FMSmallBusiness Updated to version 1.3.1 - Adds FileMaker 10's iPhone Web Interface!

Today we released version 1.3.1 of FMSmallBusiness (FMSB) which includes twenty five updates including new items, improvements, and updates.

The most exciting item is the use of the FileMaker 10 Server PHP Site Assistant which generates iPhone interfaces for FileMaker databases, like FMSmallBusiness. Videos and Screenshots [dead link] of FMSB are available including screenshots of our updated iPhone interface.

We've also added a new Agenda View in the Calendar module which produces a list of events over any day, week, month, or any range of dates! Printable versions of the Agenda, Month, Week, and Day views are also now available. Each view containing events have also been colorized based on the event category color to make identifying events much easier. Also, access to To Do lists have been added to the Calendar module views as well as the Home module. A printable To Do List has also been added.

FMSmallBusiness utilizes several extensions which need to be installed before FMSB can be used. We now utilize two methods to install extensions. First, we use FileMaker Server 10's AutoUpdate feature. AutoUpdate will automatically download, install, and activate the extensions over the internet. It's fantastic! However, if internet access is not available, the extensions are installed semi-automatically using FMExtensionsInstaller [dead link] (FMEI). FMEI extracts the extensions from the FMSB database, but this requires FileMaker to be quit and relaunched since the extensions cannot be activated automatically.

There's much, much more that has been added to this version. Details are listed below.

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FMSmallBusiness v1.3.1 Release Notes [dead link]:

2009/05/01 v1.3.1 Note: Some Features are FileMaker 10 only. The next version may require FileMaker 10.

New - Calendar - Added new Agenda view with flexible date ranges. See what is upcoming for this week, this month or any range of time.

New - Contacts - Created new field called Category to replace the previous Flag system. Allows the tagging of Contacts with multiple categories which are defined inside of Settings. Created a dynamic layout to accomodate users that need to store a large number of Categories.

New - Contacts - Created new note adding routine that builds on the prior Quick-Timestamp button, now allowing the bulk creation of notes for a found set of contacts.

New - Extension Management - Added FileMaker Server based autoupdate for plugins - restarts of the application no longer required. Self contained plugin update system manages plugins when an Internet connection is not available.

New - iPhone/Web interface completely recreated using FileMaker Server 10’s new interface. Works in browsers too!

New - To Do Events - Added To Do's to the home page

Improvement - Added new print specific layouts for the printing of Month, Week, Day, List, Scheduler, and the new Agenda view.

Improvement - An Invoice/Order can now have an Invoice Number and Date assigned even if the Invoice is locked.

Improvement - Calendar - Added display of To Do Events on Month, Week, Day and the new Agenda views.

Improvement - Calendar Events - Home, Calendar Month, Week, Day, List and the new Agenda views now show in the color of the assigned Category.

Improvement - Contact Addresses - Added Department and Title fields into the 'include' checkboxes for building addresses.

Improvement - Contact Addresses - Web Services for Address Correction now uses CURL rather than WebViewers to retrieve the data. This results in faster data reception. Also now checking for the expected text to avoid correcting without valid data.

Improvement - Contacts Addresses - Enabled the direct searching of a Contact Address’s fields; Street, City State, Zip, etc. [FileMaker 10 Only]

Improvement - Extension Management - The FileMaker Extensions are now installed into the user folder rather than the application folder. On Mac this is ‘/Users/UserName/Library/Application Support/FileMaker/Extensions/’ . On Windows XP: ‘C:\Document Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\FileMaker\Extensions’. On Windows Vista: ‘C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Local\FileMaker\Extensions’.

Improvement - Invoices - Sales Tax Report now includes Invoices with an Invoice Date and a with a Status ticked in the Invoice Settings.

Improvement - Printing - Made several under-the-hood changes to improve printing.

Improvement - Settings - Reorganized the settings module for an improved user experience and implemented a new settings navigation system to deal with the increasing number of settings panels.

Improvement - To Do Events - Added 'Auto-Advance' feature for To Do’s. A default preference can be set in settings for all new To Do’s to auto-advance or not. Individual To Do’s can be set to auto-advance or not.

Improvement - Updated the Scodigo PHP Plugin to version 2.0. Version 2.0 is now required.

Update - Accounts - Resolved error when attempting to make a Staff Account with the same name as an existing manually created FileMaker account.

Update - Calendar Events - Improved the tab order on Calendar Events screen

Update - Documents - Resolved issue where a template linked to a broken or non-existent layout would cause an unusable document to be created. Improved the error checking and reporting of template integrity and provided tools to help fix a broken templates and layouts.

Update - Invoices - Updates to Invoice contextual menus to for printing and emailing.

Update - Reassigned broken sample templates to working layouts

Update - Settings - Fixed issue where some plugins using non-standard version numbers caused them to report an incorrect version.