Hi,

I need to connect a sales a FM database to a Sage accounts system. The database is networked, running both FM5 and 6 on local machines, FM server 5.5 as host. The database is relational with a Companies file, then a People File, then an Orders File with a one-to-many following this path, connected via a unique serial number originating in the Companies file.

Is there a Plug-in that will do this (would be on a machine running FM6)? Anyother suggestions would be gratefully received!

Many thanks.

PS Much harder question on its way once I've figured out a way to describe it!

Hi there.

Hooking up two systems like this is a kind of hand crafted thing and while there are plugins to help with some of the technical aspects (more below) the hard work of setting this up is all yours.

Basically, you'll use ODBC imports to pull information from Sage, providing you can get ODBC drivers for it and account access to connect to it, and then use SQL statements from FileMaker to push data back into Sage as needed.

You can change FileMaker records based on data in Sage by performing an "update import" from Sage using ODBC. You can change data in Sage (providing you want to / have permission to) by executing individual SQL statements against individual records in Sage from FileMaker scripts.

In our practice we do this by hand, though there are some third party products that can manage this kind of "synchronization" for you. These products help manage the mapping of information from one source (Sage) to the other (FileMaker), though you can manage the same mapping in your import scripts and SQL statements. Check out

http://www.casahl.com/ecKnowledge/default.asp
I've also heard of people managing this kind of thing through Lasso ( http://www.omnipilot.com/index.html?sec ... ts%2fLasso )

You can also look at the rumora plugin to help you execute the SQL to manipulate information in Sage:

http://www.rumora.nl/english/index.html

Hope that gets you started.

John

Thanks very much John. I'll let you know how I get on.
Cheers
Dave