welcome to the introduction to webdirect 13,and also optimizing your filemaker solution for webdirect 13. i'm richard carlton, andi'm going to be your presenter for this video. a little bit of background of who i am. i'mthe ceo of rc consulting. we have a staff of 27. and we're based both in the centralcalifornia area, as well as the dallas fort worth area in texas. i'm a video trainer forvtc videos, and we're also producing a series of training videos for the filemaker 13 platform.the next training series that we have will be out in early 2014 on filemaker go. we alsohave a follow on series on filemaker webdirect 13. so what will you get out of watching thisvideo: i want to make you successful with your deploymentsof webdirect. and how do we do that? well
we need to know when to deploy webdirect andwhen not to. that means discussing its strengths and its weaknesses. after we've done that,we're going to talk about optimizing your solution for webdirect. now if you pay attentionto that part of the presentation, i'm pretty sure you can double the performance of yourwebdirect solution as it goes out across the network, and i'm not kidding about doublingthe performance. if you really pay attention, you can go faster than that. my team has doneit for our solutions, and i think we can help you do it for yours too. so who should bewatching this video: this session has been tuned for power userswho want to begin to reply web browser solutions without php programming. these are the peoplewho have may be come from the excel world
who have moved to filemaker but they reallyaren't filemaker experts. they want to learn about webdirect and how to take the next step.now if you're an intermediate or an advanced filemaker user and you want to watch thisvideo, you're going to get a lot from it. there are a number of things in here aboutfilemaker 13 that most people don't know, and there's a lot of under the hood thingsin this video about webdirect that generally haven't been published. so if you pay attention,you stand to gain a lot of information as well. also, i'm going to assume that everyonewatching this presentation is already familiar with the filemaker platform and that theyalready have a general understanding of filemaker pro, and filemaker server, and filemaker go.if this is your first exposure to these products,
i highly recommend that watch a differentvideo to get an overview. so what is webdirect? webdirect is the automatic rendering of filemakerlayouts and behaviors to web browser without any php programming or without any programmingat all. it's a completely new deployment capability for the filemaker platform. this is huge.it's a complete replacement for instant web publishing. now webdirect only comes fromfilemaker server 13. so understand that filemaker 13 is what hosts or publishes webdirect. nowit is important to understand also that while we are talking about filemaker 13, the platform,this video section is about webdirect, the first shipping version of webdirect. so webdirectat this point is really a 1.0 product. so keep that in mind. so let me go ahead anddive out of powerpoint and give you a quick
demo of what webdirect is. i've gone aheadand logged onto a copy of fm starting point which is a free starter solution that my companyhas. i'm in filemaker pro 13 right here, and i want to show you how well webdirect actuallyworks. so first off, i'm going to go ahead and fire up my browser here, and of course,you could do this on windows as well. webdirect also works great on internet explorer. i'min safari right now on a mac, but you could also use chrome. i type in the url for myserver, and it's going to show me an available list of the files on the server. i'm goingto go ahead and fire up a copy of fm starting point 3 english. and now what you are goingto see right here is that webdirect actually employs the same security system that's underthe hood in filemaker pro. whatever security
setup that you have--passwords, users, andthings like that--that are in filemaker pro will be preserved and made to work in webdirect.i'm going to type in my password for this database then i press ok, and what happensis that webdirect reproduces fm starting point precisely or almost precisely, it's reallyclose. in fact, at the top of the screen we even get some menu items that we have in filemaker.so if i click here, we have file and edit, insert, view, and records, all these kindsof things. those are actually still up here at the top as well. all these kinds of thingsare still in here. now as we'll discuss in a little bit, webdirect does not have 100%of the things in it that filemaker pro does, but it does have a ton of the features thatyou're likely to need. so i'm going to go
over here to pro and click on contacts, whichis one of the core modules in fm starting point. i'm going to go back over here to webdirect.i'm going to click, make sure safari is up and here you can see it brings up the layoutjust fine. now it's actually displaying of the bottom of the video a little bit, butyou can see it's doing a great job of rendering this layout. in fact, we're on the same recordright here that you could see. i could click on this field and make an edit right here,and then click out. and you could see the filemaker pro has been updated by filemaker13 almost instantly. i also have my record navigational controls here at the top justlike i have in filemaker pro. so that's pretty slick. so users don't have to learn a completelynew interface to use webdirect. so that's
