Category: All

Better, Faster Random Text for FileMaker

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, bBox, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker Server, Integration, JavaScript, Performance, Python, Testing

We often need large amounts of random text to simulate real-world data loads while building a FileMaker solution. I was looking to create a large chunks of unique data for testing — we’re talking at least millions of characters. Here, I’ll compare the performance of a few methods I tried.

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Why Fast-Growing Teams Outgrow Spreadsheets

by Paul de Hallé
Posted in All, Business, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker 2025, Performance, Reporting, Security, Web Development

In the early stages of building a team or company, spreadsheets are a gift. They’re simple, fast to set up, and familiar to just about everyone. Need to track spend, manage a process, or share information across a few people? Open a new tab in Google Sheets or Excel, and you’re off to the races.

But if your company is scaling quickly as it adds people, processes, and increasing pressure to move faster, spreadsheets can quietly become a liability.

At Beezwax, we’ve worked with hundreds of growing teams who hit the same problem. What started as a clever spreadsheet workaround slowly turned into a fragile, messy system that couldn’t keep up. In this post, we’ll break down why that happens and what comes next.

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See FileMaker analysis tools in action, including InspectorPro 9 — 2025 Claris Community Live

by Beezwax Team
Posted in AI with FM, All, Business, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, FileMaker UX Design, FM Products, InspectorPro, Integration, News, Performance, Security, Tools & Add-ons

Special event featuring Beezwax’s Vincenzo Menanno and other Claris Partners

Gain deeper insight into how your Claris FileMaker solutions are structured and maintained. With the right developer tools, you can make changes confidently and have full visibility into the impact.

Continue reading “See FileMaker analysis tools in action, including InspectorPro 9 — 2025 Claris Community Live” →

Beezwax at Build Grow Learn 2025 – Claris Community Conference

by Beezwax Team
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Business, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker UX Design, News, Project Management

Allison Bell Presents Transforming Time: Five Leadership Strategies to Maximize Impact and Model Sustainable Success

This month, September 8–10, we’re in Greenville, SC for Build.Grow.Learn 2025, a business leadership and growth conference designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and emerging executives. Beezwax is proud to support the event and share strategic insights that help businesses scale sustainably.

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Transforming Time: Strategic Framework for Leaders, Consultants, and Individuals

by Allison Bell
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Business, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker UX Design, News, Organization Development, Project Management

Time isn’t just a constraint—it’s a system. How we engage with time influences how we lead, how we deliver value to clients, and how we build lives that are sustainable and fulfilling.

This article outlines five time transformation strategies that help individuals, consultants, and leaders shift from reactive task management to intentional, purpose-driven action. Grounded in proven operational frameworks and shaped by real-world experience across personal and professional domains, these tools support better focus, sustainable execution, and long-term alignment.

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bBox 1.06 for FileMaker enhances support for macOS text windows and Python

by Simon Brown
Posted in AI, AI with FM, All, bBox, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker Server, FM Products, Integration, Python, Tools & Add-ons

We are pleased to announce the release of bBox version 1.06 for Claris® FileMaker®, which adds support for macOS text windows and many update enhancements, including to bBox’s support for integrating Python code with your FileMaker apps.

bBox is a free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to easily use code libraries. Supporting both macOS & Ubuntu Linux, it has functions to help you work with Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, Bash/Zsh/sh, XPath, and DuckDB. Also included is a demo file that has over 220 examples of how you can put bBox functions to work for you.

If you’re interested in Python integration with FileMaker, also check out bzPython-FM, which uses bBox.

Continue reading “bBox 1.06 for FileMaker enhances support for macOS text windows and Python” →

Retool, FileMaker, Airtable? Picking the Right Stack for Internal Tools

by Paul de Hallé
Posted in AI, AI with FM, All, Business, Claris Connect, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker 2025, Integration, Tools, Web Development

When building internal tools, you’re faced with a tough question that many fast-moving teams don’t ask soon enough:

What’s the right platform stack for what we’re trying to build?

