ACCESS OUR MAIN WEBSITE - https://fmstartingpoint.com - FileMaker CRM from FM Starting Point
Transcript
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the next day of the training. I am Richard Carlton, I'm here to welcome you. I have my team here working with me, and we are trying to, as you could tell there's a lot of this technology that is a little bit new. We are live streaming, live on YouTube and Twitter, and you can have a conversation here with us on that. I'm monitoring that over here. What I want to do is just remind everyone, as you come in there's a little bit of a delay in this we've been adjusting the color of the content or the video, making it a little bit brighter and a little bit dark, and so we have to adjust the gamma settings on the video out. And so we've done that, and it should be a little bit brighter for you coming out of our systems, and so there's about a one-minute delay plus or minus from the time. I say something when you see it. I will see your text messages in real-time, but you won't see my response to your questions or answers for about 60 seconds. So just a reminder on that end of things. What I need to do, though, is see if we can get one of our engineers. Charles, I don't know. If he's around, we get a gate, call Charles. What if we can call Charles and get him on the phone that is even possible, we should try doing that. Let me see if I can call Charles here: where is Charles? Can we get a hold of Charles? Where is he at, cuz? He can help us manage and monitor things I see. We call Charles right now we're gonna ring the phone to see if he's ready to have a conversation with us because we need someone to help manage the YouTube videos: hey Charles. How good are you on live TV? You need to turn up your game. A little bit on this, I'm gonna leave you on here.
I just want to give you a heads-up that I am monitoring the twitch feed and the YouTube feed. I don't see you being on the right screen for this. I've seen it work, but I've never made the YouTube text conversation. While I was broadcasting at the same time as I went to the YouTube page. So if you go to the YouTube page and figure out how to see that text conversation, that would be great. You could monitor that for me and me now how that's going that would be awesome, so I'm going to go ahead and leave that off. For now, I'm going to come back over here, so what I'm just gonna say is to remind everyone. You know, hear questions. Ask them, please, right? So the whole idea is that we can answer the questions in real time we're very happy about that. So moving along, so today is going to be a conversation about CRMs and the six seven tips things that the sequence of events you want to go through in terms of setting up a CRM and what is a CRM sits a little bit more of a basic Conversation initially and then what I want to do is make sure that we can answer questions in flight, and so, if you have questions, let us know Charles will be finding the YouTube conversation on his end. And then I will, on my end, be responding. Keep an eye on Twitter holy cow, so someone just dropped a huge okay.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go through the basics? There are some conversations about CRMs here and what we're gonna do. I will get on this with Brian Brian asked a question. It might be we'll see how much of this we can go to an answer on you and ask to talk to you about this, but that's kind of the idea. I'm gonna cover the basics of CRM. Brian was ready with a question in advance, which is really awesome. Brian, thank you for doing that back, Brian. Where are you from? Let us know so we can credit you appropriately. So, let's cover the basics here: real quick on the CRM-related stuff, gonna go and hide Charles for the moment here we don't need to see Charles. So once again, oh - and - and I understand that this is - we have a question over here - a little more advanced, but then at the same time, I need to cover the basics of a little bit of background of what we're doing. The short version of this is what a CRM is. A CRM is a customer relationship management system, a piece of software. I guess you could say that a binder of paper is a CRM. If you could have everyone stare at the binder of paper and have customers on one page and phone calls that you make on another page and the invoices that they have you insert them in there, I mean, at the end of the day, it's a system. Typically, software that manages your customer management, project management, and invoicing, doesn't necessarily do accounting per se. That's a separate system. A lot of people use QuickBooks for that, in fact, even my company, uses QuickBooks for it, but what we do is that we have FileMaker talk to QuickBooks makes it simple to keep QuickBooks up to date, but we run the company outta FileMaker, thousands and thousands And thousands of people fact actually a million people every day, log on and use FileMaker somewhere around the world. It's a huge number of people that log on. It has a huge customer base, and so typically, what people with businesses and organizations do is track their customers. They track their work, they track the things that they're getting paid to do and so once again we're happy to be doing a live stream.
Today we welcome you to be here with us and we want to emphasize the fact that we're going to be leaning more towards the remote workers in this conversation, because that's where a lot of people are at they're stuck at home, they're working still, hopefully most businesses Are still operating if you're in a restaurant business I mean, I don't have to tell you, that's just a really rough deal right now. Hopefully, it'll get better in the next three or four weeks. But at this point I just want to go through what the CRM idea and what the issues are, that you're going to see. Potentially as you work from home. So, first off the FileMaker platform is really owned by Apple and so the company that makes FileMaker once upon time they were named Claris. They were actually brought on, I think, brought in to Apple by Steve Jobs back in the day. So I know Steve Jobs personally used FileMaker right. He would work on it on the weekends. I kid you not the true story. He called people that I know for tech support on the weekend to get help with stuff cuz. They get stuck so even the great Steve Jobs would get stuck with things and so Apple owns FileMaker at the end of the day. So you've got one of the biggest tech companies in the world behind it right. So it's got a huge customer audience base. It's supported by one of the biggest companies in the world.