effectively what webdirect is. it's a lightweightclient that works in a web browser, and it gives you probably 70% of the capabilitiesof what filemaker pro is, but it's not as fast as filemaker pro and it definitely hassome real world limitations. so let's continue on with the presentation.now this leads us up to the major points of webdirect. use webdirect for occasional usersor users outside the organization where there may be deployment issues with filemaker pro.and this is important. this is the first release of webdirect and it's not intended for deploymentthrough browsers on mobile devices or phones. this is really important if you're an androiduser, and you think this might be a great tool for the droid. filemaker inc. would lovethis to be a great tool for the droid, but
it's not there just yet. now the team at filemakerengineering plans on improving webdirect through updated releases of filemaker server 13. soits updates are released for filemaker server through v2 or v3 later on this coming year.you will see performance improvements in webdirect; however, with that being said, webdirect atthe current times not engineered for the mobile platform but stay tuned as this is somethingthat we should see in the future which takes us to our next point... webdirect is not free.now this might seem counterintuitive because you access it from a web browser, and webbrowsers are free. but the reality is that you need a connection license to be purchasedand put on your filemaker server in order for filemaker server 13 to be able to publishwebdirect out to browsers. so this means that
webdirect is not a strategy for getting outof purchasing filemaker pro licenses. and this is super important. this gets into thepositioning of webdirect for yourself, your organization, and may be your clients. webdirectis not as powerful as filemaker pro because it runs in a browser. it is not a dedicatedpiece of software. filemaker server has a database engine, and it talks to filemakerpro which has its own database engine. this has historically been the way filemaker hasoperated for 20 years, and filemaker incorporated has been tuning this interaction every yearmaking it better and better. these two engines work together to give customers the best possibleexperience. webdirect is a brand new model and it only features one engine. the filemakerserver has to do all the work, and as a result,
the data has to move back and forth to thebrowser. the browser caches a little bit of the information, but there is no databaseengine there to help it processing or to help it logical calculations to help keep thingsmoving smoothly for the user. so understand the structural differences between the historicfilemaker model and the new webdirect model. because of this, filemaker pro and filemakergo will always make customers happier with their snappier performance, and fully richfeature sets. so with this in mind, consider webdirect for light weight users who don'tuse filemaker often or who us it in a very minimal way. those are types of situationsare users who might be outside the company. may be you have a sales force that is outsidethe company who don't access the database
very often. may be you have a warehouse ina remote location, and they need to update minimal inventory information periodically,or you have a third party vendor who needs to access supply chain information. they needaccess to a limited set of information, and they don't really need to purchase filemakerbut they do need to have deeper access to the database. so instead of paying a lot ofmoney or expending a lot of effort to build a php based website, consider deploying webdirectinstead. now the last sweet spot for webdirect are situations where you might have deploymentissues or the local it organization might not want filemaker installed. if you havea situation like that, webdirect might be the only way to get a filemaker client infront of the user. so now that we've talked
about positioning, let's talk about optimizingour solutions for webdirect. keep in mind, simpler solutions may work fine without modification.but there are several main areas to be concerned with when looking at your solution for deploymentwith webdirect. solutions will break due to fundamental limitations of the web browseras opposed to deployment on a robust filemaker client like filemaker pro. also keep in mindthat web browsers impose a limitation of a single document interface. so if you buildfilemaker solutions where the user has a window open and may be they have a second windowopen and then may be a third window open and the user is interacting with multiple windows,webdirect cannot replicate this behavior. webdirect operates in a single document interfacefor a single window. so you're going to need
to restructure or reengineer your solutionto operate in that fashion if you're one of these people. please understand that thisis a limitation that may require some work from you before you can effectively use webdirect.and there's also going to be some solutions that will need to be optimized at the layoutlevel before they can run effectively or quickly within webdirect. that's what we are goingto spending our time looking at during the rest of this presentation. so we had a realizationwhir testing webdirect and that was back in 2010, we were doing a lot of early testingwith filemaker go, and we had a similar sort of thought back then and that is that filemakergo greatly benefits from purpose built layouts and those are layouts that are specificallycreated in tuned for use on the ipad or iphone
