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Paul Bostwick's
Links to White Papers of Interest to
FileMaker Users and Evaluators

Here are some papers I have found that might interest the FileMaker Community and those teaching themselves about database design and trying to make decisions regarding database platform selection. If you know of some interesting papers that should be linked to... Let me know!

These white Papers are the property of their respective publishers so the links take you to the last known location of the papers.

FileMaker as a company, and workgroup database software: How it fits into the business IT environment.
The Aberdeen group wrote this for FileMaker, Inc and it is written to address (without being too direct) fears of going with a non-microsoft software company and interoperability concerns correctly raised by in house IT folk. As a result it is a pretty good overview of the technology space that filemaker fits into... go get it here.

A somewhat dated (but still interesting) IDC paper that addresses, via case studies, the pros and cons for adopting FileMaker Pro into the corporate environment .

This paper is tied to research into the use of FileMaker in various corporate example sites and concentates on evaluating the real value of allowing employees to self-serve on IT projects. Interestingly it does not address the additional benefit that comes from having "non-IT" staffers cross training via problem solving and modeling in FileMaker. It does not get discussed much but the exercise of doing work in FileMaker can help non-IT staff understand the constraints required by database projects... go get it here.

A clever approach to automating tasks in a multi computer environment: Robots.

The folks at Waves In Motion produced this white paper to cover a clever use for a spare computer and their script scheduler plug-in. You don't really need to use their very good plug-in either. You can just have a script that loops and loops and loops waiting for the time to be right or the conditions to change. I did this for an automated pdf production and emailing system. It just ran a search for new requests and worked on them. Eitherway, with or without the plug-in it is a clever way to automate some, especially the slower, patience tapping items... go get it here.

Normalization Primer! from the developers of the QuickTool development system.

Pretty easy to read and brezily written guide to normalization. I'm working on my version of the same paper but this will certainly move you in the right direction... go get it here.