The Context Podcast

This episode is brought to you by Otto.
ON Twitter:
Follow Todd @toddgeist
Follow Jeremy @JLBmagic

Pick up the book Digital Transformation by Thomas Siebel

Todd talks in detail about the FileMaker Product Roadmap.
The beta for Claris Connect is now open. Complete this form to request access.
To request access to the FileMaker ETS Program, email [email protected].

Today's episode is brought to you by: Geist Interactive Implementation Packages

Kevin Frank of filemakerhacks.com

Here's a list of posts from the site we mentioned.
Magic Key: Part 1, Part 2
Thinking about JSON
Virtual Lists

Determining if Two Date Ranges Overlap from Soliant Consulting.

Today's Episode is brought to you by Otto.
The FileMaker Product Roadmap webinar is found here.

We discussed the following topics.
JSON: Here are the JSON specs
XML: Beverly Voth's book
ODBC
Virtual Lists
Lookups
ExecuteSQL: Beverly Voth's Missing Manual post
Repeating fields
Named Variable Buckets: Wim Decorte's blog post
JavaScript: Our FileMaker & JavaScript stuff
SSL
Monitoring Tools: Zabbix (Wim Decorte & Mislav Kos' post and DevCon video)
We also mention Bob Bowers' 2012 DevCon Session: Advanced Reporting Techniques

Here are the concepts we talk about today:

• Transactions
• Record Life Cycle
• Scripting
• Parts of FileMaker
• Security
• Indexing
• Relationships
• Data Modeling
• Calculations
• Inputting data
• Reporting on data
• APIs
• WebWidgets
• Sharing the File

Todd and Jeremy mention the following modules and tools:

DBTransactions
And more on Transactions

Today's Episode is brought to you by Otto: An Automatic Server-to-Server Migration dev tool.

BigTom is found in the community here. He has a lot of good advice. Be sure and follow him.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode.

FMPerception
Dave Ramsey @designdb
FMComparison
Realtime Developer Intelligence Tool
Dave's podcast: Project Update with co host Joe Simpson

The three less-known features of FMPerception are:

1. Auto-open XML Database Design Reports in FMPerception.
2. Text Search area
3. Flagged Functions
4. (BONUS): Copy/paste Sidebar of a script or a field.

FMComparison

• Beta is out soon (macOS first, then WIndows)
• Current FMPerception customers will get access to the beta.
• Current FMPerception customers will get this tool for free.

Today's episode is brought to you by Geist Interactive. Hire us to complete tasks or provide advice or customize one of our products.

Our guests today are
Susan Fennema, the chaos-killing, clutter-kicking, disorder-fighting maven of Beyond the Chaos
Vanessa Costanzo, Director, Business Development & Technology at Recruiting Pro Software LLC

Susan and Vanessa are part of the leadership team for Women Innovating Together, a nonprofit that serves Women in the FileMaker world.

Here's the list of topics we talked about:

1. Scholarships. WIT provides scholarships to women each year for the Claris conference. 
2. People can donate to the scholarship fund anytime of the year
3. WIT also offers mentorships for anyone. You can sign up and be a mentor or a mentee.
4. WIT can be supported by FBA partners through donations or encouraging staff to sign up.

Carson Lind, of Eagle Optimizations, joins us today to talk:

• How he learned FileMaker
• WidgetStudio
• FIleMaker DevCon

A list of what was mentioned:

• WidgetStudio Create, Customize, Deploy FileMaker WebViewer Widgets
• Carafe From Soliant Consulting. Easily Work with and Integrate JavaScript in FileMaker
• FMEZ Charts Clean and Intuitive UI for Creating JavaScript Charts with no Experience 
• FileMaker and Industrial Robotics - Carson's DevCon 2019 session.
• Claris’ Visionary Keynote A sneak peak at the new JavaScript script step
• Node Red Low-code programming for event-driven applications

Reach out to us at [email protected] if you'd like to join us for a conversation or if you have any topics you'd like us to discuss.

Today's Episode is brought to you by WidgetStudio.

Josh talks a bit, as we start, about how he learned FileMaker:
FileMaker Pro Advanced Help
FM Forums
FileMaker Community

Josh and Jeremy bring up a few external sources in their discussion of FileMaker Security. Here they are:

FileMaker Platform Security Infographic by Steven Blackwell
FileMaker 18 Security Overview by Steven Blackwell
Sarah Stickfort, FileMaker DevCon 2018: Building Security with a Blueprint
A Conversation about 2 Factor authentication

As we chat about security, we bring up the following topics:
The complete portfolio of FileMaker Security
Encryption at Rest (EAR)
Ersatz (home-grown FileMaker security)
Security by Obscurity

Today's Episode brought to you by:
Implementation Packages: Assign us Tasks

Our Guest today is Wim Decorte. He's a Senior Technical Architect at Soliant Consulting. He's been around for a long time, spoken at many FileMaker DevCons, and has worked with both Jeremy (as Jeremy's boss at Soliant) and Todd (working together briefly at New Millennium, now called Codence). WIm worked on a product called FMRobot which was used in the FileMaker 6-to-7 conversion days. Check out a cool blog post about it. It was also featured in a FileMaker white paper (Todd contributed to this paper as well).

Wim and Mislav Kos led a session on Zabbix. Wim summarizes the session and explains the importance and ease of using Zabbix to monitor your server. Wim and Mislav have a few blog posts out about it.

We spend some time talking about FileMaker milestones:

• FileMaker 3: Brought relationships to the app.
• FileMaker 7: One file with many tables
• FileMaker 9: XML API
• FileMaker 15 / 16: Insert from URL with cURL options - really opened the door to integrations.
• (Wim and Todd forgot to mention the WebViewer. Jeremy reminded them)

Once again we reminisced about FileMaker DevCon 2019 (the last one). Wim sees this is as a new beginning. There's nothing stale about FileMaker though it's been around for 30 years.

Finally, we talked about the DEFINITIVE context for the following topics: ( :) )

• Virtual Lists
• The While() function
• Unstored Calcs
• ExecuteSQL
• JSON
• Layout Calculation Tricks

Todd and Wim tell us and finally answer the question: when to use these.

Soliant Consulting is supporting a tool called Carafe. Check it out.