Greetings!

My office runs FM Pro 8.5 on three older Macs for invoicing, inventory
control, etc. One copy of FM acts as host, the other two connect as
clients. We've just ordered a new Mac Mini with FM Pro 11 pre-installed
(this is an option in the Apple School for Education). We're not anxious
to upgrade the other computers to 11, indeed, they are all G4s running
Tiger, maybe we can't install 11 on those machines. The question is, can
the machine running FM Pro 11 fit into this setup? Can it either act as
client to the 8.5 host? Or can it host the files and let the 8.5
versions connect as clients? (This seems less likely.) I have verified
that our databases run without modification on 11, which I have
installed on my home computer, a recent iMac. And in general, it is a
very generic relational database system, created in FM Pro 3.0 and
simple converted to 4.0, 7.0, and then 8.5, with only cosmetic
adjustments in the layout required along the way.

Thanks in advance for any informed advice here! I've lurked in this
group for 10 years or so and generally found a lot of good advice and
tips.

George

On 7/17/2010 4:53 PM, George Nospam wrote:
George --

There should be no problem sharing the files between versions 8.5 and
11. I think I would lean toward leaving it hosted on 8.5 rather than
hosting on 11, primarily because there were minor changes in the field
indexing between 8 and 9 and opening directly with 11 may have bearing
on it.

The core thing to keep in mind is that you should probably not do any
development on the FM 11 machine. It is too easy to forget which
features were or were not available back in 8.5; any features that were
introduced in 9, 10 or 11 will not work with 8.5. They won't hurt the
database or anything, but the features just won't work for the 8.5
users. This might typically be certain types of layout objects,
functions or script steps.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg
FM Professional Solutions, Inc. Los Angeles

FileMaker Certified Developer
Associate Member, FileMaker Business Alliance