while webdirect benefits the same way fromlayouts that are specifically developed in tuned for it. now if you pay attention towhat we are saying here and then the rest of this presentation and the techniques thatwe are gong to show you, the following techniques will greatly improved the performance overa wide area of network of your solutions as they operate between a filemaker server andclients that are using go and pro. so why will we discussing tips to make webdirectgo faster, these improvements will greatly help your performance between filemaker goand filemaker pro as well. so that's a bonus. so this is a win win win al the way around.so step 1: planning an analysis. we need to look and review our deployment plans. we needto look at what users will be using webdirect,
and what their work flow looks like. we needto look at creating custom layouts and work flow that meets their specific needs. nowat the filemaker's developers conference in 2013, there were a number of sessions thatdealt with users center design. these sessions were recorded as videos, and they're now availableto be downloaded from filemaker's tech net website. so i'm not going to spend a lot oftime discussing users center design, but if you're a good developer, most likely you'realready using user center design. and this is basically the concept of making sure thatthe user is in the center of your design choices as you're developing a database solution.the functions and the capabilities on the layouts are central to the users work flow,and that's super critical here. before you
would consider these items fluffy and notnecessary but now, by taking advantage of user center design, we could really optimizethe work flow and we could really improve the performance of a webdirect solution. step2: layouts should be created specifically and optimized for webdirect. so that's wherewe are going with this. so how do we do that? the tricks that we are going to dive intohere... a couple were talked about at the developer's conference of 2013... but mostof the content here is new and is specific to the filemaker 13 platform. most of thethings that we are going to discuss aren't even possible with filemaker 12. so the firstand most important item, a highlight, is the idea of minimizing the number of objects ona layout. now this is not a new tip, but it
might be new for you to thing about, and i'mgoing to hit you with the simple stuff first. so first, work flow analysis; thinking aboutthe work flow. second is removing unnecessary objects on the layout. what's an object? wellan object is anything on the layout. so the top of the screen, we see a field and a fieldlabel. each of these two objects has their own block of xml and within the xml is somecss. now this is all hidden under the hood in filemaker, but it's important to understandwhat's going on. that box of xml describes the object and how it's drawn on the layout,and it's pushed down through the pipe form filemaker server to the client. normally,it would be pushed down through the network to filemaker pro or to go, but in this case,it's going to the web browser and then it
comes back if there's an update or changeto the data. but the idea is that every time we have an object, another new script of blocklike the information at the top has to be pushed down. so if you have a layout witha ton of objects on it, each object has a block of information just like the one yousaw, and that results in pushing a ton of information down through the network. so onceagain, think about work flow, think about optimizing screens, and think about givingthe users just what they need to see and not giving them everything including the kitchensink. so think about a more simple layout. now this layout might be too simple, but thinkabout simplifying your layouts. this layout here has a whole lot less descriptive blocksof xml than the first one, which leads us
to our first hot tip, "take a busy layout,break the objects into functional work flow, and we already talked about work flow." first,we are going to identify the pieces that we need and then break them across multiple layoutsif possible. some webdirect users may not need all the layouts. so why make them loadall those objects on screen at one time? so this is a complete screenshot of fm startingpoint, the contact screen. so let's say, for the sake of argument, that we determined thatthis is a very important piece of work flow, and they need everything on here. now thisis a lot of information to push down, so may be for the users who are on webdirect aregoing to break this down into functional segments because they don't need all the informationon screen at one time may be we determined
that they only need the first block initially.so we give them this piece for them to edit and update. now this might be one way to go;now may be it's not the right way for your situation, but it's one possible way. andthen from there, they could go to the next screen, and you could build a button baseor menu driven system to take them to the various screens, but some of the users won'tneed to go to all the sections. and so the point is why have them load everything onone screen when they only need one or two of the smaller layouts because the small layoutsload very rapidly. webdirect is very sensitive to pushing a lot of objects down through thenetwork through the web browser. so the goal is to really lighten the load... so keep thatin mind. so step 1 was to review the work
