file format. So in essence, you would just be best to test it with a copy of the database and be able to open it up. At that point you would have more capabilities as you move up in versions. A long answer to a pretty complex question though. And while I have you here, another question that has to do with licensing and user support, folks aren't clear what kind of user support there is available. Okay, so typically technical support is a paid service. There is pre-sale support to answer any questions in terms of capabilities and a number of other things calling our customer assistance. We do help with installation issues, but beyond that it is a paid service. Many have used our free forums to be able to ask specific questions, and either our own personnel or others in the community have been able to answer those to everybody's satisfaction. Great, thanks so much. Another question, we are looking at creating a system that allows external users to access the system that we want to create on the web. Are there sites that host FileMaker programs and how much does it cost to have many users on the web? So Kevin, if you can. The prices range, there are a number of different providers out there. I use one called the Drilling Dog, nice name. But the prices range on a single file hosted basis from around $20 a month to around $50 a month depending on who you find. Of the companies that I have dealt with, the price range is usually $20 to $30 a month, and that will give you usually one to two files. With that, again there are a couple of different ways that that hosted file can be accessed. So if you have multiple users of FileMaker, they can connect up to that file that's hosted on the server, and you can get about $250 of those users. There are also a few dedicated solutions where a hosting provider will give you a dedicated copy of FileMaker that gets a lot more expensive for a month, and you can get up to, you know, you can increase that number of total connected users. The other thing by using server is that's what allows you to do PHP. So using PHP you can get that data up onto a website, and then you don't have those connection problems, but you do, it kind of increases your complexity of what you're designing. Hopefully that answers the question a little bit. Great, thank you. A couple questions about exporting the data. You're able to export to use in Excel later, correct? Sure are. It's actually, you can hit a button, and it exports to Excel quickly and easily. You can also, FileMaker has quite a complex scripting system. So you can actually build a nightly script that would go out and take your data from FileMaker and save it into Excel. The other thing built into FileMaker is saving PDFs, which is what I use for my auction system. I save a PDF of the layouts that I've created for the catalog and the bid sheets, and I send that PDF file off to the print shop. Another related question has to do with the templates. So the templates also adjust for the export to Excel. So if you're taking what you've created from a template in FileMaker and you export it, does it also adjust the formatting of the spreadsheet? The exporting to Excel and the templates really don't, they don't relate to each other at all. The template is really either the fields that are predefined or the display that's already set up for you. In the essence though, everything that's in FileMaker is just a piece of data. And when you export to Excel, you're only exporting that data. FileMaker does a fairly good job of exporting to Excel. One of the things that I've experienced personally is sometimes on some of the big text fields, FileMaker will export those to Excel as a general field. And the display in Excel can kind of be a little strange. And so I go in and just change the field type in Excel to specifically text or change it from text to general. And then everything's fine. So the data's there, but sometimes the display is a little bit off. But how you display the data inside FileMaker does not relate to how it's exported out. The one thing that you do have though, is depending on how you have it designed in FileMaker, it will save that as a PDF in exactly the same format that you have it on your screen in FileMaker. So there's where you get a little bit of that. The template, if you're saving to PDF, it will reflect what that template is. But Excel is just straight data. Thanks for clarifying that. There's several questions that have to do with, you had mentioned that you could have up to 9 users, but then the text you're offering is 4 users. So I'm wondering if you could clarify what the 9 users had to do with. What the 9 users is, a FileMaker software, so one copy of FileMaker can host a FileMaker file, and up to 9 different copies of FileMaker can connect to that original FileMaker that's hosting the file, or the solution that you've created, and can interact with it. If you need more, if you need to connect more than that number of people, you need to either do the hosted solution which is what I recommend for that next step, or you actually have to buy FileMaker server, install that at your office, and then you can have, if you get the basic copy of server, you can connect up to 250 different copies of FileMaker. So that's the key thing is on the 9, those are different computers that have FileMaker on them connecting to the FileMaker file. The one thing that you can do without having to buy additional copies of FileMaker is doing the instant web publishing. And with instant web publishing, the single copy of FileMaker that you buy can allow up to 5 different connections at a time into the FileMaker file from the browser. Is that clarified a little bit better? Yes, so