Announcing FMChat – FileMaker Today

By Keefer Rogers On Jul 16, 2012

FMChat lets you collaborate with your other FileMaker users right in FileMaker Pro, sending attachments, images, and links to the records you’re talking about.

Private, secure, scriptable chat on your FM network. A notifications engine for FileMaker. Send attachments, links, and run scripts in your files. Stay in the loop. We just took this for a spin and loved it. Great job Jon & company!!!

Built in FileMaker Pro

FMChat lets you collaborate with your other FileMaker users right in FileMaker Pro, sending attachments, images, and links to the records you’re talking about.

Unlocked and Scriptable

You can even run scripts in your solution from within chats–approving orders, accepting invitations, or closing trouble tickets, for example. FMChat is completely unlocked and scriptable so you can change both the way it works and the way it looks.

See FMChat in Action

Here is a quick video showing the notifications and clickable links in FMChat. Remember, this is all native FileMaker Pro, no plugins required…

Messages and Alerts.
	By default, FMChat comes to the front when you’re in FileMaker to let you know if you have new chats or responses. Each User can control how they’re notified, electing to receive email or SMS notifications when FMChat sees they’re not in FileMaker.
		Notification preferences
Messaging for FileMaker Server Notifications can also come from events in your FileMaker solution: script triggers or server-side scripts can send chats to alert users of important events in the system–like a project’s status changing. For some developers, such scripted notifications may be the most exciting part of deploying FMChat.

Your chats are now a database

Because FMChat is completely built in FileMaker Pro, you can search it like you’d search any other FileMaker table. Search for phrases, dates, attachments, etc.

And you can secure it the same way: FMChat respects FileMaker’s access privileges, so you can easily control the privacy of your chats.

FMChat also lets you enjoy the collaboration and productivity of chat without your users hanging out in public chat networks which may be insecure of distracting.

Store attachments in FM12 containers

Easily share links, files, or images with FMChat, even send links to individual records or found sets in your FileMaker solution. All attachments are stored in FileMaker containers so you can find them even if you don’t remember the conversation they were associated with. Chat is no longer a black hole: it’s a database.

Links can run scripts in your own solutions

You can even teach FMChat to recognize short keywords and run scripts in your solution. For example you can configure Chat so that it turns anything following “Order#” into a link jumping to that order in your solution. You can configure these “data detectors” without getting into scripts: they’re done right in FMChat’s preferences, though you can get in and tweak the scripts if you want to.