Our First Meeting Recap

Hey, FMPUG-MN!

Thank you for joining us for the FMPUG-MN kickoff and presentation of FileMaker 12 last month! We had nearly 70 folks in attendance out of the 90 who registered to stay connected with the group!

Special thanks goes to the following:

• Bill Kaiser and Bill Heizer from FileMaker for traveling here to give us the goods on FileMaker 12 and for auctioning off a copy of FileMaker 12 Advanced (www.filemaker.com)
• The Nerdery for sponsoring our event with a great location and loads of pizza and drinks! (http://nerdery.com)
• The Mac Guys Plus for give-aways of consulting hours and for groovy notepads (http://themacguysplus.com/)
• The FileMaker Business Alliance (FBA) members who attended the meeting

Survey Responses

We have compiled the survey responses and reached several conclusions. The details for everything can be found on the web site, but the gist of it is this:

• The Nerdery will be our regular meeting place, though we will periodically meet at a few other locations as offered by members and for specific meetings.
• Meeting times will most often be in the evenings due to restrictions at the Nerdery against daytime meetings (they use the space for internal meetings). Survey responses gave evenings an edge over midday meetings.
• Member interest in topic suggestions from the survey are all over the place and spread pretty evenly. The topics on the event calendar roughly reflect the expressed interest levels. We have a few members who have offered to facilitate an event as well! (We will be in contact with you in the weeks ahead)
• 85% of respondents said that they will be participating consistently or very consistently!

Our next meeting meeting is June 14 at 6:30pm at the Nerdery. Key focus: Layout Design

We’ll work through some of the key new layout design features but also review a number of phenomenal “outside” resources for layout design. Jim Medema will also share key take-ways from a “Craft of FileMaker” session he attended in California last year. If you are still learning layout design or are stuck in “rut” with layout look and feel, this will be a great time to take a fresh look at user interfaces! Plan on sharing a few layout designs that you’ve worked on or ones you have seen that you really like if you’ve got them!
Tentative FMPUG-MN Meeting Schedule
Note #1: All meetings start at 6:30pm at the Nerdery in Bloomington and include pizza and drinks unless otherwise noted
Note #2: You can always find the updated calendar of meetings and locations atwww.fmpug-mn.com

• June 14 – Layout Design: New features, web resources, getting out of design ruts!
• July 16-19 – FileMaker DevCon in Miami Beach, Florida! (No FMPUG-MN meeting)
• August 9 – Post-DevCon wrap up! Hear from FMPUG-MN attendees about the best of what they saw!
• September 13 – FileMaker Go Design Strategies
• October 11 – FileMaker Go Deployment Strategies (wifi, 3G, syncing, import/export, other?!)
• November 8 – Integrating Calendars (within FileMaker, with iCal, Google Calendar….)
• December – no meeting
• 2013………….FileMaker Server, web integration, what’s new, what’s cool, documentation, testing strategies, etc.

Speaking of DevCon…
If you are planning on attending DevCon this year, reply to this email and include your cell phone number. Once we see how many folks are coming and see the DevCon schedule, we’ll email and/or text attendees and gather for a breakfast or lunch at DevCon.  We’d also love to have all FMPUG-MN members who attend DevCon participate in the August FMPUG-MN meeting for the “Post DevCon Wrap-up!” at the August 9 meeting.

If you are aware of any events that may be of interest to the local FileMaker community, please let us know so we can include it in our monthly email and on the FMPUG-MN web site.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Jim Medema and Tim Cimbura, co-founders

FMPUG-MN