34 years and change (*)
That’s how long the Claris FileMaker platform has been thriving, allowing developers of all skill levels to build applications that deliver strong business value. In the technology space, that is an incredible track record of relevancy.
(* – And I’m counting just the FileMaker Pro years; it’s actually closer to 40 years in total.)
29 years and change
That’s how long I have been developing on the Claris FileMaker platform as my primary tool. Before discovering FileMaker Pro, I was largely developing in Visual Basic with Access and SQL Server as the database backend. Along the way, I have continued to use other tools, such as VB.NET and C#, using the Microsoft .NET framework, some Ruby and Python, and these days, a lot of JavaScript and NodeJS. But not in competition with Claris FileMaker Pro, but rather, together with it. Here’s why.
It’s all about unique business value.
Why else would you go through the effort of building something bespoke instead of subscribing to a service or buying an off-the-shelf product?
While your business in your industry operates in largely the same way as others, there is always something unique in exactly how you go about it. Something that sets you apart from your peers and competitors.
Capturing that uniqueness and encapsulating it into an automated set of workflows to safeguard it and make it consistent is the main driver for wanting a bespoke system.
How business value gets delivered
Before, capturing that unique trait meant building a complete end-to-end system because integrations with other systems were very difficult and, thus, very expensive.
As these applications grow and change organically over time, at the hands of different developers with different skill and experience levels, these systems may reach a point where their upkeep and performance may not seem worth it anymore. That’s a normal phase in the lifecycle of any custom application.
Short-term tactical solutions to a particular problem become a strategic workflow tool, sometimes without realizing that shift and the importance of that criticality.
In bigger organizations, we often see tension between the “home-grown” FileMaker-based solutions and IT, especially when IT wants all solutions built in a particular tech stack and have all development and deployments go through a change management process that is designed to mitigate risk and offer great governance and compliance hooks.
We have had great success in steering these FileMaker projects into that essential IT oversight without losing all the tactical benefits that come from being able to develop and deploy rapidly.
We strongly believe that every company needs to have a tactical rapid-application tool exactly like the Claris FileMaker platform in its arsenal. That’s much better than having a lot of shadow-IT solutions living in Excel worksheets that become monsters to maintain and work with and have unknown effects on data integrity and data security.
The shift
Seven years ago, in May of 2017, Claris released the FileMaker 16 line-up, which has proven to be a game changer. Among the new features introduced was a set of tools that allow for easy integration with other platforms and services.
The software landscape, in general, was undergoing some changes, too: integrations went from near impossible to doable with SOAP and XML then to relatively straightforward with REST and JSON.
All standards that any software or service that you would care about have been adopted. Interoperability between systems created this shift — you do not need to build all of your workflows end-to-end with the Claris FileMaker platform.
Your FileMaker solution now becomes the glue, the central hub, the guardian of what is unique to your business, the automator of what makes your business stand out and which does not fit very well in anything that you can buy or subscribe to. For the rest of the workflows, you can now make intelligent make-or-buy decisions.
Accounting system? Sure, we can build it in FileMaker, but why would you? Just integrate with QuickBooks, Sage, or any other leading accounting platform. Emailing and Calendaring? We can build that, too, but using the MS365 or Google Workspace functionality that you have already paid for makes more sense.
Or perhaps you want to use Salesforce as your CRM or support ticketing platform. Our FileMaker consultants orchestrate many FileMaker and Salesforce integrations. We’ve also recently become Stripe experts after becoming Partners in 2023.
All of those tools are really good at what they do, and they have great APIs to integrate with. And FileMaker is great at integrations.
Using these “solved problem” choices makes a lot of business sense: it lets you focus on what makes your business unique and focus your automation energy there, and not on replicating functionality that you can subscribe to or buy and offload the upkeep and security of those parts to a trusted vendor.
The Tools
In addition to the functionality built into Claris FileMaker Pro and Server, Claris also has other tools in its portfolio to make this kind of distributed architecture easier. Claris Connect is the main tool for this, as it has a lot of pre-built connectors to various platforms and services to help accelerate your development process. When Claris Connect does not fit, you can still use those service’s APIs to craft your own connections.
Down the road, Claris Studio will become a similar tool on your toolbelt. And because both Connect and Studio are siblings of Claris FileMaker, they will have intuitive ways to work together. There is some of that in the products already, and the Claris roadmap shows that there is more to come.
But even without Connect and Studio, Claris FileMaker Pro is a first-class citizen among all the pre-built systems and services that you want to use to augment the business-specific tailored solution that you build with FileMaker, and that makes your business unique.
Moving Forward with FileMaker
To learn more about what’s possible with recent FileMaker functionality, contact our team of consultants to learn more. We can share insights that align with your application’s use cases and company’s objectives. Contact us to learn more.
Claris has recently launched new insights on how the platform serves as a Workplace OS that drives unique business value. Learn about what sets FileMaker apart and check out how Mobile Tyre Shop drives growth on the platform.
