EngageU 2023 Recap

The 2nd edition of the EngageU European Claris FileMaker conference was held earlier this month in Antwerp, Belgium. The conference attracted over 200 participants from 22 countries all around the world (including 2 from Australia!) and was expertly organised by ClickWorks and Square Moon.

This was my first European FileMaker event that I’ve attended in-person and it definitely won’t be my last. The conference kicked off with a Claris Partner Meeting followed by a brewery tour and dinner at De Koninck where I got to sample a variety of different Belgium beers. The next two days were filled with sessions and discussions in the KCC Congress Centre which was a great venue (and short walk from the hotel). One of the highlights was the conference dinner which was held at the historical Marble Hall next to the famous Antwerp Zoo.

I was grateful to be invited to present two sessions at EngageU 2023:

1. Webhooks: in this session I explained what webhooks are and why you should use them, and gave an overview of the options for deploying webhooks including commercial solutions like Claris Connect or build it yourself using other programming languages like PHP and JavaScript. I also did a few live demos using Stripe and Twilio showing how you can implement webhooks to receive automatic notifications of new payments from Stripe and incoming SMS messages from Twilio.
2. Apple Maps Integration: this session covered using Apple’s MapKit JS to display maps in your FileMaker solution using the FileMaker Web Viewer and Apple Maps. I demonstrated how to create simple maps of an address using MapKit JS and how to plot multiple markers on a map and customise the appearance of the markers. The video of my presentation is now available on YouTube.

Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions. All sessions at EngageU were recorded and will be available on YouTube once they have been edited. If you have any questions about these please get in touch. I’m looking forward to finding out where EngageU 2024 will be and starting my planning for the long trip back to Europe again.