That's probably why you're here and so the question is: how do you get started with a CRM? What's the most effective way to get started with a serum? Well, the first idea is: have this idea that you found a maker platform might be worthwhile looking into if it's really cost effective? If you look at what it does for you, the second thing you're gonna want to do is go to the Claris.com go to the website and download a trial, a FileMaker Pro. If you have a hard time with any of these things, I'm talking about emailing us to support at RC. Consulting the next thing. You're going to do is, after you download and install this trial, which will run it for about 45 days, a FileMaker pro mac or windows you're going to want to get a free CRM. Now the CRM that we have is called FM starting point. It's a free CRM, it's actually completely unlocked, which is great, and what that allows you to do is to customize yourself. So you get a CRM actually for free. Why do we do that? Because it makes a great training tool? It's a great PR tool for my company. We have invested over a million dollars of my personal money into it over the last ten years, not a million bucks at once. No, it was this, but incrementally, when you add over ten twelve years, your things start to add up, and so it's designed to work really great. With mobile devices. It works great with a cloud. In fact, it's specifically optimized to work really well with remote users. It's super important this time right now with a lot of people at home, people that are working at home, who maybe have never worked at home before. If you have a FileMaker system, it hasn't been kept up to date and the people who run the system haven't. You know, optimized it for home users. You might be having a slow experience that can happen. FM Starting Point is specifically engineered for high speed, high performance. In fact, every bottleneck that's been in there, we've removed so really quite quite good, and so you can download a free copy here.
All you have to do is go to the download myself over here. A little bit down here out of the way, so I can make myself a little bit smaller too. Let's just do that and hide in the way. Is it snapping, it's kind of snapping right, that'll work, and so you go to download here. You just put any for your information: you'll get an email. The email will come to you with download information on it when you download it you're going to get a folder like this. Once again, you have that FileMaker installed already on Mac or Windows. You'Re gonna install it, you're gonna double click it and you're in and you're running now, at the moment, the copy of FM Starting Point or the FileMaker or a CRM is running locally on your computer you're, not sharing it yet with your team, the real benefit. The power of FileMaker is the collaborative sharing, so you get it going and then, along the way here, you can decide hey. I want to deploy it and share it with the team, and so that's really the benefit of the platform running it. Just for you on your local computer, yeah, that's great, but a lot of people can do that, but having it shared in real time on the cloud is awesome. So the idea is that you come into FM Starting Point. It's actually completely unlocked. So what I can do is, I can actually come up here and I can go into layout mode, which is a design mode and you can customize the application since it's already built right. So it already has a contact section here. It has a couple sample records.I've already put in this one right here when you get yours, it'll come with one sample record in each of these sections, but we have the ability to invoice the other day, we're talking about barcoding. With this, you have the ability to estimate. Project management contacts are a very big thing in terms of the communication with the customer, so you can see what's going on super valuable, so it's completely unlocked, which means that you can get under the hood and you can add fields, add capabilities. You can look at the relational design, the relational structure of it.
If you want to get into that - and we have training that covers all this, so the tool is free. FM Starting Point is a free FileMaker. You have to pay for FileMaker, but can get a trial for 45 days. It's really quite cost effective and we have training. That's really reasonable starts at about $79 and it covers how to build in the FileMaker platform, how to customize. Frankly, the CRM or any other FileMaker system understands that that's how you're going to get going, the idea was the starting point is because it comes with these modules where you have the ability to actually go into layout mode and remove things. So if you decide that you weren't going to do people and invoices and you're really weren't going to do projects, you can actually come in here and start removing items and getting rid of them. So you don't really want to do estimates either, but you do have products, so you could move that up here and so you can actually remove things that you don't need.
You can actually remove capability. So we built this tool. The goal. Really, when you first get it is to remove the things you don't need now, a lot of people. What they will do is, instead of actually completely removing items, they will take the items they don't think they need and move them off to the side of the screen like this, and that way if they haven't deleted them, they're still there. If they decide they need to use them in the future right, you could come up with a you know: move the buttons over here, go back to browse mode right here, so I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. So you see the little keyboard shortcuts right there, and so that is basically the idea of taking a prebuilt CRM, which probably has maybe more in it than you need removing the pieces. You don't need, then adding the pieces. You do watch some training along the way. If you need some personal hand-holding, you can get coaching to help you with that. So the idea with file with with getting a Sarah I'm going rapidly the tips for starting their tips for being successful, really ours, picking a platform that has worldwide adoption and over a million people the day you who use it, who log on to use it.
