There are two plugins that alarms can be set. Brand new is Dacons ScriptFire. Another is at www.wmotion.com. Both seem to do about the same thing (though there is a fairly significant cost discrepancy).

My question is, is your calendar application compatable with these? I am especially interested in Dacon's. How would I integrate your solution with theirs?

Thanks,

Ron

You can create alarms any number of ways; it all depends on what you want to have happen when the alarm goes off. Both Events and ScriptFire will let you set up an agent machine to run a look-for-upcoming-alarms-script every x minutes as we suggest here.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply.

But it seems like your recommended solution, although a good one, fails to take advantage of these plugin's apparent capabilities of being dead-on specific in their alarm functionality...an apparent weakness of Troi's. Troi does offer a lot of additional "bang for the buck" with their plugin. However, if you're planning on deploying in a multi-user environment, their marginal licensing costs can be significant, and should be considered.

It seems to me that there are now seveal good plugins that can do the job, each with their own tradeoffs. However, the new ones bring a level of advancement and price competitiveness which should be considered by any client.

Personally, I am in that stage now, both with these plugins and with a calendar application, such as Cleveland's. Verifying their compatability and ease of integration are of prime consideration to me, as I'm sure they are to others considering your calendar product.

(Not quite sure if there was a question in that last post.)

You're right that our recommendation doesn't involve setting a plugin alarm for each appointment- such alarms would have to be edited as each appointment was edited and that seems like an unnecessary complexity. The other advantage of the "agent" approach is that if someone isn't running FileMaker when an alarm comes due for them, the agent can take another action, such as emailing or paging them.

If you don't like the agent approach and want to write one plugin call per alarm I'd suggest downloading the ScriptFire demo version and just diving in.

Hope that helps.