We were very honored to have Brad Freitag join us for, our 41st episode and, an absolutely fascinating conversation which gives all FileMaker developers the opportunity to hear Brad discuss his vision for Claris and his absolute committment to the developer community; something I don’t believe any of us have heard before.

We also asked all of our listeners to write in with their comments and suggestions for Brad so that we could pass them on to him.

Click here to follow this thread at FMSoup (which, by the way, is a really well designed forum for FileMaker users)

Wow such a great interview, I think it went off so well. He comes off very well in the interview. The final version is so clean to listen to, really an outstanding podcast all round.

It sounds to me like a golden time of FileMaker™ development may be imminent and it is going to be even better in the future than it has been in the past

Though I can’t shake off a niggling feeling that the entire premise of the pricing structure is becoming obsolete because when I see the work that Dan does it is inconceivable to his clients that they will ever have to pay per seat for accessing their FileMaker™ backended website

I feel that right now FileMaker™ is leaving the bulk of the market off the table by insisting on selling licences.

There should be a way for an online supplier of some sort or other to run their business on FileMaker™ and seamlessly allow their online customers, via the web, to access their services or shop or catalogue or marketing information or tech support etc all from within FileMaker™ seamlessly. This is currently completely impractical because of the licensing structure.

I suspect that only a tiny fraction of the available development work is going to FileMaker™ because of this one issue.

Happy days.

Marc and Brad spoke about the opportunities within larger IT shops because of FileMaker™’s ability to integrate.

I believe ESS is a big part of this capability, but it has been seriously undeveloped since it’s original introduction.

There are key performance issues, and the driver/version support are lagging behind production SQL DB versions in the market.

What can we in the developer community do to help get FileMaker™ to put some attention into this feature and bring it up to snuff with products like MS Access, other “low-code” tools, and products like PowerBI?   

Interacting with other systems and DBs is critical for low-code departmental tools, and even for SMBs now as folks adapt Cloud based solutions.  

I’m like a broken record when it comes to ESS.  But it’s the only way I know to try and get it “fixed”.

If FileMaker™ wants to be treated seriously in the mid market, they have to do this part better.

Otherwise, very exciting things in the works.

I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast and especially the frank points and questions you asked Brad, and appreciated his seemingly honest answers and some maybe hidden giveaways of what Claris has in store for the near future.

As you know I am nowhere near in calling myself a developer, however thoroughly enjoy and hopefully benefit from all the insights and knowledge you give us on the podcast. Many thanks.

I particularly liked Michael’s comment about the Oracle team project, and the FM guy who replicated the project overnight!  I’ve had my share of those too.

I must disagree with Marc’s enthusiasm for the pace of all the new features, functions, details and changes.   I often wish there were two versions of FileMaker™ – one with all the latest upgrades, and another that just stays the same as long and as much as possible.  As a one-man part time in-house developer, I don’t have the time to implement all the changes every time Claris/FileMaker™ rolls out an upgrade!  I struggle to keep up with the new interfaces and options when I am finally forced to upgrade across multiple versions.  The vast majority of new features and changes don’t apply to my use and environment.  Just MHO.

Congratulations on pinning down Brad Freitag for the latest podcast. You certainly managed to voice most of my principal concerns about the future of FileMaker for the smaller-scale.
Whilst Brad acknowledged Michael’s very succinctly worded questions, I was most concerned that he dismissed single users, startups and ‘Mamas and Papas’ as less important to Claris than the ‘enterprise’ market, which explains clearly why this sector is so neglected. Also, sad to hear that there are no proposed changes or plans to revoke the decision to depreciate peer-to-peer networking without introducing any cheap hosting options. It will largely make the purchase of single licences a total waste of time.
The frustration mounts:
Significant software price increases;
Reduction of ’trial period’ software (now increased again once more);
Effectively disallowing hosting on non-dedicated in-house servers;
Disallowing multiple client hosting, by hosting providers;
Discontinuation of FileMaker Pro client;
Discontinuation of runtime environment;
Deprecation of peer-to-peer networking;
Whilst there can be good reasons for some of the above, Claris continually seems to work to hinder developers with that most important first step to snagging a new client. I have very few clients on my books who started with a proper brief. Largely they were stricken with a problem with their current software or spreadsheets and needed a fast solution or prototype yesterday. FileMaker is just the tool for this and it gives it the ability to slip into organisations everywhere by the ‘back door’. More recently, the ease of linking it to existing competitive systems has made this even better. Surely Claris should recognise and nurture this to its max?
If everyone had a free copy of FileMaker on their computer with a couple of test solutions, I bet the take-up would be significantly more. IMHO a free copy with every Mac would be a first step. Add in a cheap 1 or 2 user cloud-hosting option and it could quickly dominate the market. Of course, for Claris, how this converts into hard cash is not something I can be sure of. But it would make my job a lot easier for introducing new customers who would rapidly need to upgrade as FileMaker becomes more and more essential to their work and they need more licences.