As You Were

Over the last few years, Claris have been making changes across their platforms including introducing some new products. We've been slow in how much we communicated about this  because on the whole the changes were not going to have a huge impact, or at least not in the short term, and we've been uncertain on how it would all work exactly…

Without going into great detail, Claris intended to have two platforms, the original FileMaker Platform that we all know and love, and a new one called the "Claris Platform" that would encompass the new products as well as a new version of FileMaker itself under a new name.

Claris Studio

As part of this, they released a new product, Claris Studio, which is essentially an easy-to-use, purely web-based, database and form builder. This would allow users to spin up a web form for things like conference registrations, internal forms etc etc. The data captured in these forms would then flow through into Claris Pro, the FileMaker Pro type app on the Claris Platform side the equation.

Studio has the makings to be a great addition to the product range from Claris and a very useful compliment to FileMaker. As a product it’s still in its infancy, and Claris are making changes to it on a very regular basis. I think that in another six to twelve months we'll start seeing all sorts of use cases and ways that it can help expand on the capabilities of FileMaker.

We recently used Studio in the organisation of the Reconnect.Sydney conference, the local APAC for FileMaker developers. It helped us build forms for speaker registrations, filter the speakers we wanted, collect their bio’s, photos etc. All this was spun up without any coding required, no need to set up a server, and zero deployment effort.

Simplification

Before we go too deep into all of this, things have changed, and we believe for the better and simpler: Claris announced last month that they are going to go with just the single platform moving forward, that being the "Claris platform", comprising of:

In short, they are consolidating the new products with the tried and true FileMaker line, and calling it the "Claris platform", but keeping the FileMaker name and product as it is (confused yet?!) 

The big win for you if you have FileMaker already is that Claris Studio which was limited to the new Claris Platform, will now work with the current FileMaker product line.

All up we think this is a great move by Claris, they listened to feedback about the two platforms, and have made the right decision. What it has shown to us is that Claris are continuing to try things, sometimes they don’t get it right, but they are trying, and we think thats great.

If you'd like to know more, here's Claris' own recent presention on their platforms: