Alarms
Can the Calendar Set Alarms or Give Me Some Kind of Notice When Appointments Are Coming Up?
Our calendar does not have any kind of alarms function built into it, though you can easily add one.
The trick here is to get FileMaker to run a script every so often- once you can do that, you can have a script that finds upcoming appointments, or finds them and then emails you about them. Sending emails or text messages like this can be great when someone may have FileMaker closed when an appointment is coming up.
In order to run a script like this (every x minutes, for instance), you’ll need a plugin, something like the ScriptFire plugin from http://www.dacons.net or the free ZippScript plugin from http://homepage.mac.com/jkornhaus/filemaker/plugins.html
You can also run a script like this on FileMaker server, emailing the user when their event is coming up.
Yet another approach would be to run a FileMaker script on the correct user's machine when the alarm came due. This kind of assumes they have FileMaker open at the time, but it can be pretty cool. For this you'd use Activator from Troi: http://www.troi.com/software/activatorplugin.html
In many of our installations, we have a simple FileMaker client running a similar plugin as an unattended agent. This agent machine can then do other automated tasks like email notifications, reports, etc.
For more information on this, search our support forum for “alarms”:
