In contemporary civil engineering, brownfield land means a property, redevelopment, or reuse which may be complicated by the presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.
Imagine a land formerly occupied by a petroleum processing plant. It would take years of work, cleanup, study, tests, and engineering to prepare the ground for re-use.
This is what it feels like with some FileMaker projects.
At HighPower, we pick up a lot of projects for businesses that have been using FileMaker for years, and sometimes decades. Because FileMaker has a 40-year history, there are a LOT of old applications out there still being used. In many cases, they were created by “citizen developers” and did not have good data architecture to start with.
This isn’t a criticism of FileMaker, which is fabulous software. After 40 years, it’s still going strong. It is powerful, versatile and easily the best options for small to medium-sized businesses to quickly and inexpensively track anything. It’s a great tool for tracking customers, clients, projects, inventory, invoices, payments, downloads, documents, videos, and even music.
HighPower specializes in transforming messy, outdated FileMaker systems—often built over decades—into clean, modern, and efficient solutions, much like renovating an old house into a brand-new home.
Because it’s so versatile, we encounter solutions which are, to put it nicely, quite a mess! The relationship graph is a gigantic spiderweb of lines going in all directions to connect the tables in a crazy fashion.
Example of an actual messy Relationship Graph created by a client
There might be hundreds of fields per table, many of them which haven’t been used in years. There could be multiple files – from the days when you had to have one file for every table in the database.
Since we’ve seen it all, we can tackle these kinds of projects. We can unravel all the crazy relationships and build new ones. We can clean up the scripts, the fields, and the layouts. We can replace the out-dated colors, the congested layout objects, and the unwieldy navigation to make everything look good and work well.
It’s like remodeling an old house built in the 1940’s . Once completed, it looks and feels completely new.
Remodeling an old FileMaker app is like remodeling an old house
That’s what HighPower Data Solutions has done for our clients again and again.
We can do the same for you.
~ William Miller
CEO and Founder
Minneapolis, MN