flow and determine what the users really need.step 2: limit the objects; think about how you are going to limit those things, removethe items you don't need, break them down into different layouts. and step 3 is to getinto customized styles and themes for your layouts, and this is the next great step thatis only made possible with the release of filemaker pro 13. custom styles and a customtheme for a layout are not possible in filemaker 12. so let's go ahead and dive into this.we're going to go ahead and switch out our power point here and jump into filemaker.so here i have a copy of fm starting point, and i want to look at optimizing this fordeployment on web direct. now, i have this application called wireshark. this is an applicationthat allows me to measure the bandwidth between
filemaker server and a filemaker client likefilemaker go or pro or in this case, webdirect. now i have a copy of fm starting point, andi have put it up on my filemaker 13 server, and i have gone ahead and logged on to fmstarting point with my copy of filemaker pro 13. we're going to use wireshark and measurethe bandwidth from the main menu right here to the contacts data entry screen right here.this is a simple process of jumping layouts which is what we want to do. now i am in filemakerpro right now, and that is where we have to make all of our changes. so wireshark is goingto measure the bandwidth from here to here. so first off, i'm on a layout here. this isa layout that we created in filemaker 12. so like most users, if you really want tocustomize your layouts in filemaker 12, you
end up using the classic theme and customizingthe objects to meet your particular needs. this is pretty common. at the fiemaker developer'sconference in 2013, when asked for a show of hands, a vast majority of the users wereusing the classic themes to customize their layouts just the way they want it. this isbecause themes in filemaker 12 could not be customized and saved. the problem with usingthe classic theme is for every object on a layout, there is a complete set of descriptivecss that tells filemaker how to draw that object,and this is really wasteful. the ideais to have these objects that are very similar share the same description. and that is whatwe can do by sharing a custom style. what i'm going to do is walk you through how wemade this layout twice as fast. so first off,
i'm going to create a new window. now i'mstill on this contacts layout, and i don't want to mess it up. so i'm going to go aheadand say... layout... duplicate layout. next, i'm going to change the theme for this layout.i could do that by going to the layout.. change theme. now, the themes under aspire are areall new to filemaker 13. this is a completely new family of themes that are part of filemaker13. i'm going to select vibrant because this is kinda cool. it reminds me of the a layoutthat we were using previously. and i look at this and it's not to horrible, but it isdifferent than what i had before. and so i asked one of my engineers that is new on theteam to sit down, and he spent about half a day retooling this layout to make it looklike the original design because i kinda like
the original layout over here. i thought itlooked a little nicer, and i said, "can't you take this and tweak it and customize it.so he went into layout mode, and he actually went over here and went under data in theappearance panel and made all sorts of adjustments, customizations, and all sorts of little tweaksand things. and what he would do is he would take an object like this, would go into style,and after adjusting it the way he want it, and he would say this is going to be a newstyle. and he would say this is going to be fm starting point's standard edit box andsay ok. now that's going to be a saved style; and now that's part of this theme which ispart of this layout now. now that has its own block of css. now i can click on theseother similar objects over here and still
have their own block of css. i'm going toselect all these over here... all these everywhere over here, and i'm going to tell them to usethe standard saved style. so we have a shared style. they're all sharing the same style,instead of them having their own block of descriptive css. they're all sharing the sameblock, and suddenly this layout is already much lighter. now it was already much lighterwhen i went to this new theme here. now it was radically transformed when i convertedit to the vibrant theme under the hood, but we wanted to customize it with a shared styleso it had a design that my team approved of. instead of styling each item individually,giving it its own complete set of css, i want to create a shared style. so what we endedup with after a half a day of work was a layout
