Morning
This morning started off with some intermediate sessions to ease us into the conference. Although I guess it depends on your knowledge level as to whether you think they are basic, intermediate or advanced.
Personally I started with Darren Terry’s session on Modern FileMaker Development Techniques. Darren’s a great speaker and offered some great hints and tips on creating reusable scripts through parameters. Using XML & XSLT for user based custom reporting and creating layout level calculations (without fields) by utilising the web viewer, where just some of the highlights of this session.
Product Showcase
Lunch provided the opportunity for a first glance at the product showcase, there was lots to see and some great people to talk to, including:
The new 24U Software Phone Companion plug-in, offering complete cross-platform telephony integration with FileMaker
A new version of the Fusion reactor plug-in, delivering a UI extension kit.
A range of new super-fast architecture servers specifically designed for FileMaker to eliminate long back-up times by XFM
more on the showcase tomorrow.
Afternoon
The afternoon sessions were really good, starting with Bill Heizer from FileMaker Inc. talking about advanced script triggers and how to get the most out of them. I then went straight into Scott Karchs session on Server Virtualisation. This session was a real eye opener in showing the many ways creating and using VMs (Virtual Machines) in both a test and production environment can be amazingly useful and cost effective. There is even a full robust Virtual Server environment for Macintosh in the form of Parallels Server for Mac
