WOW! You *Really* Can Do Some Very Cool Things in FileMaker with 360Works Plug-Ins!
Sam Barnum was our guest speaker at the Phoenix FMPug/FMugAZ meeting on May 19, 2009, and did a great job demonstrating 360Works’ plug-ins to our group!
Sam is one of the senior developers at 360Works and an expert in FileMaker Pro, Java and PHP. He is the author of key 360Works products, a certified developer in FileMaker Pro 7, 8 and 9, and he is a regular presenter at the San Francisco FileMaker Developer Group.
Undaunted by the library’s lock-down on Internet and the lack of a projector (which I forgot to bring), Sam was still able to share his Keynote/Powerpoint presentation with the help of Geoff Coffey and Jesse Antunes of SixFriedRice.com.
In short, Sam displayed his presentation via screen-sharing on Jesse’s mac, which we all viewed in lieu of the big-screen projection. It worked out surprisingly well. Thanks again, guys!
Sam gave us a fast-paced demonstration using 360Works’ Showcase file, which included an impressively fast and comprehensive document-management and audit-logging solution. The Showcase file utilizes almost all of the 360Works products and plug-ins, including:
His highly-informative, jam-packed session showed us how to easily:
- Install plugins onto users desktops without having to touch their computers or even restart FileMaker
- Add super-easy audit logging (using FileMaker 10 script triggers) with color-coded changes highlighted!
- Search the text of PDF documents ***inside*** FileMaker
- Grab files and images from a MySQL database, gmail account and FTP server
- Pull the contents of a web page and all of its images into FileMaker fields
- Send an HTML-formatted e-mail message, with a link to trigger a FileMaker script from the email viewer
In addition to sharing the details about a plug-in or two that are in development and beta-testing, Sam also discussed a few plug-ins that are currently only available as pre-release versions to select 360Works clients—alas, the rest of us will just have to wait.
Before wrapping up his presentation with a question-and-answer period, Sam told us about the 360Works AutoUpdate Utility, which has easy-to-follow instructions for setting up auto update on your FileMaker server, and also includes scripts you can copy into your own solution to get auto-update up and running. There are also links to download the latest 360Works plugins in auto-update format—all set to deploy on your server.
You can access the 360Works AutoUpdate Utility from here: fmnet:/theseus.360works.com/AutoUpdate360Works
CindyJ was our lucky doorprize winner for May and will receive the 360Works plug-in of her choice!
Thanks again to everyone who attended May’s meeting! See you in June!
