Hey all,
I am a student worker at my University and I've been working with an Instructional Design staff member here on several small computer projects.
We recently purchased FileMaker in hopes of creating a database containing information such as faculty members, events, invoice and spending and other things you would expect a school to track concerning faculty and staff. Particularly we are interested in event management. (Having faculty and staff members register for events using our database)
Is this possible with SeedCode Complete?
We both have limited experience in database development and I am unsure of what is the best way to go about learning and developing this type of database.
We are both interested by SeedCode's Calendar product, and we believe it could help us greatly in the learning and development project, however we are unsure of how much experience is necessary to effectively use this product.
I have been playing around with the Demo version trying to familiarize myself as much as possible.
I am just wondering if anyone has suggestions as to rather we should try to learn how to use FileMaker without this software so that we know better what we are doing when we do use it, or if we should purchase this software and begin working on this project with very little FileMaker experience.

Any tips or feedback is greatly appreciated,

Mike

Hey Mike,

Good questions. Maybe this will help...

Our calendar is very well documented, so even folks who are new to FileMaker can follow our instructions to hook this up to their own FileMaker solution.

But diving into our calendar probably isn't the best way to *learn* FileMaker. The reason is that calendaring isn't something FileMaker does naturally, so a lot of the techniques we use in the calendar aren't things you'd need to do to, for example, make an invoicing system or track teachers and students. If you want to take apart something that is built with more traditional techniques, I'd suggest looking at the Business Productivity Kit. I wouldn't want to run my business with it, but it is a good basic solution to get familiar with.

You might also take a look at the training materials put out by FileMaker. I mention these because the book uses Students-Teachers-Courses-Advisors as it's example when teaching about Relationships. I think you'd find it very helpful.

Don't think the first .fp7 you start into will be the one you're using a year form now: FileMaker can be *very* fast to build in, so you might want to play around with some other files, maybe even get a first few files into production to see what works for you, before returning to our calendar to add some of the Student-Teacher-Courses things you've learned about into our calendar.

You might also checkout "Know What You're Building" here.

Hope that helps.

John,
Thanks for the reply. The information provided on the page containing "Know what you're building" was especially helpful. Right now all we have is a vision for what we want without the experience to achieve it.

I'm still not sure what we're planning to do to try and construct this solution for our needs. However, I'm sure the more I familiarize myself with basic concepts the more confidence I will gain in my ability to use the SeedCode product as we move forward.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated. We may be visiting this support forum often when diagnosing issues we run into.

Mike