just to reiterate, you could get one copy and publish the form on a web, and at any time five people could be editing it, but you'd only need to have gotten one license. Correct. Okay, I hope that's clear for folks out there. So this question is for Glenn, is there a free trial we can use for a limited time? Yes, indeed. I posted just moments ago the trial version link. However, you can get to that by just going to FileMaker.com, and it is a 30-day fully functioning trial version of both FileMaker Pro. And if you'd like to try, you can utilize also the FileMaker server. Server Advance is actually the product that is available for trial version, and that's available up there as well. And Glenn, there's a question about someone has FileMaker Pro 8, and they want to upgrade to 11. Is it lower cost just to upgrade, or what would you recommend they do? Unfortunately for version 8, 7, or rather 885, and for that matter 7, since we discussed it earlier, those versions are no longer available as a discount method. The versions that have discounts associated with it are versions 9 and 10. We typically go two versions back after a new version is released. Depending on the quantities that you do have, you would be best to look at our methods to see if there is any additional discounts depending on your quantities and your program. Great, thank you. And we talked earlier about storing images. One question had to do with storing Microsoft Word files. So Kevin, is that possible? Sorry, the question again once? Oh, can they store Word files? We talked about images can be stored. Can you also store other kinds of documents? Yeah, you can actually store any document you might want inside of the container field. The issue just has to be there are a couple of file formats that the container field knows how to interact with. And I'm not sure if it knows directly how to interact with it, but if you were to, you can store it in FileMaker, and then you can say, I think like a Word document would probably be, it would save the file to a temp directory and then open up. But you can store it. The actual storage can be inside of FileMaker in the container field. And then once those documents are there, can they be searched? The contents of the documents could not be searched. There's a couple of, the FileMaker world is actually quite fast in workarounds or ways you can kind of get things. So you could have a Word document that you're storing, but then you could also, when you copied it in there, you could identify some keywords and have a field that would have those keywords that then when you search for some of those keywords it would bring you to that document. But what's actually inside the document? FileMaker doesn't have a way to look inside of that and reflect it for you. And you earlier said that we could do labels, like a mail merge for labels. Can you also do letters and envelopes? You can actually do anything that you could probably think about. And there's two ways to do it. So the first way and the way that I do it is I actually build the letter inside FileMaker. So I have everything laid out as the letter would be. FileMaker has a very rich text construction system. It allows you to kind of design anything you want. And then you put in certain places you put a reference to the field. So if you were to put a form with, you know, Dear Kevin, I saw that you spent $20 last year. So the name Kevin and the amount, those are references to fields in your database. And then when you print, it will print that letter with those fields filled in for all of the people that you have said you wanted to print it for. The other thing that you can actually do with FileMaker, just like you can do with Excel, is FileMaker can be a data source to Word. So you could create a Word document in Word and you can link it up to FileMaker exactly the same as you hook it up to Excel. Obviously Word and Excel work a little bit better, but it uses ODBC drivers and allows you to have FileMaker be your data source and create any kind of documents you want in Word. So it has both of those options. Great. Can a remote employee change or add data on the web publishing or just view the data? It all depends on how you set it up. It depends on the permissions you give them and the way that you've designed the field. So FileMaker does not limit you. So anything you do, the instant web publishing is almost exactly like a unique copy of FileMaker that's allowing you to interact with the data that's in the solution you've created. The reason I say Caviar to the Bound, it is trying to interpret your file that you've designed and display it inside of a web page. So there's a lot of challenges with that. So what a lot of people do if they do have an instant web publishing solution and also possibly the mixing it with some people that have FileMaker accessing it and a few people that may be accessing it from the web, they will create two different layouts, one that specifically meant for someone connecting with FileMaker and one that specifically meant for the IWP users so that the IWP users, it's a little bit simple, maybe not as many graphics and those types of things, but there are no limits to what you do in it other than limitations of a web browser. I mean there are certain things that you can't do without getting into really deep dive development, which you could do if you wanted to. But from FileMaker's perspective, it's a pretty basic web page so you have some pretty basic constraints as to what that web page can do. There are a couple questions that have to do with QuickBooks. Do you know how well or if FileMaker works together with QuickBooks? So FileMaker out of the box does not have any way to connect up with FileMaker. However, there are a number of third-party solutions that the FileMaker community has come up with. I think FM Connector or FM Books Connector. Yeah, FM Books Connector. And then I think there's at least two or three others that are out there. So with any of the third-party solutions, what they are is so you've developed your, let's say your contact or your donor system in FileMaker and that's where you want to track everything, however you want to track the actual payments in QuickBooks because that's how you do all your books. So you would have to purchase this third-party software and I think the prices range between like $150 to $299 on some of them. I'm not sure exactly all of them. But that software would allow you to use it. Now, the caveat to that is if you chose to develop it yourself, you could do that. FileMaker gives you all the tools that you could communicate. You could build that communication to QuickBooks from within FileMaker. That's getting into a very serious level of development which is why a lot of times it's just someone's already done it and they're selling it and then that cost is a lot better than spending your time. But you could, if you chose to, you could develop it yourself. But out of the box FileMaker doesn't do it automatically. Does FileMaker require a dedicated server or can it live on a server that performs other functions? There's a real answer and a real-world answer. So you are going to get better performance from a dedicated FileMaker server, hosting FileMaker server. With that said, it is possible. There's nothing that FileMaker does to prevent you from having maybe a web server or a file sharing or DNS server on it where you will see the slide that I had on network connections and your network connection speed. That's where you're going to see the disadvantage potentially of hosting FileMaker server on a server that may be doing other things. Your server is not strong enough and beefy enough to be able to do that. You won't be happy with the results, but there's nothing to prevent you from doing it. And what is the best format or template to track grant deadlines? Is there a template that would work? Not that I know specifically. The donor solution would probably be the one that I would start with. I don't know specifically what's unique about grant type of items, but I assume if you have a grant, you're recording that you have a specific grant and that it expires at a certain time. You can track that as a specific table. You have your grant, you've recorded it, and you have a specific expiration date. You can always go back to that file and look at it. There are also tools that you could set up so that FileMaker will send you an email when you are in within 30 days or 60 days of that grant expiration and do that. So yes, you can build that, but I don't know of any templates that are available that you could start using today that would do that. This is one last question. It has to do with can contacts from Outlook be imported to FileMaker, and there is also another question that had to do with access being imported into FileMaker. So if you could address those two questions. So directly, FileMaker cannot grab the contacts out of Outlook. There are third-party solutions that allow you to do that. Outlook Connector I think is the name of one, and allows you to – Outlook Manipulator. What's that? Outlook Manipulator. Outlook Manipulator. It even allows for some two-way communication I believe. Now with that said, from Outlook you can save all of that information as a text file so you can export from Outlook as a text file, and then you can import that text file into FileMaker. So if it's one of those one-time things that you just want to get the data out of one system and put it into the other, you can very easily do that by exporting from one and importing into the other. But actual connectivity, FileMaker doesn't have anything built in unless you go to the third-party solution route. And access, Glenn, do you know, I don't think FileMaker can open and import an access file, can it? Not that I'm aware of. You probably can utilize ODBC, but that would be a little bit more of a process. I believe if you were to want to convert those files, you can use FM Migrator Pro from .com Solutions, and it can help you with the creation of tables from the other solution. Actually, I've seen a demo of that particular system, and it is quite amazing what it does. But it's another one of those third-party solutions that you would have to buy in order to make that transition easier. That is all the time we have. Thank you so much Glenn and Kevin for all this great information. And I hope most of you got your questions answered. I know that there's a few out there that we didn't have time for. So please post those to our community forums. I've sent out a link via the chat. It's also here, and I'll send it in the post-event message that you'll get this afternoon. We are offering another webinar next Tuesday that has to do with an open-source database application called CIBCRM. So if you're available, check out that webinar next week. And we would like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk which is donated to use of their system to help tech super expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So again, thank you all for participating today. I hope you got some good information. And please don't hesitate to send me an email if you have any questions and take a minute to fill out our post-event message. So thanks again. Have a wonderful day. Thanks Kevin and Glenn. See you on the next TechSoup Talks. Thanks guys. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.