FileMaker 17 New Features From Around The Blogosphere

There’s a lot of buzz about the release of FileMaker 17 out and about, with lots of smart people providing their two cents as to what’s interesting and useful, and describing how to use these new features.  I compiled a list of some insightful articles that I have come across, that I think you will find helpful as a starting point for exploring these new features yourself.

In no particular order:

• Skeleton Key has always been a go-to source for me when trying to understand the inner machinations of the FileMaker platform. This posting from Calvin Cooper of Skeleton Key is another of their informative explorations, this one reaching into the crannies and nooks of the changes to Layout Mode, offering good tips and tricks along the way.

• Sometimes watching someone work through a task yields additional insights or nuggets that often aren’t written down in text-only articles. John Mark Osborne, on his “Philosophy of FileMaker” page, covers lots of the new features of FM 17, with both brief text bites and accompanying videos. About a third of the way down, look for ‘Found Set Portals’ – this is a good topic on the new self-joining portal-without-relationship feature.  (AppWorks’ own David Weiner posted a great blog article about this as well – but it’s always nice to get a second opinion.)

• Always innovating how to do things and tackle old problems, here’s a posting from Darren Burgess at Beezwax discussing the new improvements made to the Data API. The Data API is moving out of beta testing and into the regular world. One particular item that Darren makes clear – if you created something for the FMS 16 Data API (the beta version) it will need to be refactored to make it compatible with the FMS 17 version.

• How many times have you worked with a client who wants to send emails to their users or some other stakeholder in their system, but have been limited by only being able to attach one file at a time to an email from inside FileMaker? New with FileMaker 17 is the ability to attach multiple documents to a single email – hooray! Marc Larochelle of Productive Computing has put together a nice video demonstrating this new feature.  (Video #3, about the middle of the page; runtime ~3:30)

• One subtle but significant change is that FileMaker Inc. has now merged what formerly were two versions of the client software, FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced, into a single product – FileMaker Pro Advanced 17. Jeremy Brown at Geist Interactive describes that now everyone gets Advanced when they license 17. (For more details about licensing, our Customer Success Manager, Shawn Prado, wrote this article about it last week.)

• Digging into the administrative side of FMS 17 is the ever inquisitive and knowledgeable Wim Decorte from Soliant.  He discusses changes in the Admin Console for FileMaker Server.  There are some significant changes with the Admin Console – leaving some scratching their heads about things that were removed from the UI and now have to be administered with the updated Admin CLI or via the new Admin API.

• On the flip side Mike Beargie of MainSpring takes you on a video tour of the new features that still ARE in the FMS 17 Admin Console.  FileMaker Inc did make a bunch of things to refresh the UI – it looks a lot like the console from FileMaker Cloud. Can you say “no Java”?!   (Runtime ~10:00.)

• Don’t forget about FM Go!  Beth Latta of IT Solutions covers all the new features available in FM Go in her article. With access to many more of the sensors in iOS devices now, you can do so much more, and the ability to access Notifications is a big new feature.  

For a general overview of new features of FileMaker 17, visit these additional resources:

• FileMaker Academy
• FileMaker Magazine’s New Features and Functionality
• DB Services’ FM 17 Overview