that looked like this. so here you can seewhat we have is a layout that looks almost identical. the difference is this layout righthere is the original using the classic theme, but this layout right here, we have createdall of the shared styles between the fields here, and it has its own custom theme so thislayout right here is much lighter and that is the critical piece of knowledge that iam trying to explain, and i hope that you understand that you can take away and employyour own solution. so if you look right here at these labels, you can see that these labelsshare their own shared style. if you look at these buttons across the top, they sharea shared style. so you get the idea that you have shared styles between similar objects.so what was the difference in bandwidth between
this layout and classic and this layout witha custom theme? this layout to push to download one time as we navigate from home was 850kilobytes of information or almost a megabyte of information, and that's quite a bit fora single layout. by creating a custom theme for the layout at shared styles, a singleprocess of going from the home layout to the contacts layout was reduced to 425 kilobytesor about half the original size which may translate to about twice the speed of theoriginal depends on network conditions but you may get twice the speed. so we thoughtthat was an amazing improvement. so as a side note, we also decided that since we took afilemaker design and we were monkeying quite a bit, what if we took a filemaker designand just left it unaltered? and we did that
too. we actually went to this layout overhere and this one here is based upon the stone theme, and it is unaltered. of course fromtheme to theme, the weight will change somewhat and the cost of going home to the contactsdata entry layout went down to 225 kilobytes. so we go from 850 kb to 425 kb, which is ahuge improvement and the interface looks almost identical and if you're willing to give upon your custom design entirely, you can cut the design down in half again. so now i haveshowed you how much you can save if you set up your own customized style and shared themes,let me explain to you a little bit more about how this works. first off, if you click intoan object and make customized changes for that individual object, then you are creatingadditional level of css that is local to that
object. this is called a local override forthe css. now this is a bit technical but effectively what you are doing is creating a whole lotof extra work, and the downside is that filemaker has to push that down from filemaker serverdown to the web browser when a user accesses that object. so try to minimize making individualcustomizations to objects. if you are going to make individual customizations, try totake that object, go to style, and save the style or create a new style. this allows thoseobject attributes to be saved at the layout level and to be shared with other objectson the layout without additional penalty. another hot tip that you should consider isthat the format painter tool up here in the corner should be avoided at all cost if you'rebuilding a layout for deployment on webdirect.
and that's because of the way the format paintertool works. say for example that the department field has a style on it that you want to useon other fields. well historically on filemaker, you would click the format painter tool, andit's going to remember the settings for this object. now the settings that you would thinkit would remember would be the effect the department field at the shared style mainfield. if i click over here and paint the primary address right here, you'll noticethat the indicator has gone red right here. this is because the format painter tool didnot actually copy as you would expect from the department to the primary street. theformat painter tool took the department settings and copied the shared style down to the primaryaddress, but copied it and made it unique
to the address 1 field. it's a bit of an abstractconcept, but the whole idea of this process that we've been going through is to make surethat all the objects in here are sharing the same block of css and the bottom line is thatthe format painter tool does not preserve the shared style. it should've preserved itfrom the department field to the primary street, but it didn't do that. it actually took theinformation from the shared style and copied it in to the local override for the primarystreet, which basically created a whole additional block of css under the hood of this layout.now it looks fine on screen, and the user will never know what happened and the developer,if they're not paying attention, will have no idea what's going on. but if you use theformat painter and effect enough fields under
the hood, you're going to cause a performancepenalty in rendering this layout. filemaker is aware of this limitation and their officialrecommendation is as i described before is to actually select the fields that you wantto have use a shared style then manually select the style panel in the inspector. i want totake a quick moment and address the issue of having a custom style and shared styleson a layout that are optimized for webdirect while using a solution in a in a hybrid environment.and what i mean by this, i'm talking about an environment where some users are usingfilemaker pro 13, and some users are using filemaker 12 products. now of course, strictlyspeaking, filemaker 12 and filemaker 13 share the same file format. so filemaker 12 canopen filemaker 13 files and filemaker 13 can
