I may well be confused about what's the right mix of products for this situation. I have a client who wants a set of Filemaker date entries (each record is one date from one user's schedule of appointments) to be available to multiple users on their iPhones. The owner wants to see ALL user's appts. but each of the other users should only see his/her own appts.

As of two months ago, it looked like I needed to setup several products to do this, but now it seems Zulu would do it all. Just want to confirm this.

Originally, I setup BusySync on the key iMac (the one that would enter all dates for all the users schedules) to push the iCal dates out to a Google calendar. That calendar would be jointly accessed by all users via their iPhones. Who could see what was to have been handled by subscriber privileges in Google calendar account.

On the Filemaker side in the original setup, I configured Productive Computing's iCal Manipulator plugin to push the FM date entries out to iCal. Once in iCal they would be pushed out to the Google calendar via BusySync.

So the BIG question is, can Zulu do what needs to be done WITHOUT BusySync and/or iCal Manipulator? My understanding is that Google calendar allows shared calendars via iPhones and/or web whereas iCal (even iCal Server) does not.

Any suggestions or guidance on the proper deployment configuration would be appreciated. I got the demo of Zulu going to test a simpler solution for yet another client and it is WAY COOL. Hopefully, I can use it for this more complex challenge as well.

Hi Ray,

(Don't you love being able to say, "Yea. We can do that"?)

So, yes. Zulu can do that. Moreover, this is one of the use cases Zulu was designed for.

Zulu respects FileMaker's Access Privileges (when a user adds a FileMaker calendar to iCal via Zulu, they enter their FileMaker username and password.) So they'll only see the records their privilege set lets them see.

Going further, Zulu will let them edit these records-- if their access privileges permit that-- and even create new FileMaker records in iCal.

A couple tips:

- The first time iCal sees your database, it needs to write to each record, so things will go more smoothly if your admin user is the first to login. This is a one time thing so no sweat after that.

- If you want to let users make records, be sure that you have some kind of auto-enter that lets the newly created record meet your access privilege criteria (that knows who created it): otherwise, users can create records but not see them.

- Zulu can also create read only URLs for each calendar. So if you're filtering the calendar to create one calendar per user, you can just email them the calendar for their events.

(Thanks for your call; I'm sorry I missed you. Been running around like crazy here!)

Hope that helps,

John

John Sindelar wrote:Hi Ray,

(Don't you love being able to say, "Yea. We can do that"?)

So, yes. Zulu can do that. Moreover, this is one of the use cases Zulu was designed for.

Hope that helps,

John

Excellent, John. So no need to mess with Google calendar at all, correct? The admin user at this client site can elect to see ALL users on his iPhone/iPad/iMac calendar (i.e. iCal) whereas the staff users will only see their appts. Correct?

No need for Google Calendar or BusySynch. Each user will have an account in FileMaker and those accounts will be tied to privilege sets that only let the user see *their* records: the admin account will have no such restriction.

When users employ these accounts to subscribe to their FileMaker calendars from iCal, FileMaker will only show them the records their privilege set is allowed to see: so you get to control who sees what using FileMaker's privilege sets. Zulu just respects that.

If you need help with the privilege set side of this, get in touch and we can help.

John

John Sindelar wrote:No need for Google Calendar or BusySynch. Each user will have an account in FileMaker and those accounts will be tied to privilege sets that only let the user see *their* records: the admin account will have no such restriction.

When users employ these accounts to subscribe to their FileMaker calendars from iCal, FileMaker will only show them the records their privilege set is allowed to see: so you get to control who sees what using FileMaker's privilege sets. Zulu just respects that.

If you need help with the privilege set side of this, get in touch and we can help.

John

Thanks, John. That's great news. I'll go ahead and try to set it up. Happy to hire you or your merry crew if I fall short. Appreciate your prompt and informative reply.

Zulu respects FileMaker's Access Privileges (when a user adds a FileMaker calendar to iCal via Zulu, they enter their FileMaker username and password.) So they'll only see the records their privilege set lets them see.

Yes that works fine. But for the moment all my users see all of the iCal calendars, even those for which they do not have access and cannot see the events. Is there a way of making the iCal calendars invisible according to the user's privilege set?

Yes Geoff, you can apply privilege set restrictions in FileMaker to the ZuluCalendarList table just as you did to your events table.