Hi

My company has 4 persons at DIFFERENT locations.

I have recently purchased Filemaker 8.5 – the 5-user Pak to use with my current data base. Each employee will have a copy of the Filemaker on their computers and I plan to install the FIFTH copy on a server at yet a different location and will be using per-to-peer sharing with the server being the host machine. I did check with the Filemaker support staff and was assured this is an appropriate deployment.

I now plan to install SeedCode Calendar to track contacts, calendars and sales – a new application. As stated on your web site: Note that we highly recommend using FileMaker Pro Server, even for small numbers of users. The data protection and backup utilities offered by FileMaker 8 Pro Server are simply invaluable. Furthermore, FileMaker 8 puts more of the work onto the server and, in a peer-to-peer situation (where there is no server), that work is sent to the host machine, often putting it under a very large load and decreasing performance for all users.

Question1 – Should I contact Filemaker and try to exchange, upgrade or purchase the Pro Server version?

Question 2: Will I need one or 5 copies of SeedCode Calendar at $239 each – one install for 4 employees and one install for the server??

Thanks in advance for your advice

Stan Rachelson

Good question. In my opinion you won't want to run this as described using a peer-to-peer setup. You'll want server. You can either purchase server yourself or host the solution with a 3rd party offering server based hosting. There are lots: we use filemaker8hosting.com. Note that this will always be slower than if your users were all on the same LAN and some of the calendar screens (like the fancy week view and scheduling tab) can feel especially slow.

filemaker8hosting.com offers a free one week trial and you can load our 10-day demo up there (its network ready) to see how the speed is. Just be sure to change the name of the file you upload since they have a ton of "SeedCodeCalendar.fp7s" up there.

You'd only need 1 license of SeedCode Calendar for $239--though we call it a "site" license it is really a "server instance" license, meaning you can run one instance of the calendar on one server per license: no matter where the users accessing that server are.

Hope that helps.

Hi

This is something I'm grappling at with present. Right now I'm running SCC peer to peer on a server in a small office. We have the IWP module with IWP running too for the occaisions when one of us forget where we're supposed to be Monday morning, or we're away from the office for an extended period or we want to check our future availability while at a client's office. Everything works well except that on the LAN some things are slower than you'd wish for (fancy week views, selecting contacts in mini windows) And the back up situation is less than ideal. We are nowhere near the user and database number limitations.

For us to retain the functionality in a server package I'd have to purchase FM Server Advanced, about double the money again we've spent to date on the peer to peer solution. (FM Server doesn't appear do the IWP bit)

I'd be a bit of a twit to ignore all the advice pointing to FMSA, so it's likely that I'll shell out for it however I'd dearly love to hear anyone else's actual experience in addition to the advice.

Thanks
Rob

I $$prung for Server Advanced, here are my observations one week in;
I haven't noticed any great change in speed;
I have noticed that there are now no complaints about unpredictable behaviour;
I'm not worrying about back ups.
My guess is to improve speed of the week display (which everyone loves!)we will have to move the FMSA/Seedcode Calendar to a newer dedicated server. At present we're running it on our only server a G4 single processor Xserve.

Rob

Thanks for posting your observations Rob.

RobertFrith wrote:My guess is to improve speed of the week display (which everyone loves!)we will have to move the FMSA/Seedcode Calendar to a newer dedicated server. At present we're running it on our only server a G4 single processor Xserve.

"Dedicated" is certainly the key here: doing nothing but running FMSA, not even having a user logged in makes a difference.

If you didn't catch last week's webinar on server you can review a recording here: FMS Config. Kind of dry, but it goes into a lot about dedicating your machine to FMS, including differences between OSX and OSX Server. Also covers some good points about switches and hubs. May just be review, but I found a couple things helpful.

OK, here we are a few months down the track, a little bit older and a little bit wiser. Just thought I'd share a little bit more of our Seedcode / FMSA / Server experience.

We've had some very odd things happen on the server (G4 XServe) since installing FMSA. We run Retrospect. I know a lot of people are just going to be thinking "told you so" at this point. We have experienced server crashes when running largish (in the order of 20gb) backups to tape (HP Ultrium) and accessing Seedcode via Filemaker Server.

The worst of it has been that Retrospect forgets where it's up to and just runs the entire backup again when the server has been restarted and the Retrospect script re-initiated, which has soaked up a fair bit of Ultrium tape!

Anyway we added an MacPro to the office which left us with a mac mini on our hands. We installed FMSA on it about a week ago and have been running Seedcode on that machine since then. It appears to have sped things up noticably, especially week views over the LAN and the IWP side of things.

The best thing is that it's running so well on such a cheap machine. I was so totally thinking I'd have to put in another Xserve just to run FMSA/Seedcode and it wasn't thrilling me(!). We're only a small ofice, 5 permanent staff total so those sort of costs really count.