Having a tool that works great with users at home, which works on the cloud which shares with users at home, so a user could be logged onto the system right now and it would operate the same at home as it would in the office. If you have a FileMaker solution and it's built correctly and it's optimized, then it will work really well for the home user. It works really well for the office user. It works great on iPhones and iPads and there's even some level support for Android devices. So you can use that as well. It's pretty cool. So if you download the software you're going to remove the items you don't need. You can add you could let go to contacts you can say. I want to add an additional field here of information. I want to track. You can do that very easily. The next thing you're going to do in this step. You know step four of the process. I think step 5 in the process is actually to import the data, so to find the data that you had in excel files find the day that you have in wherever you had the data previously.
If you have post-it notes - and you really can't know if you have, if you run the whole company on notes and paper like this, then there's really no import feature for that right. But the idea is that if you have data in another system, you're using an excel like such where you can actually go into FileMaker and do an import, so you have the ability to import records here and bring them in once again with a little bit of practice. A little bit of hope would be useful for you, if you don't have experience doing this, but that's kind of the idea.So the next item you get to the point where you really want to share it with people and the idea is to take it and deploy it. So we have a local copy right here. You can actually deploy it onto a server that runs in your office. Now, if the server's in your office - and you have home users or users that are working out in the field, you want to make sure that people can access that server out from the internet. If you don't want to mess with that or set that up, and you don't have IT people to help you, then what you want to do is take a look at using FileMaker cloud. FileMaker cloud is a service that you basically go through the signup process. You should go to claris.com. I can go ahead and bring up my website, but let's go to claris.com, and what you can do is, if you spell it correctly first and you'll have the ability to actually check out their cloud service. If you need help with setting up the cloud service, then definitely shoot an email to support at https://rcconsulting.com/, but it's it's. The new cloud service is radically simpler to set up and that's actually how you license or buy the product. FileMaker or I say, FileMaker Claris, the Claris management team at Clara's is not really interested in selling you a single copy, a FileMaker. What they want to do is sell you a five pack for your team or ten seats for your team.
You know, I always say a pack like a six pack of beer or something right. So it's a six-pack of diet coke. You know five seats of software ten seats, but that's for your team. Then you install the clients and that server manages those licenses. So there's really cool things you can do in terms of managing the access, usernames and passwords things like that. The Clarence cloud does that very, very well right, so once again, average million plus users every day they obviously have some sample files. Here these files are not always optimized for a white area use with the white area in the internet, but our starting point software, the the CRM that we have is specifically optimized. We had the biggest test we had about a year ago. We had almost 300 people using it simultaneously and a live webinar like this, and they were all using it. In fact, it was running on cloud and it worked really great and it performed the way it was supposed to and that those are people who were remote from home or different offices around the world, very cool, so it works, we've tested it. It goes so anyway. So this is a Claris website. You can check out the Claris FileMaker tab right here, and that brings up information about the apps and then, of course, you get going on it, but you're.
Basically, how makers feel like selling to you or want to sell to you is the idea that you can go through a simple installation process and set up your own cloud, and then you take this file. You come over here with a file and you say I want to share it so right here at the top you say share. I want to upload to a host and it's gonna say hey. You know we need to set up a security code. You go through the process of setting that up and then putting a username password in it's very simple and then you're going to upload the cloud and then your other users on your team can all access this information. At the same time, it's really a simple process. It's really good and we see a lot of success, but that's why there's a million people who use the FileMaker platform. So we do have a question.
So we have people from San Paulo Brazil awesome Fort Lauderdale, yeah we've seen the Fort Lauderdale people on TV. You guys are all on the beach spreading the coronavirus right. That was the news that wasn't news. Everyone was on the beach, all the college, students yeah. They don't care that it's on the beach partying, drinking and doing whatever at college. Do when they're bored anyway, so welcome to the world of 20 year-olds. I have a whole bunch of them that work for me at RCC and yeah. So I could, I could totally see where they would ignore things and go to the beach anyway. So what I enjoy is I'm going to cancel this right here and then I'm going to come over here and we're going to take our first question from Brian. Hi Richard I've become familiar with FileMaker for sales order processing. Once again, a CRM will do sales orders. Processing here is, for example, an invoice screen that we have right here. A database management inventory control, while working with a company for 20 years. I went to work for a new company, so the guy, this gentleman Brian, who was at a company using FileMaker goes to a new company that's not using FileMaker , and we hear about that. A lot they're like oh my gosh, this company is, you know, antiquated or backwards. We need to bring them up to date with FileMaker. I'm not saying Brian said that here, but that's frequently how these messages start off like this. I haven't read this yet. I went to work for a new company. I would like to see these FileMaker at CRM. There we go so I need an R of a quote for a quest for information. Ok, so this guy's asking me to provide a quote over quite the slack of it. Ok, so here's a tip if you need, if you want to hire my company or yeah, because you know there's only you know gonna be a thousand people are gonna see this so just shoot. If you want to talk to us about quotes and business processes, I am sending you some ideas about costs and stuff. Shoot an email to support, support at rcconsulting.com. There's a tech support crew that answers it. They triage it. We've got a dedicated sales guy. Who can help you with licensing and in terms of quotes and stuff? That's fine, but Billy has sent out quotations drop drip. Emails can accomplish FileMaker better than other CRM, so FileMaker is a platform right so understand that it's a really great soul. I'm gonna answer this one question he's asking about a couple capability so one so if you buy FileMaker licensed FileMaker, the starting-point CRM is free and it's optimized for high performance. It's been around for a while. It's one of the most established, well known, CRM in the FileMaker world. It just is a lot of the other CRM companies that there's like three there's like two or three other decent good CRM that are in the FileMaker platform. Those are about five hundred dollars per user in that range.
