Bad news for any current Filemaker users excited about the release of Leopard. Filemaker have announced on their website that they do “not recommend the use of Filemaker 9 products on computers running the Leopard OS”, I presume until they can test its running and issue any compatibility updates. In addition, earlier versions (I currently am a very happy business and personal user of version 8 ) are also not recommended until compatibility testing is complete.
This is not going to be a rant. On balance, any operating system needs to be tested and it is no mean feat to ensure that all previous code and functionality will swim easily in the new water. We decided to purchase new iMacs quite recently towards gradually moving all our machines to Macs (we are currently 2 out of 5 Macs to PCs). A hard drive failure and backup problem on one of the PCs prompted the earlier than Leopard release purchase. With this announcement I’m glad we did buy early. My surprise, with others in all this is that Filemaker isn’t ready. Filemaker as I understand it is an owned subsidiary of Apple! If others can have their software tested and ready for Leopard why not family members? I phoned customer services UK and they told me they were waiting to test Filemaker with the release of Leopard. Now, obviously Filemaker developers haven’t been waiting until now to get ready, they would have had the developer’s releases of Leopard all along and what they are waiting for is final confirmation of its compatibility. They will have known general problems up to now and hopefully talked to Apple engineers to begin resolving any problems and even getting excited about making Filemaker rock even more with new Leopard only features. So I find it very strange that they are not ready. Very strange.
I would expect that further announcements will be made as to which of the previous versions will be made compatible for Leopard. Anything less than a full preparation of versions 8, 8.5 and 9 would be damaging to customer relations. As a small financial sector business user of Filemaker v. 8 we store all our client personal and financial information on Filemaker, it has become our data hub, helps us see the entire business process and is invaluable to our business. We can’t follow the upgrade path to Leopard just yet because Filemaker have ran into some difficulties. Did somebody at Filemaker fall asleep? Maybe they are just being cautious but plenty of us just expect things to go smoothly and have been ordering Leopard updates and new computers with no thought of our main data hubs falling around our ears. An unfortunate lesson and I’m glad I got the news early.
Posted by voxo 