Hi All,
We've been running Complete with a handful of in-house additions for a few months now, and we're really happy with how it is all working.

Initially, we've kind of ignored the calendar functions, and instead concentrated on using the solution to handle customer (Contact) data, staff (User) data, invoicing and then adding quotes, leads and sales data.

Now we're looking to develop the calendar side to suit us - and I have a question about the feasibility of a couple of ideas I've been kicking around - anyone have any thoughts as to how (if?) these might be achieved...?

1. We currently don't use any locking / permissions as the solution is hosted internally, with no access outside the network, on a password protected network drive which is not physically accessible, but we want to make the system accessible to all of our staff in the fullness of time, which means permissions and a new hosting solution - having read John's docs and the related filemaker help, this seems straight forward - the only issue will be that the high number of staff (likely 150+) means that we will need to use a unique login, such as userID, rather than a more memorable name. Does anyone have any experience of allowing user-generated unique IDs with filemaker, or even an automated login hint or something perhaps?

2. We want staff to be able to access their own payroll reports, payslips, but obviously not see anyone else's - I'm assuming this will be relatively easy to accomplish using the help files, but may end up posting back here (many) times for some assistance.

3. Our eventual aim is to make full use of the calendar for all of our rotas does anyone know if it is possible / practical to achieve the following?

- an admin logs in to check today's rota and sees the following:
Job Name / Location / Time etc
Dave (Teamleader)
John
Mark
Sam
Vacant
Vacant

- whereas, if Sam logs in, he sees:
Job Name / Location / Time etc
Dave (Teamleader)
Filled
Filled
Sam
Vacant
Vacant


(Very) long set of questions but thanks in advance for any advice

Cheers, Matt

Hi Matt,

Others may have some thoughts here, but I'd like to suggest a couple things.

- With 150+ users you might look at using external authentication to help manage that. With or without external authentication, however, each Account will need a unique name, be that some kind of ID or a regular username: it doesn't really matter to FileMaker.

- You can have FileMaker create new accounts for you from within scripts, so you *could* have FileMaker suggest new account names for people.You could also write scripts to create these accounts in more than one file- pretty essential if you're not using external authentication since you'll need the same accounts in all your files (I'm just assuming you have more than one file).

- Regarding your questions about blocking access to certain elements for some users. You're right that this is easily done from within FileMaker's Access Privileges. Replacing a name with "Filled", however, isn't something FileMaker does out of the box. You won't be able to hid the whole record in this case, but will instead need to write unstored calcs that use "Filled" in some cases, such as when the logged in Account Name is not a member of the account names that can see a given person's appointments.

Hope that helps.