Potentially, they're not cheap, and sometimes their capabilities are better than this. Sometimes the capabilities are not as good as this, and that's why you know frequently free wins the day on this one, so he wants to be able to track out orders send out quotations so right here, for example, we have an invoice if you went to an Estimate - and you wanted to send the estimates say you rigged up the estimate right here and you wanted to send to someone by email - it's already built in it's already in here. There's nothing to build. We've already done it for you, so the ability to do a quote. Do a yeah David. I'm not gonna go yeah! So yeah there's David asking me. If I'm a doctor, I'm not a doctor David yeah. So he's asking me about the proper name and that's a political, hot potato. What you call the virus, the Chinese don't like it when you call it the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus, and of course then some people think you're being politically insensitive. We're not going to go there with that, but yeah interesting with that conversation. Let's just try to keep it on FileMaker. Don't start asking me about it. You know planes, helicopters or blowing things up. Because then, will this get distracted from FileMaker, but so then the ability to send out quotations is already in here the ability to set up and use a drip campaign system. So that's what you know. Drip system is what a lot of you will see when you come into you sign up for FM starting point. You'll get an email from me once a week. That kind of thing it's a drip system. It's a it's, not a you know, you can adjust a schedule, the drip. So if the idea is that, if you have a water faucet and it's like, barely cracked open at your sink and you get this drip and then a fifteen Minnesota to get another drip and the idea is to stay in front of people and and and give Them demos about great products that you sell whatever that is, maybe a Toyota does a drip to you or whatever. So there are online services that provide drip. You can do an API integration, that's where you take FileMaker and you're going to connect it to some third-party service.
That does the drip for you. It's probably the most effective way. To do that, I wrote my own drip system. Okay, it's really specific to RCC. In the way we do business, we can write your own drip system, but realistically, integrating with an online system would probably be much easier and simpler, and so that's where you would work with a senior engineer to take a CRM like this and then wire up a Connection to a drip third-party service, so this CRM right here doesn't do drip notifications. It has the ability to email people to manage the contact, so you can come over here to the email menu. You can have candy mails about what you want to say to them and - and you know like in my personal system, what we use with RCC was based upon a very early version, starting point. We probably have 200 candy males here of various kinds. You know with various messages so that we don't have to rewrite every email every time it saves a lot of time, but these emails only go out when I press the button over here to send it out. So I can say, send right, here's the send button and I don't even know if this will work right here or not.
Oh yeah, my Mac wants to make sure I have okay, so it dropped it into an email. Client right here you couldn't, you can change the settings and starting point if you come over here to preferences and once again, this isn't FileMaker , specific and I'll explain this in a second. But if you do email issues on FileMaker , so we're using FileMaker Pro, we can send them out through SMTP server or 360 works, email plug-in and you could actually have it go directly out and you never see it on your email. Client right makes sense. You have to do a little bit of setup. So when you click that and set this up, then you have to wherever that went, email yeah over here, so we have a condition right here. You have to actually come over here and set up my own one. Second, one record: here: you have to set up the settings for the email client, so we see those settings right here. So it's really the account that you use with your email system and that way you can send emails directly out of here. So let me just take a look at that yep, so we have calendar preferences, invoicing preferences backups. If you want to do that, and then we have this right here and that should pop a window right here, I'm not seeing it on this. This might be an old version of starting-point to check that. But basically you have to set the settings up for your email. So it does all that.
But if you want the drip, that would have to be integrated to make sense. So it's an and that's where you know we build starting points, the most common elements that people need. Some people want drips. Some people need to connect to QuickBooks. Some people need this and that's where you kind of get into customizing it. The power and the benefit of the FileMaker platform, is really two things one well, three things one is a huge company with both a huge ecosystem that supports it too. It's a highly customizable system that really, at the end of the day, has a ton of power and it's pretty customizable and you generally can get a coach for less than 100 bucks to help you figure out what you need to do. We have those at support at https://rcconsulting.com/ and they can walk you through things or teach you things or help. You build things, and so that was in the coaches. So you have great support, backing of Apple, highly customizable and super shareable, and collaborative nature. The prot form is really what it's great at, and so that's what you know the point of this is oh, I'm OGG is on the job. If you know today would not be yeah there, we go yeah, I'm Auggie's back. Alright, would the day not be complete? The day would not be complete unless he, this person was here and so yeah waving to me, yeah awesome, yeah, very good, oh shoot. So. Brian said no yeah, there we go anyway, so we are. We will entertain questions at this point. Charles, are you there still? Are you Leon my slack here? Still it looks like you're here. Do you have any questions from the YouTube side on the questions there, YouTube is quiet for right now there go further chat. Okay, great, that's fine, so yeah so Chinese virus.
