2019 was quite a year in our community. The year started as FileMaker Inc kept its strong message about being a leader in the #workplaceinnovationplatform market. Alongside this, they released a set of templates, taking things a notch further than the traditional starter solutions.

Also, as the year began, they wrapped their list of short films about “innovation without the hype“.

One big event was the retirement of Dominique Goupil, former CEO. Dominique was loved by everyone and will be missed immensely. His legacy will allow FileMaker to pursue its mission further than before, a mission that is now in the hands of Brad Freitag.

It is in March that Apple bought Stamplay. It is only later we would learn the acquisition was meant for FileMaker who would rebrand that product as Claris Connect, scheduled to be available in Q1 2020.

April saw the community forum migrate to a Salesforce backend. There were things about the previous community that needed improvement and there were other motivations that, combined, led FileMaker to choose a new service provider for this. Not everyone likes change and this one came with some bumps. There were always other places for community members to gather, but as a result, this spawned a new one: the.fmsoup.org

May is the month that saw the release of FileMaker 18: with improvements to FileMaker Pro that were mostly oriented towards developers and a new feature in FileMaker Server called startup restauration that implements transaction logging. Server monitoring with Zabbix is now also possible. For a more exhaustive compilation, follow this link.

August usually is a busy month because it is when devcon is happening. This devcon was quite unusual, to say the least. FileMaker changed its name back to Claris and the new management shared its vision, letting us know what to expect of things to come. The name change was to reflect the fact that FileMaker would no longer be the single offering of the company, putting forward a clear “cloud first” initiative that would get them to release FileMaker Cloud and bring alongside Claris Connect in early 2020.

Claris did not waste any time and, in October launched FileMaker Cloud. Quickly after, in early November, we got to see the latest revision to the Products Roadmap, letting us know what to expect for 2020 and beyond.

Oh yes, they also replaced the “Made for FileMaker” by a brand new marketplace.

We can all agree this was a busy year indeed. And some would say it is just the beginning… Keep an eye open for our post about what to expect in 2020!