open filemaker 12 files. and they can actuallyopen the same files on the filemaker server at the same time, but that can lead to someinteresting situations when you start incorporating filemaker 13 specific features into your solutionand then going back and opening that solution in filemaker 12. custom themes and customstyles are unique to filemaker 13, and filemaker 12 does not know how to recognize them. thisis the layout that we previously created in filemaker 13 with the customized theme, rccvibrant. this has been optimized for delivery for webdirect. now what i'm going to do isgo ahead and open this with filemaker 12 on my machine. i'm opening up the same databaseto the same layout. i actually am in filemaker 12 right here as you can see and is generallyrendering okay, but that will not happen in
all situations. and as you can see right here,there are some differences in certain functionality in the layout. in this case, the labels hereare not rendering correctly, and this cannot be corrected for filemaker 12 users. overhere, you can see in filemaker 13 that it is rendering the labels correctly, but overhere in 12, we have a fairly minor defect, but it can't really be corrected for filemaker12 users without negatively effecting the 13 users. the keypoint to understand is thatyou can open a layout with a custom theme in filemaker 12, but it may not render thelayout correctly. if you go so far as to actually go into layout mode in filemaker 12 with alayout set with a custom theme, then you're really asking for trouble because filemaker12 does not understand custom themes or shared
styles. in fact, if you go up under layoutand down to changed theme, the custom theme that we defined, rcc vibrant, is not evendisplayed; filemaker 12 does not know what to do. so it's going to default back to whatit knows which is cool grey in filemaker 12. now in this situation, the variations between12 and 13 are not too bad, but in a lot of cases, 12 is going to have a much more seriousallergic reaction to what we're going to see. we run the risk of breaking objects in thelayout to the point where they will not work and that is especially true if you are oneof the developers who manually went under the hood in filemaker 12 and customized thecss on your own. that activity was not approved by filemaker incorporated and was not an approvedmodification to a filemaker database. and
it's one of the situations where if you havebeen messing around under the hood with css to a filemaker file and you take that filemakerfile up to filemaker 13, things may get real exciting because filemaker 13 assumes thatthe css is gong to exist in a very specific format. so if you've been playing under thehood behind the scenes in a non-approved fashion in your filemaker file, you may see unexpectedor aberrant behavior. and this is why filemaker incorporated specifically warn users againsthacking the css in filemaker 12. so filemaker's general guidance on this topic is that ifyou're going to have users accessing layouts in a hybrid environment, make sure the layoutsthat are accessed by filemaker 12 users do not contain custom themes and custom styles.of course, if you think about this, that makes
sense because the first lesson that we'velearned in this video was that webdirect layouts should have their own specialized layoutsdedicated for their own purposes. that's just another reason to follow our own recommendations.now a couple of long-standing recommendations i want to remind you of... first off, stickinglarge images on your webdirect layout is generally not recommended. so if you have a beautifulpicture of hawaii or of a race car or may be a fighter plane -- something like thatthat you think is really cool that you could put in a background, that's going to causea lot of overhead and bandwidth on your network connection and that's going to penalized theperformance of your webdirect layout. it is recommended not to use a lot of images onyour webdirect screens. using the filemaker
tool set is a preferred method for creatingbuttons as opposed to creating images in photoshop and copying and pasting those buttons or importingthem into filemaker pro. a couple of other tips about webdirect, tab and slide controlsgenerally have a lot of object data associated with them. use of tab and slide controls isgenerally not recommended; however, keep in mine that if you do use them, object dataon the non-viewed panels does not cause an immediate download penalty. that means thatif the slide or tab panels that you do not immediately see will not be downloaded immediately.if you slide or tab to those panels, there will be a delay as a web browser goes backto the server with webdirect to refresh and get new information to display on those panels.the same is also true on pop overs. if you
have a filemaker layout, there will be noimmediate penalty for having a pop over available on a layout; however, activating a pop overin webdirect will cause the browser the ping the server to get additional information asto how to display the contents of that pop over. so understand that there is a penaltyin terms of communication back to the server if you move slide or tab control panels oryou display a pop over. now something cool came up during our testing and that is there'sone area where webdirect is really awesome and that is doing sorts on the server as opposedto filemaker pro. why is this? well doing sorts on filemaker server where the data islocal on the hard drive of the filemaker server is always faster than sending the data downacross the wire so that the client does the
