>We have several programs in our organization with various levels of
>affiliation who all currently have FileMaker databases. Our central
>administration has gone to FileMaker/ebase 102 and now the question is
>whether to incorporate the program databases into the central one. The
>conventional wisdom among ebase users/trainer seems to be that one
>database per organization is best and, I agree that there could be lots
>of wasted opportunity and/or duplicated effort if, for instance, one
>program has info on an activist's interests that other programs don't
>have access to.
In addition, you'll likely have duplicate records among the several
databases that all need to be maintained with address changes and the
like.
>But there are potential problems. We don't want all
>the affiliated programs to have access to giving history information to
>the central organization. Is there a way to block access to this
>information? Any other suggestions?
There is always a way. But in this case it's not built in to ebase,
and is very complicated to implement. You would need to change the
password structure of the ebase file set to allow access to payment
records only to selected access groups. Further, you'd need to
restrict access or modify layouts in other files where payment info
is presented. For example, the home screen contains payment summary
info for the current and last year, and membership info, all of
which you would presumably want to restrict.
Another strategy which might be simpler although a little more
cumbersome, would be to create a rolodex file which gets updated
periodically by exporting contact info plus whatever activist info is
relevant from ebase. It would be easy to script this so the update
would be called by one button click. What do wouldn't get with this
is the ability to track contacts and actions with ebase that seems to
me would be valuable to your programs.
Anyone else have a strategy?
--
--
Dave Shaw H4 Consulting
tel: 206-954-7526 fax: 206-625-1338
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