I had a great time at the monthly meeting of the Connecticut FileMaker Developers Group. We met at the usual location: the Student Center at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

The main topic was a discussion of online resources for the FIleMaker developer. These include custom function lists, forums and the official FileMaker bug tracker among others.

Some discussion was centered around the non-FileMaker resources that are becoming increasingly important as FileMaker developers embrace other languages and technologies in their work: PHP, CSS/HTML, Java, SQL, Web Services, etc. As it turns out, often Google is often the best place to start for these online resources.

We had a couple participants from large universities who discussed the numerous "silos" built in FileMaker. Departments and individual users were creating databases in FileMaker to solve their own problems as quickly as possible. With the connectivity advancements of FileMaker (External SQL Sources, Web Services client/server support, etc), using FileMaker like this has at least become technically feasible. Still, it does seem like large institutions are struggling with how best to organize those silos and how to provide institution-wide support for such a system. If you're in a situation like this and need someone to help, drop us a line via our Contact Us page and we may be able to help.

Because of Dev Con, the next meeting will be in September. If you're in the area, we'd love to see you there.