I can. I can be your doctor David. What's the issue? Yeah so yeah, I have a great team of people here that are enjoying the show and I'm glad you're with us today. So, how can you save a record as a PDF and attach it to an email soon? Okay, so we went through this a week or two ago, I'm gonna I'm gonna run you through it whoa. My camera is moving around, stop well, bang there we go so we a couple weeks ago. We went through this. It's the starting point of the sample code here, I'm gonna kind of walk you through it, so you can see it briefly. So we've done this before I'll. Do it again, I just want to show you this, so the idea is that, because I'm OGG, one of our FileMaker training subscribers, they get all the videos that we have it's about. If you folks ask for a discount we'll give you the discount on just the video training, if that's what you want, we have two bundles I'll. Just simply explain this so then I mean it seems like an ad for an ad, but I'm explaining to you. What's about to happen here, so if I go to this page right here, this bundle here is normally $2.99 right. If you want a discount and your part and you're watching these videos live, you know shoot us an email, so you're watching the videos live, and we can get you a $ 50 discount on that. If you ask the same goes over here, if you want the video learning only so the idea is that if you have this you're going to get what they call FM starting point, enhanced FM starting point enhance it has it's the basic CRM, but we put some Extra little nuggets of goodness in there, if you're, getting the video only bundle normally does it come with it just email us and ask for it. I will send you a copy of the enhanced starting-point. What is straight so, if you're, watching this and and and you have our annual training, then what I'll do is you get this version of starting point? So this is the basic starting point right here and what happens? If we put extra buttons over here that do extra capable kinds of things and you can just drag the buttons and drag them on here, and so we had already dragged on the button over here. It's called create a PDF right and, and so what we do is over here is you could take the PDF, create the PDF drag it to desktop. So we covered this the other day.
The process is almost identical. So what you do is you have to see how this is going to work. What you do is a couple tips. First, you go to FileMaker Pro you're gonna go to preferences, you're going to make sure your advanced tools are turned on and if they're not then go and turn it on, then quit FileMaker and reopen it. You need to have this tools menu at the top. Then what you're going to do is to see how these things work as an example, so you can steal the script out and use it. It yourself is that you need to watch it run, and so what you do is you're going to say. Script, debugger show the script debugger. So what this does it's going to, instead of the script just running every line like as fast as it can it's going to run each line of code separately, and you can watch what happens. There's also the ability to send right, like I hit this button right here, it's going to send it by email right. So it's going to attempt to send this invoice to this guy, this booming guy with this really bad email here that won't work, but so it's going to run script 1202. So I press the, but so I can stop it. Look one! Stop it! I'm gonna press it again so when I press it now, the script debugger is interrupting it and we step through it. So I miss a step and it's going to run script 1202 it's going to then I can step through and the little green comments or our comments to you about. You know: what's going on we're not using QuickBooks or we're using the web publishing engine? No, so then we come down here, we're going to commit and freeze the window. Now, when we're doing script debugging, the freeze window is ignored because it's redrawing after every step, so the freeze window doesn't really work with script, debugger and so they're gonna check to make sure this has an email address. Yes, it does now, we see the amount email address over here being a bad address, it's not a great address and, and so the the it will fail, but it doesn't know what's going to fail so then what we do is we set the email into a Variable it doesn't really matter you could step through this. The whole idea is, I'm not going to give you every answer right here. We only have a limited amount of time, but I'm gonna steer you to where to go when I'm gone. So when the broadcast goes away, you want to watch the training videos or see how this works.
This is you step through it here right, so you're gonna step down through here, you're gonna make sure that check is checking for a multi-page invoice. So you have so many line items, it has to be a multi-page right. We don't have that. So now it's going to come down here and it's going to determine what kind of layout we're using so I'm OGG. I have a layout for the PDF right and so on and John wants me to cover the six steps again. I will cover that. Okay, yes, yeah, the problem is yeah, it's just the way that was written. So we have a question so obviously there's a very interesting dialogue going here on the slack on the twitch side. Awesome, I'm glad for the question, but yeah I can get back and stuff. Let me finish this with the I'm Agra quit, so sending me once again we're sending a we're, creating an invoice, we're sending it out via email and all the code you need to see is in the starting point. It's basically free, if you want, if you have the, if any of you want the enhanced version, just email us a listen to you, so it's checking the layout. So it goes to the layout. So this is what I mock said: yeah I've got a layout, and here it is right here then, what it's going to do it's going to check to see if we can do a barcode from the Todd, guy's barcode that was a couple days ago, we're not Doing that it's going to jump out now, the next thing it's going to do it's going to create the PDF through these steps right here. These are the critical steps set on script 1202, step 73. 74. 75 right through here. The idea that's going to create a PDF and essentially save it to the desktop is the idea or it saves it to the temp folder.