sort. structuraly, the filemaker platformdoes sorts by sending the data down through the wire from filemaker server to filemakerpro so that filemaker pro does the actual sort. this is kind of an interesting issuewith filemaker, i'm not going to get into details of why this is, would filemakers interactingwith pro and go, it actually does send all the data down to the client so the clientdoes the sorting. this actually can result in some fairly slow performance when comparedwith webdirect. webdirect forces everything to be done on the server, and if the serverdoes a local sort of the data, that happens right on the machine where the data resides.so as you can see from this test, we had about 350,000 records. and webdirect performed thesort in about 57 seconds as opposed to 225
seconds in filemaker pro. now we have themachine information down below if you're interested, but that makes filemaker sorts about 400%slower than webdirect. so that's one area where webdirect is much much faster. so nowwe're in the q and a section, and we've collected a number of questions from customers thatbeen emailed to us over the last number of weeks since filemaker 13 shipped and i wantedto address those. so first question is, "can you use webdirectto allow older computers access to filemaker 13?"and the answer is "the requirements for webdirect are pretty high, just like the requirementsfor pro 13. webdirect requires a modern browser and it uses html 5. and so there's some moderntechnology at work. in fact, it's pretty advanced
stuff under the hood to make webdirect workin general. so as a result, you're not going to be able to use a windows 98 machine witha really old browser to access webdirect. i'm going to post the requirements right herethat you need to access webdirect. as you can see, older machines are not supportedvery well with that. and that's unlike what you'll see with citrix users who can use thattechnology with old machines to access more modern applications. webdirect is not intendedto allow old machines to access more modern technology."what're the costs for webdirect?" "well to purchase webdirect, you need to buy connectionlicenses for filemaker server 13. the connection licenses are $180/user, and they are soldin packs of 5. now the $180 price is a perpetual
license, which means it's a forever license.now filemaker does sell annual licenses for people who want to do an annual budget andwrite a check annually, and it's about a third of the cost that way. and that's a concurrentlicense, which means that if you have people who are logging on intermittently, 5 concurrentconnections might service 10 people. so if you have 10 people logging on periodically,only 5 people may be on at one time. so a 5 pack of connection licenses might service10 people just fine. the next question we've received a numberof times, "what are the supported browsers?" the supported browsers are microsoft explorer,safari, and chrome... now there's general agreement that firefox works. but i don'tthink that's official at this point."
"can you use filemaker 11 with webdirect?""you have to convert the filemaker 11 file to the new filemaker 13 file format beforeyou can use it with webdirect. so remember to use webdirect. the file has to be hostedon a filemaker 13 server. so you have to get your filemaker 11 file onto a 13 server, sothat's the path. you have to convert it from the fp7. file format, and all that has tobe done in filemaker pro. so you have to close the file out of pro 11, you're going to haveto open it up with pro 13. pro 13 does the conversion to .fmp12 file format, which isthe new extension. once it's been converted to the new file format, then you need to installthat file up on your filemaker 13 server. once it's on the filemaker 13 server, thenyou'll be in a position to get it hosted with
webdirect."next question, "what devices can access webdirect?" "well just to reiterate, filemaker recommendsthat users do not use mobile devices to access webdirect at this time. so desktop computersand laptop computers are all right. handheld devices like android phones, android tablets,or even iphones and ipads are not recommended for use with webdirect. now they will work,strictly speaking, but the performance i think will be sufficiently poor that you will notbe well served." next question, "i've been working on a filemaker12 file, can i just put it on webdirect?" the answer is, "yes, you can take a filemaker12 file, close it out of pro 12, but you will need to move it up and install it on a copyof 13 server. so if you have a copy of 12
server, you cannot host webdirect. webdirectis a feature unique to 13 server, it's not part of filemaker 12. so you need to have13 server to utilize webdirect." but i think that wraps things up, i appreciateeveryone watching this video. be sure to pass the link on to your friends and subscribeto our channel here on filemakervideos.com. also be on the lookout for our training serieson filemaker go 13, and then our training series for webdirect. we're going to get intothe ins and outs on both of these products more than just optimization. there's a lotof moving pieces with both these technologies, so these training series will be very valuablefor those people building solutions. i also want to thank the team at filemaker, boththe product management team and the engineering
team, for their advice and encouragement inthe production of this video. and so for the team here at rc consulting, i'm richard carlton,and i'll see you next time.