This year, Claris International kicked off its new Claris Engage conference, a virtual – and free — approach to the longstanding FileMaker Developer Conference.
Several Solianteers were featured in the two-day event, including Bob Bowers, Wim Decorte, and Makah Encarnacao.
In addition, our FileMaker team has provided a range of excellent on-demand content, which in the past would have been onstage talks. This content is being released in batches through the end of 2020.
Check out the descriptions and links below, which we will update as the on-demand sessions are released.
Note that the live sessions require that you register for the Claris Community, while the on-demand sessions do not.
Live Sessions
Business Build on Claris: CxO Perspectives
Panel moderated by Bob Bowers
Four business executives share their experience using the Claris Platform to drive growth and success.
The four entrepreneurs joining this panel have each built and sustained successful businesses in different industries. And, they all share a common experience – they’ve leveraged the Claris Platform to compete more effectively and enable growth.
Led by Bob Bowers, CEO of Soliant Consulting, these executives discussed their journeys, lessons learned in their use of technology, and perspectives on the value of the Claris Platform. The session addressed their different investment and development strategies and explained their philosophies on engineering in their respective organizations.
Developers Making a Difference
Panel with Makah Encarnacao participating
Recognizing the Claris Community that’s putting purpose ahead of profit.
2020 has been a challenging year by so many measures. But Claris Community members know how to quickly respond to problems, and over the years have stepped up when needed to do the right thing. This year has been no different.
Claris COVID Response Team members joined this panel to share stories of community members immediately volunteering to provide apps and services that help people in need. Nic Friedman also joined to discuss how a simple idea from an ALS patient – to capture more data, more easily – has grown into an organization that helps advance science focused on motor neuron diseases.
Cloud-Smart Security
Panel with Wim Decorte participating
Security experts navigate the new normal of modern security threats.
As our economic landscape changes and businesses approach a “new normal,” the threat landscape has changed in parallel. A panel of experts from the Claris Community discussed the current state of security and explore best practices for delivering enterprise-grade security at any scale. As threats evolve, the learnings of Claris engineers and our community will help our customers stay safe and secure and ahead of the curve.
Topics discussed:
- Customer selling strategies – how to sell your customers on security and position it in your projects early
- The threat landscape for SMBs – understanding current threats, the impact of virtual work and work from home, and best practices
- Shared responsibility – outlining the division of roles and responsibilities between customers, partners, and Claris
- A deep dive into “Secure by Default” and how a consistent focus on security makes a long-lasting impact on business outcomes
- The cloud as a security safeguard – learn how to deliver cloud message to clients
On-Demand Sessions
Ease Your Digital Transformation Using Release Planning
Presented by Sara Severson
Learn how to break a project into smaller, more frequent releases to get multiple “wins” on one project
Making a digital transformation can be daunting—there are often multiple platforms, tools, connectors, and user groups to consider. Putting some advance work into Release Planning allows you to prioritize components of the transformation, then step through the work in phases. This can reduce risk for you (avoiding a scary all-or-nothing approach) and benefit your users by giving them frequent improvements much sooner. In this session we look at how Soliant Consulting has used Release Planning to help our clients and ourselves and discuss how to think through and map the complexities of a large release. You’ll learn how to break a project into smaller, more frequent releases so you get multiple “wins” on one project.
Effective Identity Management Will Determine The Success Of Digital Transformation
Presented by Wim Decorte and Steven H. Blackwell
Learn why Centralized Federated Identity Management is central to the security of your cloud-based apps.
Digital Transformation (DT) uses ‘current tech’ that solve well-defined problems, makes connections, and allows data to flow between those different services. Identity Management and Authentication is one of those tools, and it sits at the heart of DT; ideally you want your users’ identities to be stored in only one place and authentication to flow seamlessly between your connected services. At the same time, increasingly dynamic, agile, modular, distributed software expands the Threat Surface and increases the Risk Profile. Traditional perimeters such as buildings and their networks have disappeared.
When everything is connected, security is everything. Effective security depends upon and starts with effective Identity and Access Management. Who are you? Are you who you say you are? How do we know this? Centralized Federated Identity Management (FIDM) is the key to managing this.
This session shows:
- Why security in general and FIDM in particular are prerequisites for successful Digital Transformation.
- How can the FileMaker Platform, both on-premises and in the Cloud, employ and integrate FIDM into its operations?