From prebuilt dashboards to low-code platforms to fully custom apps, there are more options for internal tooling than ever—each with its own trade-offs.

  • Retool®
  • Claris FileMaker®
  • Airtable®
  • Custom-built Web Apps
  • …and plenty more depending on the department and the problem.

So how do you choose?

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New power for your everyday tools in FileMaker 2025 – Claris Community Live

by Beezwax Team
Posted in AI with FM, All, Business, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker & OData, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker Data API, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, FileMaker UX Design, FM Products, Integration, News, Performance, Security

Special event featuring Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax, with Claris product team

Watch this Claris Community Live event where Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax will join the Claris product team to discuss the enhancements available with FileMaker 2025 (v22). Learn about streamlined app upgrades, secure server integrations, and a modernized UI, prioritizing user feedback for improved functionality, enabling powerful new features for implementing AI with FileMaker.

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Records, Go Get ‘Em in Claris FileMaker 2025

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, FileMaker, FileMaker 2025, Performance, Techniques

As a FileMaker developer, I have powerful tools. But I have long wished for a highly-efficient mechanism for representing and reproducing any arbitrary set of records. Now, it’s here, with FileMaker 2025:

• GetRecordIDsFromFoundSet – function
• Go To List of Records – script step

This is fantastic. Something I have wished – for a long, long time!

Now let’s cover these new methods, with an example file (which you can also download – see below).

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Monthly Maintenance – Care and Feeding of Linux Servers

by Rami Kanj
Posted in AI, All, DevOps, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker 2025, FileMaker Server, Logging, Monitoring, Performance, Security, Server Administration, System Administration, Web Development

Maintaining the health and security of your Linux servers is more crucial than ever. With any server, you should be using real-time monitoring solutions, and performing backups every day (or more often, depending on data use). And, while you can rely on the OS to automatically install updates–especially on Windows and Mac–with Linux you benefit from a more “managed” approach to regular maintenance.

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The Sunrise, The Clock, And The Map That Covers Everything

by Ryan Simms
Posted in All, Mapping, Uncategorized, Web Development

My family vacations in Maine most years, and because it’s so far north and east, the sun rises egregiously early around the summer solstice. I was looking up the sunrise times on a chart and noticed that the earliest sunrise did not line up with the longest day. It was about a week earlier. Additionally, the latest sunset is about a week after the solstice. At the winter solstice, the latest sunrise and earliest sunset are even further off, about two weeks in either direction from the solstice.

I thought that the math behind this calculation would make for good content for an article, but the true reason behind the anomaly is much more interesting than a simple calculation, and has significantly altered my understanding of time itself.

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Quick FileMaker Server Stats.log Summaries

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, DevOps, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Server, Logging, Monitoring, Performance, Python, Server Administration, System Administration

When making changes to a FileMaker file or a FileMaker Server’s configuration, it is often useful to know if the changes have helped, or made things worse, or perhaps had no effect at all. FileMaker’s Stats.log generates some data needed to summarize this, with some help from monitoring and analysis tools, or in this case, a Python script.

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Beezwax Sponsors Vienna Calling 2025 – FileMaker Developer Conference

by Beezwax Team
Posted in AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Cloud, FileMaker Data API, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, FileMaker UX Design, InspectorPro, News, Performance, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “Till Technical Debt do us Part!”

This week, June 5-7, we’re in Austria, at Vienna Calling 2025. The Claris® FileMaker® Developer conference feature open discussions, interactive workshops and collaborative break-out sessions. Beezwax is proud to be a conference sponsor.

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Beezwax Presents at Elevate FM 2025 – Toronto FileMaker Developer Conference

by Beezwax Team
Posted in AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Cloud, FileMaker Data API, FileMaker Go, FileMaker Server, FileMaker UX Design, InspectorPro, News, Performance, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “Modernizing Code – Maintaining Your Investment”

This week, May 26th, we’re at Elevate FM 2025, a brand new conference taking place in downtown Toronto, Canada. The Claris® FileMaker® Developer conference features sessions by industry experts, training workshops and interactive discussions.

