Learning to recognize opportunities where some of your current technology can be replaced with something else that fits the role better is an important skill for any leader, and the modern world of technology certainly gives us no shortage of options in this area. You have to know what substitutes are available for all tools and processes you’re using, even if you don’t see yourself replacing them anytime soon. You never know how things are going to evolve tomorrow, and you must always be prepared for new trends on the market. When it comes to FileMaker, you’ll often find plenty of potential opportunities for integrating it into your daily work, but you have to be careful to filter the truly viable ideas from the rest.
Quick database access
If your processes involve accessing a database on a regular basis, but you’re only making small changes to it, it might make more sense to switch that over to a FileMaker app instead of accessing the database directly. If you can separate the data into its own database related to this particular task, even better – FileMaker will give you some fantastic opportunities for integrating this with the rest of your systems in that case, and you’ll have the benefit of knowing that this aspect of your business is isolated in a separate area. That’s not always possible of course – sometimes you’ll need to retain the connection to the original database too – but a little planning can go a long way.
Security is another consideration you’ll want to make here before making any drastic changes. Sometimes there’s a good reason to use a more advanced database solution for these systems, as it may provide you with a more solid security foundation that keeps your connections properly isolated. This can be more difficult to achieve with FileMaker in some more complex cases, so it can pay to use a dedicated platform instead of it in those situations. For everything else though, you’re doing yourself a bad favor by not checking out what FileMaker can do for you and how it can help you address your issues in a more streamlined way.
Organizing lists across the company
Regularly have to work with long lists of data with an otherwise simple structure? This is another task that FileMaker can often handle better than alternative solutions, and there are lots of tutorials online for adapting FileMaker to this purpose. Just make sure that you develop an interface that works well enough as a replacement for the current system – one of the main features of a simple list-keeping application should be the ability to easily add and remove new things without having to go through long menus, so complicating that with a messy interface sort of defeats the whole purpose of using FileMaker in the first place.
Of course, not every type of list should be replaced with a FileMaker app – in some cases, if the current system allows you to easily change data in the list and share it with other people, you may be able to get away without changing anything. But if people are complaining that it takes too much effort to make even simple changes to the lists they have to regularly work with, this is a different story.
Prototyping complex applications
When you need to deploy a more complex application in your organization and you’re not sure how to even start prototyping it, you should look into using FileMaker for this purpose. The platform enjoys a lot of attention across the industry for this particular use case, and there is a lot to be said about the ways it enables you to more quickly get a sense of how your apps are supposed to work and be structured. When you also have a reliable FileMaker hosting solution at your back, you can easily ensure that all your advanced solutions are put through a lot of verification before they are brought to reality. The last thing you want to happen when developing a complex app is to realize that its requirements and specifications were not defined correctly in the first place, which can force you to undo a significant part of your work.
In some cases, you might even be able to convert the prototype itself to a usable application, although this should not be your main mode of work as it’s prone to various issues that may be difficult to resolve later on.