- How does the oAuth2/OpenIDConnect protocol facilitate this?
- Are there other protocols that developers and administrators can use as well?
- What is the Human Role in the success of Digital Transformation?
How to Align Digital Transformations to Business Strategy
Presented by Kristy Lapidus
Strengthen your ability to guide digital innovations and increase user adoption.
As 2020 has made abundantly clear, established organizations can crumble without the ability to transform digitally. What is your strategy to adapt? In this business + technical session, I will share the journey of my masters’ thesis research on digital transformations with a business in the high-tech industry. You will learn about the challenges and opportunities of applying inclusive strategic planning to guide the modernization of a Claris FileMaker app. You will strengthen your ability to guide digital innovations via planning techniques like SOAR and SWOT as well as increase user adoption via evidence-based organizational change management methodologies.
Keeping your career on track: discipline, passion, or curiosity?
Presented by Mark Baum
Hear from Soliant Consulting employees as they reflect on their careers and how they approach them.
For many of us, it’s human nature: once you learn how to do something, you tend to keep doing it that way. You’d like to master every new technique and embrace every technology, but your time is limited and often is spent meeting your clients’ immediate needs.
How do you invest in your career while staying productive? Where do you put your time: growing as a business analyst or UX expert, adopting coding practices, understanding use cases for AI and machine learning, or everything at once?
In this session, I’ll share reflections from my colleagues at Soliant Consulting about their careers and how they approach them.
Listen to Your Heart: Soft Skills in High Tech
Presented by Mark Baum
Learn basic concepts of emotional intelligence, perform a self-assessment, explore strategies for growth, and hear stories from members of the Claris Community.
The Claris Platform attracts many creative thinkers who take an inventive approach to business and development. But following your intuition isn’t always easy in the technical realm.
Maybe you’ve asked yourself how you fit in and what you have to offer. I certainly have, so I’ve started asking leaders in our community about how soft skills have figured in their success.
In this session, I’ll explore the idea of emotional intelligence, walk through an informal self-assessment, and offer strategies for growth. Then I’ll share stories from people I admire, talking about their personal challenges and strengths.
Modern DevOps: Making the Switch
Presented by Mislav Kos
Incorporate DevOps best practices to make your deployments faster and more frequent and help you attain shorter release cycles.
Does your team make development changes directly in a production environment? Or do they use a development environment but then deploy new versions by painstakingly recreating code changes in production? Have you wanted to adopt a methodical approach to developing, testing, and deploying your app but are unsure of how to make the switch? This session will help professionalize your DevOps by showing you how to: use Agile tools like Jira to organize your develop-test-deploy cycles, create deployment plans and checklists to reduce stress and eliminate errors, and take advantage of tools like the FileMaker Data Migration Tool to automate deployments. Incorporating these practices will make your deployments faster and more frequent and help you attain shorter release cycles.
WITfm: Get Involved in the Claris Community
Panel with Makah Encarnacao participating
Hear from several WITfm leads about what it’s like to be part of this organization, what opportunities are available, and how you can get involved!
Have you seen Women Innovating Together (WITfm) on the Claris Community site, on Twitter, or “in the wild” and wondered who we are and what we do? Come hear this incredible panel of women talk about who we are, why we exist, what our plans are for the future, and MOST importantly how YOU can support us and get involved.
For more information about WITfm, please visit their website.
Technical Tips from the Claris COVID Response Team Volunteers
Presented by Makah Encarnacao & Graham Young
Learn from the technical challenges encountered by truly agile volunteer developers.
In March 2020, the newly formed Claris COVID response team made a call to volunteers to build emergency COVID-19 related apps. That call was met at an overwhelming volume from our generous community. This series highlights a few of the projects made by our volunteers and demonstrates some of the interesting technical challenges our volunteers overcame along the way.
Webhooks
Presented by Wim Decorte
Leverage webhooks to mediate communication between your cloud-based app and remote services
API integrations are here to stay and by now many of us know how to use the FileMaker tools to call an API and pass it data and parse the responses. But what if that API does not give an immediate response? Or the remote service needs to send you a notification that something happened? Or the other system does not want to be called every 5 minutes to check if there is data? It will send you data when it has any. Many APIs do this through webhooks. In this session we will explore how to deal with webhooks. How can FileMaker receive those call-backs and those notifications? How does Claris Connect handles this? What other tools can you use? Webhooks are the answer and they are extremely powerful.