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Using OData, Syslog or DuckDB to handle FileMaker Schema Change Notifications (via Plug-in API)

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, bBox, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Data API, FileMaker Server, FM Products, Integration, Performance, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

FileMaker Server v21.1 (2024) introduced functionality for plug-ins to receive notifications of changes to database schema, layout, custom functions, or scripts. Notification messaging is passed in the form of JSON. Let’s show a few examples of these JSON payloads, and how a plug-in might use external tools (Syslog, DuckDB or OData) to handle things.

Continue reading “Using OData, Syslog or DuckDB to handle FileMaker Schema Change Notifications (via Plug-in API)” →

What’s New in FileMaker Pro 21.1? Exploring AI-Powered Semantic Search, Developer Productivity Boosts, Security and More

by Russ Catanach
Posted in AI with FM, All, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker & OData, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Data API, FileMaker Server, FileMaker UX Design, FM Products, Integration, News, Performance, Security

FileMaker Pro 21.1, the newest update to Claris FileMaker 2024, introduces powerful new AI capabilities and significant quality-of-life enhancements for developers. The Beezwax team gathered to dive into these exciting updates, including Chief Innovation Officer Vincenzo Menanno, Director of Engineering Andrew “Red” Witschonke, Developer & Systems Engineer Simon Brown, and Senior Developer Fabio Bosisio. Here are the highlights from their discussion.

Continue reading “What’s New in FileMaker Pro 21.1? Exploring AI-Powered Semantic Search, Developer Productivity Boosts, Security and More” →

Resetting the Admin Console IP Address Block in FileMaker Server

by Simon Brown
Posted in All

Under its Administration: Administrator screen, FileMaker Server’s Admin Console has a feature you can use to restrict access so that only certain IP addresses are allowed to connect. Although usually a useful feature, here we’ll discuss how to turn it off if it isn’t working correctly.

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bBox 1.05 for FileMaker Now Available

by Simon Brown
Posted in All, bBox, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 19, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FM Products, Integration, Python, Tools & Add-ons

We are pleased to announce the release of bBox version 1.05, which adds support for schema change notifications, a new Ubuntu ARM binary, and DuckDB integration.

bBox is a free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to easily use code libraries. Supporting both macOS & Ubuntu Linux, it has functions to help you work with Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, Bash/Zsh/sh, XPath, and SQLite. Also included is a demo file that has over 220 examples of how you can put bBox functions to work for you.

If you’re interested in Python integration with FileMaker, also check out bzPython-FM, which uses bBox.

Continue reading “bBox 1.05 for FileMaker Now Available” →

Beezwax Sponsors EngageU FileMaker Developer Conference

by Jay Gonzales
Posted in AI with FM, All, Beezwax News, Claris Development, Community, Events, FileMaker, FileMaker 2023, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Server, InspectorPro, News, Performance, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “InspectorPro 8 for FileMaker: Investigate, Accelerate, Collaborate”

This week, November 17-19, we’re in Malmö, at EngageU. It’s the largest Claris® / FileMaker® Developer conference in Europe this year, and Beezwax is proud to be a sponsor.

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FileMaker Perform Script on Server: Episode IX – Endless PSoS Abilities

by Vincenzo Menanno
Posted in All, Claris Development, FileMaker, FileMaker 2024, FileMaker Server, Techniques

If you go looking for a FileMaker script step called Perform Script on Server on Server, you are not going to find it. Because this isn’t a new script step, but rather the same Perform Script on Server (PSoS) that we have always had, except that now it is FileMaker Server-compatible.

This capability allows FileMaker to fire off other Perform Script on Server scripts (from an existing script that is running on server), and either wait for those to complete or not. I have been thinking that with this feature one could build a main controller script and a set of worker scripts. That is just one idea, of many, I am sure.

Continue reading “FileMaker Perform Script on Server: Episode IX – Endless PSoS Abilities” →
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