Doing the simple is hard. Someone recently reminded me of this when discussing business workflow. Tasks like scheduling, calendaring, communicating and sending notifications are individually manageable, in a world where tools for these tasks exist online. Calendars, email, databases, Slack, and a collection of other apps and services make this possible.
It may be that digital transformation is already well-supported, but it’s often at an isolated, siloed level. There’s an app for that, a different service for this, and customized applications can be built and deployed when tailored innovation is needed.
But how do your apps and services and applications talk with each other, especially supporting a growing workload of tasks and workflow automation across functionally-diverse teams of users?
Integration. Automation. Orchestration.
That’s where Claris Connect comes in. It’s an integration platform that allows you to automate workflows by stitching apps and services together, seamlessly. Simple and accessible for everyone to get started, Claris Connect also promises robust capabilities for professional developers, including support for functions like conditional logic, error capture, flexible approval flows, robust security and deployment across both on-premise and cloud-based systems.
Fabio Bosisio, senior developer, put together a demo of Claris Connect-driven workflows for interactive scheduling and purchase order approvals, which you can see in the video below.
These Claris Connect “flows” stitch together several apps and services including FileMaker, Google Calendar, WordPress, Calendly, email and Slack. Thank you, Fabio, for putting together these examples!
Although the Beezwax team had the advantage of working with Claris Connect for a few months, it’s still impressive the platform tools allowed us to build these integrations in hours, rather than days.
Claris: Past, Present, Future
Claris International Inc. is still an Apple subsidiary, although as a company they were renamed and rebranded in 2019 from “FileMaker Inc.”. This change brought back their company name, “Claris”, as it existed 20 years ago, which I think was a fantastic idea. To people who have never heard of Claris, it is brand new. And even to those of us who knew Claris back in the day, it was great to re-introduce a new Claris.
The original Claris also existed as a company with multiple product lines. With the introduction of Claris Connect, along with the FileMaker platform, it also steps back into that camp. There’s also a new sense of innovation, momentum and synergy — all needed in a new age of digital expectations.
While FileMaker and Claris Connect are indeed two separate products, together they offer a complete platform to enable powerful digital transformation. While Claris Connect is a v1.0 release, the company has committed to add new capabilities and features (to the FileMaker platform as well), at a faster pace than years gone by.
This is the way software companies roll these days. It’s an exciting time to see Claris accelerating alongside the rest of the software industry. Exciting times for sure.