360Works Case Study - Pool Pro Office

Pool Pro Office is a pool construction management solution developed in FileMaker Pro that covers all facets of pool construction. The solution has many documents that are either digital images created by digital camera or software applications or scanned documents such as contracts and change orders.

Business Challenge

During initial development of Pool Pro Office, before 360Works SuperContainer was available, all images and scans were stored directly in FileMaker Pro. This was a good solution because no special configuration was required on the users end such as setting up a shared directory, managing user access, or addressing platform issues. The client using Pool Pro Office was storing each revision of a pool drawing, scan of the contract, and many images, but this was adding about 100,000k per week. After 30 weeks, the data file was over 3.5gig in size and the backups were taking in excess of 20 minutes and having a big impact on user experience during this time. Pool Pro Office believed that the major reason for the extended backup time was the size of the drawing files, averaging about 3meg each. When all of these items were stored in containers and a number of users had screens open with a drawing while the backup process started, a number of items came into play: the size of the drawings, the number of users with open drawings, the amount of caching, and how long before the users exited the record that they were modifying. Something needed to be done.
Overview
A pool construction management FileMaker solution gets taken to new levels with 360Works SuperContainer.
Industry
Pools, Home Improvement, Construction
Benefits
Faster solution with better performance for users, no matter how many images are added!


Successful Solution

360Works announced SuperContainer during the 2006 FileMaker Developer Conference, and there was a buzz about it on the show floor and at some of the sessions. Pool Pro Office needed to take a look to see if this was a solution for our problem.

Pool Pro Office decided to begin the implementation of SuperContainer. This was going to be a significant undertaking. Exporting of the FileMaker Pro container contents had to be performed for all of the current container fields in Pool Pro Office, and scripts were written with the aid of the SuperContainer companion plug-in.

After all of the container fields were transferred to SuperContainer:

  • Data file size dropped to 20meg
  • Backup time dropped to less than a minute
  • User experience was greatly enhanced during backup
  • Performance was increased by 500% during selected operations, because FileMaker did not need to cache large container objects

Thanks to 360Works SuperContainer, Pool Pro Office, Inc. is moving forward in the marketing of Pool Pro Office in the pool construction vertical market.

Comments provided by:
Gerard Beutler
Pool Pro Office, Inc.
http://poolprooffice.com