A FileMaker Minor Datacalypse is Coming

Douglas Alder has an interesting and informative post on the effects of FileMaker ending support forFileMaker Pro 11 this coming September:

I have written before about the need to stay current with FileMaker Pro, operating systems and hardware. I recently received an email from a reader who asked:

Between me and a colleague we built a large database with all the bells and whistles back in the days of FM 5.5 and yes, we fell behind or more to the point my colleague moved on and now I need to upgrade to FM 13. How do I go about doing this?

I responded with a short rundown of what to do, (see below) and thought this was worth sharing as support for the .fp3 and .fp5 format is starting to slip away. Recently FileMaker Inc. has announced End of Life for FileMaker Pro 11 support, which is the last bridge from the past to the future.

While it doesn’t sound earth shaking, there is an angle that could be bothersome.  What if operating system advances render FileMaker 11 unusable, as is it won’t start, or perhaps will start but crashes?  There are a lot of systems running on some version of FileMaker that is pre 11, and versions 7-11 all use the .fp7 file type.  All those solutions could become unusable after an update.  And that would leave users of even older versions–.fp5 or .fp3–out in the cold.

As most FileMaker developers know, pre FileMaker 7 solutions must be upgraded to the .fp7 file format, then upgraded to the newest file format, .fmp12..

While compatibility has not been that big a problem in the past, complicated operating systems and their supporting architectures (think java hear) sometimes break software.

So, if you are running a system that uses .fp7, .fp5, or .fp3, it’s time to start planning the move to the latest version of FileMaker (v 13 as of the date of this post).  Developers: This is a good reason to reach out to your clients and to open a discussion on how you can help them avoid this problem.

And Doug Alder has a step by step guide on how to do this, including links to some helpful articles addressing function changes, architecture changes, and more.

Via…The End is Near – a Minor Datacalypse is Coming | HomeBase Software.

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