Creating Panic Status Boards using FileMaker Server

As long time users of Panic applications we were very interested when they released Status Board earlier this year. Status Board is an iPad app designed to help you display your data. You can view the data on the iPad using the app, but where it gets interesting is the in-app purchase that lets you connect it a giant display screen/TV with HDMI out.

The app has some great standard display panels:

• Clock — Analog or digital, anywhere in the world.
• Weather — Temperature and four-day forecast.
• Calendar — Pick a calendar and see your appointments at a glance.
• Mail — Get messages counts, or see the latest Subject lines.
• Twitter — See the latest Tweets or the volume of tweets.
• Feeds — The latest headlines from your favorite sites

and also 3 Pro panels that let you customise your own content to display:

• Graph — You provide the JSON or CSV data source, we make it beautiful.
• Table — Toss us some HTML or CSV data and we’ll make a nice looking table.
• Do-It-Yourself — Design your own panels using HTML

It’s these 3 Pro panels that let you display data directly from your FileMaker Pro databases hosted on FileMaker Server. We’ve used the FileMaker API for PHP to query hosted databases, return the result and then format the data into the required format. Here’s an example we did for a real estate client:

This Status Board is displayed on a TV in their office that all staff can and is updated every 5 minutes automatically. It allows sales staff to quickly see how they are tracking in terms of number of property listings for the month and sales for the month. They can also view historical data for the last 6 months. It includes a table of their current properties for sale – we’re only showing 4 at any one time but the table scrolls automatically on the external display. We even included some green/red icons for the admin staff to quickly see the status of their FileMaker Server and Web Servers so they can tell if there’s any issues.

If you have any questions about integrating your FileMaker data into a custom Status Board please contact us.