Jennifer you are right. The FileMaker runtime is designed to work for one user at a time on one machine. Basically the price point for multi-user FileMaker is about $300 per workstation for the FileMaker software.
Some small orgs try to work around this by putting the runtime on a shared machine and have various users access it that through the network (not at the same time). That approach always leads to a corrupted database eventually. There is a rumor that the next FileMaker version will have the option of a limited network runtime which can access data from FileMaker Server but the cost of FM server makes that more of an big org answer than a tiny org answer.
If you are driven by a free or very low price point and multi-user capability, you are probably looking at developing in something other than FileMaker and at a much longer and more expensive software development cycle for the solution.
That said, I am a FileMaker developer and think that the advantages of working in FileMaker are worth it. I find that most small non-profits, who have more than one staff member and a network, can afford (or fund raise for) on the order of $300-500 per workstation for software that they need.
Good luck
Clif
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Clif Graves Consulting
cgraves%40clifgraves.com">cgraves
clifgraves.com -http://www.clifgraves.com
Phone: 207-512-2522
Serving clients throughout the United States and Canada with:
* NorthStarDb http://www.northstardb.com/
* ebase consulting
* Training, Data conversion
* Management / Work flow consulting
* Custom FileMaker software development
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-----original message-----
>>I'm a former (recovering?) non-profit director who has now left to improve and market a database template product that I co-developed while working in the field of downtown revitalization. I am working with someone to develop a run-time version of this FileMaker template so that it will be more affordable for the tiny non-profit customers that are its market but we seem to have run into a snag. The programmer has come across information that a run-time version of a FileMaker file will not work for multiple users of the same file. Since this would mean that multiple- user offices would have to run a FileMaker version of our template and buy multiple FileMaker licenses, a financial investment many cannot afford, thereby defeating our whole conversion to run-time, I am hoping someone on this list will have information that will tell us there is a way to make a run-time version for multiple-users of a file.>>
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