In this case it might save it to the temp folder, and so the next thing it does. This is the next. So the other day we're talking about saving it to the desktop. That's really step one of sending out any email, you create it, you save it somewhere, then you create an email and you attach it which is kind of the critical piece here. So that's line 82 right hereWe're gonna use the email clock. Okay, I'm not sure if I left out an email client, but that's what it would do right here. I'm gonna step down. It's probably gonna jump yeah, it did so it thinks it's sending out through the SMTP server. The point is: it's going to create an email and send it out if you're using the local email client. It'll pop open your mail clients like here, it'll pop it open wherever it went, hello where's my mail message: viewer know what I want to do. Just being stupid yeah, so I've got my spam email here from well. Even I got mail for myself. Hey there. We are so there's our video, but what it's going to do is it's going to create it in the outbox here and attach it. So it's pretty slick, so that's how this works. That's the code that you want to go in here, take apart and play with okay, so we built it for you already. It has a lot of extra options in it. You're just going to keep the simple option. You decide where they're going to send it out through SMTP, which is directly SMTP, is where FileMaker, client or basically the client that's running, is going to communicate directly with a mail server. It's gonna skip your email program. It's not going to use a plug-in! It's going to send it directly out to an email server up on the cloud somewhere. So that's where that works.
So hopefully, I've answered that question. I'm gonna pivot back and go back here. So yeah! Sorry, Brian, didn't understand the question. But hopefully I did answer the question. In terms of the drip capability. That is definitely a capability in the FileMaker platform. Is it cheaper than other systems compared to like Salesforce? Salesforce starts at about 85 dollars per user per month for any real deployment FileMaker, depending upon what level you buy that at five to ten users, just the platform itself is gonna be about now about Twenty dollars per user per month is the lowest tier. They are there for that. So once again, I'm over here, sneezing and stuff. So I am not sick. I'm not sick, trust me like that, but I have seven rescue cats and I have allergies. So how stupid is that right, so cool so yeah, so he's there saving his the email into the temp folder. We see that so spectra, yeah Brian's question was the Archaea, but for a company to accept input from a company website to their FileMaker solution. Okay, I didn't understand that so let's just address that from Spectre 207, can a company website talk to a FileMaker solution? Yes, it can, if you're using FileMaker server, it's probably the easiest to wire up.
So once again we talked about deployment options. So the one person over here asked about deployment options I'll I'm gonna go ahead and sideline this. For the time being, I'm going to pin it back to my checklist of things, the things to consider, my tips for kicking over a CRM for your company right so step one. I basically tell people that you know you think about the FileMaker platform. If you can find an off-the-shelf system that works exactly the way you want it to and you're confident with that company and it's cheap, then then use that FileMaker value. Is it highly customizable? So, for example, let's talk about accounting very simply. If you need an accounting system and you have highly creative accounting practices, using QuickBooks is probably not a great idea. Quickbooks is cheaper than building your own FileMaker system because you have to buy FileMaker , then you have to build it yourself or hire a developer or get a coach to help you and that's where the cost comes in. The real cost to FileMaker platform is not the license. It's getting the help that you need, after the fact, right, um, and so the so Salesforce is a can system, and generally people use it customed to the box.
It's just the way it is. You can get developers to help you with things that they're really expensive, so get a developer to try to help you customize salesforce. You hear people swearing and talking about big data systems, and you know it's $ 250 an hour on a cheap day. Stuff Salesforce is not a low, it's not a small medium-sized business solution. There are some medium businesses that use it, but once again you have to if you need a really to customize your business process like every business. I've ever met almost exclusively has their own way of doing business. They have their own customized processes that are different. The way their workflow works.A customer moving to their organization is different. FileMaker allows you to customize for that pretty easily with, certainly with you know, either you learn it yourself. You get a coach to help you. They can be inexpensive. If you have a lot of it, you need it done really fast. Then we just go all the way with a senior developer and have them bang it out for you, but there's more cost for that. So the question here is: is so, as you start to go through this checklist of things, I'm going to finish this checklist, then we'll get down to the deployment option which gets back to the spectra to a7s conversation, so FileMaker platform seriously. Consider downloading a free copy of FileMaker Pro the trial. The software runs for 45 days. If you're having a problem with any of this shoot me an email to support@rcconsulting.com because in 30 minutes the live stream will be over yeah so and I'm gonna get back to Brian here's talking about deployments. Oh, so you do, then you have a copy of FileMaker running. You download a free CRM like this one right here. If I'm starting point, which is FM starting point com, the next thing you're going to do is look at custom downloading it, customizing or removing the elements you don't need, maybe getting a coach to help. You get some training whatever's within your budget, then importing the data somewhere around the time you start to import data in. Are you customizing, you're gonna want other people to see it? You need buy off from the people in your organization, to you know, approve it.
