Coming back to scening Malbun in Liechtenstein, we were glad to again support the friendly German speaking FileMaker conference and presented our latest FileMaker performance update. This time we have also helped by providing our Scavent event management solution and both the organizers and attendees were astonished.
Total of 86 people, including 4 organizers, 6 sponsors, 14 speakers and 11 guests, arrived to the JUFA hotel at 1600 m above sea level and created an amazing family-like friendly athmosphere while sharing recent news and knowledge about the Claris FileMaker platform. Despite my close to none German language knowledge I understood at least from the various slides and demos that the content was highly technical and very useful, which our friendly discussions over amazing food and drinks only confirmed.
I am greatly thankful to all the attendees for willing to chat in English with me and my colleague, especially at an exclusively German speaking event. They all helped us feel like a part of the big family.
Scavent experience
This year was special in that our participation started way ahead of the conference. As an experienced host of teachers summits in Prague since 2010, we agreed with the organizers to provide some of the features of our own event management system Scavent to make the experience for attendees even better than in previous years.
Scavent's features we utilized for this year's FileMaker Konferenz included custom-printed plastic card badges, secured in custom 3D-printed card holders matching the badge type color. Several people praised that the badges had the same information printed on both sides, as badges flipping to the back side and hiding the attendee's name are a common issue on many similar events. We were even able to print the badges at the event in cases such as guests not previously registered, regular attendee becoming a speaker at last minute, or updating the name of an attendee who got just recently married.
Even more welcome than the badges was our event dashboard, powered by Raspberry Pi and our custom app, showing the current conference program, number of attendees already arrived, slide show with fresh photos from the event, and a rotating message with important updates. Being able to update the dashboard in a matter of minutes was very helpful to announce which session is placed in which room, as this was decided each morning based on the interest in individual topics, and attendees used the dashboard a lot when finding out where to go after a snack or lunch break.
In the Monday's Lightning Talks I briefly introduced the technology behind Scavent, including features we did not use this year, such as automatically tracking attendees visiting individual sessions using RFID equipped badges. I was really pleased by the overall positive feedback.
FileMaker Performance Update
My session was traditionally focused on FileMaker performance. This time it consisted of three topics - the results of our performance testing of FileMaker 2024 and comparing it to FileMaker 2023, introduction of our Initiative '24 and explaining when and why every millisecond can matter, and the true story of our web-based client portal optimization.
While we have already recently published the FileMaker 2024 performance test results and when a millisecond matters in other articles and you can open them by clicking the respective links above, this week was the first time I presented the client portal optimization story. I was talking about the issues we faced, what challenging target we set for ourselves, how we approached the optimization, how amazing results we finally achieved, as well as what mistakes we made on our jorney and what we have learned from them.
I will soon share the whole story in a separate article, but before that I am going to present it at two more conferences - the Rome FileMaker Week and EngageU. So if you're interested in learning more and are going to attend one of these events, make sure you don't miss my session. I look forward to seeing you there!
You can also download my slides from the FileMaker Konferenz website and if you have not voted for faster FileMaker calculation engine yet, you can do so here.
