Moving from Filemaker 6 to 7 with Lasso

At the TTU College of
Education we are about to embark upon the formidable process of migrating these
server resources to the Filemaker 7 environment. Because we also have many
MS-SQL databases and need better interoperability between databases– especially
to synchronize certain fields based on date and time key fields, this should
eventually be good news. Given the large numbers of databases (around 70) that
need to be migrated from their current location on a box running Filemaker
Server 5.5, and all the customized CDML pages that have been written (mainly by
me) over the past 3 1/2 years, this task is understandably one which I have
mixed feelings about. It will be good in the end, but likely not real fun in
between.

We are also upgrading our
license for Lasso, which has been purchased from Blue World by Omnipilot and is
now called Lasso Professional Server. Today’s discovery
(although it has been out since mid-2004) is the Lasso CDML converter: a free tool that
integrates with Dreamweaver MX 2004 (my web authoring tool of
choice) and converts old CDML pages to Lasso 7 format. Hopefully, this will
streamline and facilitate this conversion process considerably. As we move
further ahead in this process I will post updates here. If anyone else has
experiences, good or bad, about moving web-enabled databases from FMP 6 to 7, I
would love to hear from you and get any advice you are able to
share.

I anticipate at least
initially converting our old CDML webpages to Lasso format and web enabling them
to Filemaker 7 via Lasso. I will also experiment creating web enabled pages for
Filemaker Server 7 Advanced, but what I want to avoid at all costs is having to
do a lot of tedious coding. Lasso Studio for DW MX 2004 is available, I had
a much older version of Lasso Studio many years ago that was OK but still not as
easy and fast as the Filemaker Server Connector wizard included in Claris
Homepage 3.0 (discontinued when Apple bought Claris.) Some friends (who shall
remain nameless here) think I am insane for still liking and even using Claris
Homepage today in 2005, 5 years after it was discontinued. It is good to know I am not alone, and online
tools like wikis available on sites like JotSpot make coded static webpages
using software tools seem like
overkill.

Yet until someone comes out
with an open source WYSIWYG, wizard based connection tool for mySQL using PHP,
Perl, or another scripting language that is free and pretty easy to use, I think
I still may dabble with the older Filemaker 6 and Claris Homepage. It is working
great this term for student blog reflection postings in the Advanced
Multimedia and Video class I am teaching. If something better and
easier comes along I’ll use it, but in general my philosophy is to stick with
what is simple, powerful, and effective for the needs of the task at hand. Not
being a programmer or wanting to become one, Filemaker has fit the bill for my
needs in the past quite well, and I expect it will continue to. We shall
see…..