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I wanted to take a quick moment and talk about integrating third party hardware with FileMaker
and FM Starting Point. Now here I have a copy of FM Starting Point that's being customized
by one of RCC's engineers. In here I have a mag striped scanner with a USB connector
that's capable of reading a three track hard card, and specifically, this is useful for
reading California drivers licenses. So our customer has a situation where there a federal
mandate where they need to actually capture the driver's license information for their
customers, but inputting lots of driver's license information slows down the work flow
and the business process during daily operations. So that's where integration with a third party
mag stripe scanner comes in really handy. Now this capability is not built into the
free basic version of FM Starting Point, but it is something that could be set up by a
skilled FileMaker developer or by simply giving us a call here at RCConsulting. But I wanted
to give you a quick tour here and show you how this works.So i'm going to click into
the contacts module here of FM Starting Point, and I can see that I have a couple records
here on my test database. I'm going to go up here to a script that I have that's already
set up. Now what we're going to do for our customers actually build this into a button
on screen, but we're still getting this set up for them but I wanted to show this to you
before it goes out the door to our customer. I'm going to select this script right here.
The system is now asking me to scan the driver's license. So i'm going to flip the card over
here, and i'm going to run the driver's license. So as you can see, our script automatically
created a new record in FM Starting Point. Now we could've scripted FM Starting Point
to have gone and done a search for us to find this person if they're already in our database.
Or it could've displayed the information in advance and asked us if we wanted to create
the record. In this case, we just added the new record of information automatically into
the contacts screen right here. Now this technology has gotten much cheaper over the years. When
originally when I did this 20 years ago, these devices were $300-$400 a piece. Now these
mag stripe scanners are in the $50 range. So it's pretty cost effective to get one may
be velcro it to your mobile laptop or your desktop computer and hook it in through a
USB port. This mag stripe scanner works equally well with credit cards. So while we're scanning
a driver's license, we could also use this hardware and technology to directly scan credit
cards into our FM Starting Point or FileMaker database, but this just gives you an idea
of some of the external integration options available for FileMaker in FM Starting Point.
Feel free to give us a call anytime at RCConsulting. If you have a question or an idea that would
help us all with business need for you.