They need to see the value of it like you know, if you're, a middle manager person and you have limited budget and you're trying to bring in a system like Brian might be trying to do, then the issue becomes one where you need to show it to People to get them to buy to see the value that once people see the value of something they will typically support it. Once you get down that road, then it gets into a conversation where, where II echo Foxtrot Golf 52 efg 52 is talking about whether the server is with your deployment options for the server arm, and currently there are really three deployment options for the server. You have FileMaker server software, it's the on-premise software, it's Mac and Windows, and there has been conversation about that being made available for Linux, that software can actually be deployed locally in your home or office. I should say home office or whatever you want. Wherever you have a local data center or your local stuff set up, it could be in your office. You can also take FileMaker server and deploy it on a Windows machine up in the cloud with Amazon. We do that a lot, so people like the flexibility of FileMaker server, but they still deploy into the cloud which gets it out of their office, so they don't have to worry about it. The other option is FileMaker cloud.
Now. FileMaker cloud is the current version of it called 2.0. If you already have found the mega cloud you're using right now, you're using FileMaker, Claude 1.0 FileMaker in their technical documentation, and things like that. Well you'll see references to version water version 2. If you talk to sales and marketing, they don't try to differentiate that because they think it confuses people which it does. But in training like this, we have to be very specific, so cloud. The very first version of FileMaker cloud came out four years ago or so, and it had a lot of well. The limitations were primarily setting it up . It took about three hours for a technical person to set it up. It's very difficult. If you got really good at doing it took about an hour and a half of a very technical person to set it up way beyond the skill set of an average user or developer, even a basic FileMaker developer, it was too much for them. So that was Claude 1.0 back in September. If I release cloud 2.0, they are starting to get the bug fixes in it, starting to look pretty good, it's fairly easy to set up and that purchased. When you do, that includes the license of the software and the hardware on one bill, so you so they completely take care of the whole thing for you. It's a little more pricey and expensive, but considering they take care of the hardware and the software for you and you don't have to really worry about it, that's pretty great! So that's where the deployment conversation comes from, and so what ends up happening is that when you're gonna connect from a web server so once again we're back to the conversation from Brian and inspector to a southern Claris .For that clarified it. For me, I really appreciate that yeah, so efg 52 talks about we're gonna spend some time on deployment alpha. I guess for the rest of the hour here, and so the idea is that there are different capabilities. You know, okay, so all three deployment options, FileMaker server cloud, one and cloud to all - have a very similar basic set of capabilities.
They all will host a FileMaker file and, if you're using FileMaker Pro FileMaker Go or FileMaker Webdirect, you cannot really tell the difference between them. There's no way to tell which kind of server so it's transparent to the user. Okay, how would you select one of those? In fact we were just shooting an updated video for our new, updated video course coming out in May. Where we talked about, you know where the kind of the benefits and issues are really a cloud. One is being deprecated if you're using cloud one you're going to be forcibly moved at some point. That's the first thing to understand. So really you can't buy cloud one at this point. If you already have it, you can renew it for a couple. More years, but eventually they want you to move the cloud, so you have found it really. The conversation is about FileMaker server and cloud to cloud is the cloud. If you go to claris.com, you see I'm talking about cloud from the sales marketing side, that's cloud and and so really what is the difference? So a cloud FileMaker server at the end of the day has more options for hooking in and connecting and communicating with an outside web source. So if Brian had come to me and said hey, I want this to deploy and work right now there are. We have outstanding tech support issues with Claris that they have not replied to at some point. We think they'll reply to them, but we're having a hard time getting some of the web technology to connect and you some people say it works great. But I have some of the sharpest FileMaker people in the community working for me and there's a definite issue, breakdown issue or bug. That's preventing the cloud from really communicating with a web server at the current time. So the cloud it came out was version 1.0. Really in September, it's a fairly new capability, and, and so it's got some neat things in it. There's a FileMaker ID capability basically.
