We are testing versions of Studio Manager to see if there are any gotchas to running the brand new and fabulous FileMaker Pro 11. Initial testing shows that running Studio Manager 10 unmodified will entail some misbehavior. Until we’ve tested Studio Manager 10 extensively under FileMaker 11, we recommend against upgrading. We typically take 30-45 days to do this testing.

If you are as eager to check out FileMaker 11 as we are, we recommend you get FileMaker 11 or the trial version and play with it, even test a copy of your version of Studio Manager with it as long as you have Studio Manager 7 or higher. The charting feature alone may prove invaluable for your business. We’ll be very interested in your discoveries and will document and publish what we learn. What we don’t recommend is taking your production version of Studio Manager and running it under FileMaker 11 before some serious testing has been done. This is your valuable, mission-critical data after all.

You need OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher to run FileMaker 11 and 10.6 Snow Leopard is recommended. Keep an eye on this blog for breaking news relative to both FileMaker 11 and Studio Manager. The Look and feel of the product has a major yet very subtle upgrade going on. End-user charting is there.

Expect a quick release of Studio Manager 10.1 to quickly take advantage of new feature low-hanging fruit and nip any problems in the bud.

I’m tweeting my initial impressions and thoughts on tokerud.

I will be posting at least one article to my FileMaker Fever blog today on FileMaker 11 new features.

I have been trying to do some importing with fairly large interrelated files using FileMaker Pro 10.3 and Snow Leopard in single-user mode. I’ve had several crashes in about a 1/2 hour of efforts. Will now be switching to a machine with Leopard installed and re-do the work. Be forewarned that unspecified problems with FileMaker Pro 10 and Snow Leopard may occur. I’m sure we’ll get clarification soon. I will post an update once I know more. Meanwhile I would recommend against running this combo for the time being.

Update Sep 6 noon PDT: The problem may not be with FileMaker 10. The problem I experienced may be due to one or more of my Filemaker plugins that need updates. I will get all my current plugins up to date and then test again. 360Works updated all of their plugins for Snow Leopard on August 28.

Update Sep 8 11am PDT: Removed all extensions in the FileMaker applications folder. Haven’t tested extensively, but I’ve had a couple crashes of FileMaker since then. Maybe I have a specific other conflict with FileMaker. But what? Next project is to try running FileMaker as the only running app and do a few things and see how that goes.

Resource: Camp Software has good blog post summarizing known issues dated Aug 28.

When it comes to databases, no news is good news. In four months, we’ve not heard of a single problem from our customers who are running Studio Manager on FileMaker 9. Full compatability was expected, but after 4 months even the conservatives among us can feel confident moving ahead with an upgrade.

Especially if you are running FileMaker Server, FileMaker 9 moves things ahead in a safe direction. Server 9 keeps you abreast of data events via email and can notify you every time it verifies a backup or has a problem. Good thing to have in place to protect your precious business data.

FileMaker 9 is looking really good and FileMaker Inc. has spiffed up their website to show it off. We encourage you to explore the site if you are interested in FileMaker 9.

We’ve got conversion advice for you over on our FileMaker Fever blog. And a bit more information on Studio Manager Bulletin.

Preliminary testing shows, as expected, Studio Manager 8 is fully compatible with FileMaker 9. FileMaker Pro 9, FileMaker Server 9 and FileMaker Server 9 Advanced were released July 10. Since FileMaker 9 uses the exact same data format underneath the hood, we expected to have full compatability.

We have have had no reports of errors of any kind regarding FileMaker 9 as of 8/19. We have now switched over to using FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced as our daily tool of choice. We highly recommend the software.

We also recommend that you sign up for the Maintenance program that gives you better pricing on future releases in exchange for paying a fixed annual fee. Currently, when you buy a site license or 10 user license as part of a Volume License agreement, you get 1 year of maintenance free.

FileMaker Pro 8 was released on Monday. There is no data format change with 8, so Studio Manager 7 runs perfectly on 8 without modification. If you have Studio Manager 7, you can upgrade to 8 if you like. It’s faster. They’ve eliminated some of the tiny bugs in 7. It has clairvoyance (auto-complete using previously entered values) for any field on a layout that has clairvoyance checked. And you can turn this on by clicking a checkbox for any field in Studio Manager.