Handling FileMaker Licensing Questions

Quite often, especially when working with a client that is new to FileMaker, I'll get asked questions about licensing. I typically try to refer the client directly to FileMaker Inc for answers and pricing. However, there are resources online that I also recommend to them. They are:

• Licensing FAQ: http://www.filemaker.com/purchase/store/licensing_faq.html
• License Program FAQ: http://www.filemaker.com/company/legal/faq_us.html

One question that comes up quite often is, "Is FileMaker licensed per user or per machine. Here's what I refer them to:

May I use FileMaker software on different computers over a network so long as I never use more copies concurrently than the number of copies licensed?

No. Your software copies may not be shared concurrently by different computers. You must acquire and dedicate a license for each computer which will be using the FileMaker software. Although you may run the software from an internal network, each computer which has access to the software from such network requires its own license. The same rule applies to use of the software in a terminal server environment. Again, you must acquire and dedicate a license for each computer or client which is provided access to the FileMaker software on the terminal server.

http://www.filemaker.com/company/legal/faq_us.html#2

Another question that comes up often is whether FileMaker can be used on both a "work" computer and a "home" computer. Here's the answer:

Am I allowed to use FileMaker software that I've licensed on my computer at work on my home or portable computer?

In order to provide our customers with the flexibility to take their work home with them, we provide limited home/portable use rights for FileMaker Pro software. As long as you are the primary user of the computer at work, you may make a second copy of FileMaker software for your exclusive use on either a home or portable computer. Note that you may only make one such additional copy for either your home or portable computer, but not both. And only you, and no one else, may use the copy of the FileMaker software installed on such second computer. Please note that these rights do not apply to students if the software is part of a volume license program ordered at an education discount. Further, these rights do not apply to FileMaker Server software.

http://www.filemaker.com/company/legal/faq_us.html#4

Again, I try to refer licensing-related questions to the experts. Here's the contact info for FileMaker's licensing team:

filemakerstore_licensing@filemaker.com

800-725-2747

Got any licensing-related tips that you'd like to share?

-- Tim

Review: 360Works Scribe

Anyone who has worked with me knows how much I dislike Microsoft. It takes everything in me to install and run Windows on my Macs, which I do using Parallels to test my solutions on that platform. And for years I've been able to avoid installing Office on my Macs, and instead used Pages and Numbers to open the Word and Excel documents that I receive.

So recently, when a client told me that he needed to merge data in FileMaker with Word templates, I cringed for two reasons. One, because it meant that I'd very likely need to buy and install Office on my Mac. And second, because FileMaker doesn't natively "play well" with Word. But I was up to the challenge...

First, I purchased "Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business 2011" which was surprisingly affordable ($155 from Amazon). The installation was easy, and for the first time in a very long time, I can "really see" what the Word and Excel documents that people to send to me are supposed to look like. (In the past, I opened these up Pages and Numbers, which, while doing a great job of translating Word and Excel documents, sometimes runs into problems.)

Next, I downloaded a trial version of the 360Works "Scribe" plug-in (http://www.360works.com/filemaker-pdf-plugin/). 360Works describes the plug-in as "the ultimate text processing plug-in." Scribe does a lot of very cool things. It can be used to read and write text from Microsoft Office and PDF files, search for things, highlight keywords, make substitutions, and more. It's been around for a little over a year, but this was the first time that I had a need for it.

In about an hour I had a prototype of the FileMaker / Scribe solution that I had envisioned. I was able to take a Word document, load it into FileMaker, substitute tokens in the document with data from FileMaker, and save the "merged" Word document. The documentation for Scribe is very well written, which made all of this as easy as possible.

I then began adding the Scribe functionality to my client's solution. For the most part, that went very well. However, I did run into a few "gotchas," the biggest one being with carriage returns. If you have carriage returns in the data that you are trying to merge into a Word document, they are ignored. After doing some research, I found that this is really an issue with the way that Word (and other Office document types) handles returns. My work-around, which is admittedly a little clunky, was to substitute carriage returns in the data being merged with a token. I then open the merged Word document, and replace the token with breaks. Again, not elegant, but it works.

I haven't had a chance to use Scribe with PDF documents yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so. I have a lot of clients who make heavy use of PDF forms, and with Scribe, they would be able to read the data stored in completed PDF forms and easily add it to their databases.

My overall impression of Scribe is that, like all of the other 360Works plug-ins that I've had the opportunity to use, it is very well done. The plug-in's functionality is useful, it is easy to use, and the documentation is both easy to follow and thorough.

So if you're looking for a way to integrate FileMaker with Word, Excel, and/or PDF documents, check out 360Works Scribe.

From Digital Nomad to Digital Refugee

I'm writing this blog post from a Starbucks just outside of Richmond at around 8pm on Tuesday, August 30th. In 15 minutes or so, my home will have been without power for 80 hours. That's not a typo. 80 hours. Our community was hit hard by Irene on Saturday, and large parts of the area are still struggling to get back to normal.

I normally consider myself to be something of a digital nomad. I'm almost always on the go, my trusty MacBook Air tucked neatly and securely into my backpack, along with all of the essentials - external hard drive, USB modem, plenty of thumb drives, and so on.

But this storm, and the power outage that resulted from it, has turned me into something of a digital refugee.

And I'm not alone. If you walk into just about any local cafe or coffee shop in the area (Panera Bread, Starbucks, B&N, etc), you'll find other digital refugees. They have the same panicked look in their eyes. They've got their notebooks and power bricks in hand, as they look nervously for an open power outlet. The Starbucks that I'm writing from, while mostly and surprisingly empty (it's a small one), has but one power outlet available to customers, and sure enough, two other customers are plugged into it. I'm plugged into an extension cable that someone has run into the back of the store. I'm a lucky one, I guess.

Throughout this ordeal, I've had several thoughts and emotions. If someone had been reading my mind over these past few days, they'd surely think I was bonkers. And I think they'd be right. I'm losing it.

What surprised me about all of this is how absolutely reliable so many of us are on technology. Whether that reliance is real (meaning, your life and/or business depends on it) or imagined (meaning, you're just addicted to it all) or not doesn't matter much. The reality is that we are now a digital society, and whether we know it or not, we're vulnerable.

We have very cool, very powerful tools that we can take with us - things that we couldn't even have imagined in the not so distant past. Smart phones. Notebooks. iPads and other tablets. These are truly amazing, empowering tools that we have.

But our Achilles’ heel seems to be energy. We've all had the batteries on our devices die on us, I'm sure. And while devices like the iPad and the newer MacBook Airs have amazing battery life, at the end of the day, we still need to charge them up. No matter how cool our devices are, without power, they are reduced to nothing more than expensive paperweights.

Maybe we have two Achilles’ heels. The other would be reliable, affordable wireless Internet connections. In the rare times that I can connect to the net using my USB modem or my iPad's cell connection, the connection has been terribly unreliable.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this... Maybe the long days and nights as a digital refugee are catching up with me. All I can tell you is that we need to find ways to fix these types of problems. Otherwise, all of us will be digital refugees at some point.

-- Tim