Connect Your Website to Your FileMaker Databases

Posted by John Mathewson on May 30, 2017

Small businesses are looking for the same solutions that enterprise-level companies use, but at a small-business price. Now there is good news: we can customize a web solution allowing customers, employees, and others to access specific information in your database directly from your website.

Whether you’re familiar with the Filemaker Platform or not, these solutions can save you and your employees valuable time and money.

Two Solutions: Custom Web Publishing and WebDirect

The FileMaker Platform allows small businesses to connect their databases to their web pages using either Custom Web Publishing or WebDirect. The differences lie in how many simultaneous users you need to accommodate.

WebDirect is for small businesses with up to 500 distinct users needing to access information in their databases at any given time.

Custom Web Publishing can handle thousands of simultaneous users, making it powerful enough to function as a cost-effective enterprise solution at a fraction of the cost.

How Does it Work?

Kyo Logic’s expert developers can write a web page on any web server to display data directly from your Filemaker Pro database onto your company’s website. This “portal” for lack of a better term blends in with your current website perfectly, is easy to use, and can automate and streamline your customer service experience.

If you’re familiar with the Filemaker Platform, you can use WebDirect yourself to create a portal on your website. Once you’ve created your database and programmed it correctly, WebDirect can help you turn your database into a website.

It’s important to have everything programmed correctly for WebDirect to work. Kyo Logic can help ensure your code is clean, you’ve set up security properly, and you’ve considered hosting and reliability before deploying WebDirect.

Custom Web Publishing requires more programming and finesse, so it’s better to hire a consultant to help you create your solution.

Kyo Logic can create customized solutions more swiftly than other consultancies. And for larger systems, we can deliver a solution customized to your needs and requirements in months where others might require years.

Let’s consider a real-world example

Self-Advocacy Association of New York State (SANYS) is a non-profit, grassroots organization serving people with developmental disabilities. They help disabled persons by offering support and training to enable them to become self-sufficient.

SANYS organizes several regional and local seminars for the disabled. They also host a large statewide conference in New York that pulls in significant numbers of registrants. SANYS traditionally captured registration information through paper forms and phone calls.

It was very cumbersome for the volunteers to organize and manage a large number of registrants for these conferences. SANYS came to Kyo Logic for a customized solution to help them control the registration process.

We created a Filemaker solution database to let them capture who’s attending, special meal requirements they may have, emergency contact names and numbers, and what conference they’re signed up for. Here’s an example of registrants for a particular event in SANYS’s database:
FileMaker Development

 

The next logical step was to create a web portal so the participants could go to SANYS’s website and register themselves.
WebDirect Development

 

Registrants now have a form to fill out their personal information, meal preferences, and other particulars without any human intervention from SANYS.
WebDirect Development

Automating registration has dramatically decreased the time spent on participant organization and management. This allows SANYS to help more people through education and support than ever before.

 Do you have a business problem the Filemaker Platform could solve?

Most companies have databases containing business critical information like inventory, sales, customers, accounting, products, raw materials, and more. Even if you provide a service, you still have data to be tracked.

Do you get emails from your storefront with orders that need to be filled? A cost-effective web portal can capture the order directly from the shopping cart, send the order to operations for fulfillment, adjust inventory, and capture the charges in your accounting database. All from your website.

If you’re using manual processes to capture the information you need for your business to operate, the Filemaker Platform and Kyo Logic offer a better way. We eliminate the redundancy of manual entry so you and your employees can concentrate on growing your business and increasing revenue.

Contact Kyo Logic at 203.221.3033 today to discuss how to gain control of your business operations using the FileMaker Platform and connecting to your website.