This idea of Active Directory IMAGE is talking about directory. When you see ad say the part of the interesting with the conversations we have a broad group of people here about three people here chatting amiably chatting back and forth on the twitch, which is great. But there are a number of other people who are watching. Who doesn't understand the context so the FileMaker server, the FileMaker server that runs on Mac Windows and eventually Linux, is the most flexible. It's the most mature product, it's the most, in my opinion, reliable in terms of having an issue you know like, for example, like we can't get the web server to talk to the cloud to do. The web servers talk to Claude one, just fine, but that's been in the market for four years. Cloud 2 has been in the market for, for you know, five months or something and it should be working, but we don't know why it's not so we're chasing that down. So I'm not gonna recommend something to you that doesn't work for us and I've got some of the sharpest guys around. So at some point, they'll fix that. So if you're trying to do a web page that talks to your database back-end right, then that's where really at this point, you want to use FileMaker server and then you have choices of using the FileMaker data API to connect and talk to it or like the PHP gateway, so let me show you another demo, I'm gonna pop this up right here. This will blow you away. Well, some of you'll be like oh wow, that's great. Some of you are like no big deal. I'm gonna try FileMaker! I'm gonna type this right. Here I recommend you, you type out, try FileMaker the entire word and and don't abbreviate. It would be my recommendation just to keep everyone out of trouble. If I go to try FileMaker right now, it's gonna bring up this page right here.
The structure of the page is an HTML file, but the data in here is coming out of FileMaker, and so this is a free tool that we have called the FileMaker video library, publication, kit and what it does is. I can actually yeah. Here's the here's, the here's, the problem and here's the issue. So in this specific situation we wanted. We wanted to have a way where you could have this. These are records in FileMaker right, the container, the image everything these are records and FileMaker. You can turn this down and look at additional videos here right. Oh, I want to see this. I want to see this and what we do is we play these videos through Vimeo? Why do we play the videos through Vimeo, because what happens is: is that if you're a sales or marketing person and you're taking a really short video course we're going to explore whether very Laur is the right platform for you wow that there's that guy right there? I don't know who that is so this is a plank to Vimeo. If you play stuff through YouTube, which a lot of people will do, YouTube is going to put your competitor videos on there. They're gonna put your try to distract people like the five most amazing cat tricks this week or the fails or people you know, walking off buildings and doing stupid stuff YouTube is trying to keep you engaged and and clicking and spending time and getting distracted. So you can pay Vimeo, you know ten twenty bucks a month or whatever it is pretty inexpensively and you can run video just like you would with YouTube, but it doesn't try to spam, you with advertisements, and so what we did is we built our own system That allows us to basically, if I close, that it runs out of FileMaker. We drive this out of FileMaker, yet the videos don't go off to the 10 most important cat videos. So, if you're interested in more about what kind of what this is, you want to download and play with it, we can even have a training session where we talk about it.
If you go to FM Starting Point and then you go to the marketplace right here, you can see the vivarium FileMaker, video library, publication kit and it's got the overview, video, the detail, video and it shows you how it works, and so You can download it for free. If you want help getting it rolled out, then we have engineers who can help you with that, not a problem so, but this is a classic case of FileMaker driving data from a web server in this case we're displaying it as a directory, but it could have Been a data entry that so cool, so additional questions yeah. So so so, let's talk about the deployment option. It's a FileMaker server! If you choose FileMaker server, mac or windows, it's the cheapest licensing option to get into FileMaker. But you have to provide your own hardware. People have their own mac servers or windows servers in their offices. If you have an IT team and your IT team is very security-conscious and they want to build their own server and do their own server, and you know they kind of get territorial. Then the FileMaker server. Software is what we're talking about, what you need to understand, what we say: final makers, a lot of people say FileMaker server and that's such a loose term, so FileMaker server is either the hardware or the software or people refer to it. As my FileMaker server, which means kind of both of those things together right so when I say FileMaker server, I'm actually talking about the software, that's Mac or Windows, then you have FileMaker cloud which is a service, and so when you go through the process of purchasing Or setting that up or you could have us help you with that, whatever you need to do, it's going to run it on Amazon now it runs it on Amazon, it's abstracted. You really can't tell us running on Amazon. You administer and manage the whole thing through a web interface on your end, so you never talk to Amazon, which is really slick, and so it has the benefits of low overhead and low cost of setup. It doesn't take your tech support guys to set it up, which is great. It has fewer options in terms of flexibility in some ways it has a couple good things in it. We could have a conversation where you just talked about clouds. If you folks are interested in doing that, we can schedule that for another day, but for example, if I go over here to FileMaker and I say open, I could go to a house, I say show hosts on this computer.
I have my FileMaker server here. I have 18 servers there. I have an ETS server somewhere else in here that's running, and this is actually my FileMaker cloud 2 machine. That's running up on Amazon, so it's running right here, and so I can actually come over here. I can open this up and it'll. Ask me for username and password unless I have it set to auto enter, which I might do yeah it set to auto enter. Did I do this? Let me close this one right here, so I want to make sure I'm gonna make sure I did this correctly here. That was so easy.
Consulting and Development Office:
3130 De La Cruz Blvd Suite 110 Santa Clara, CA 95054
Phone: (408) 492-9701
ACCESS OUR MAIN WEBSITE - https://fmstartingpoint.com - FileMaker CRM
Driving Directions