In this movie we will discuss what FileMaker Server is and what versions there are. FileMaker Server is an important member of the FileMaker product line for a number of reasons, all of which we will discuss in this training. FileMaker Server truly is the cornerstone of a trouble free deployment for any FileMaker solution. The essence of FileMaker Server is that it hosts FileMaker files, it makes them available for users to connect to, no big deal you think, I can host files with a regular copy of FileMaker Pro. There is another movie in this tutorial that describes all of the differences between hosting files with FileMaker Pro versus hosting them with FileMaker Server and it explains why FileMaker Server is the way to go even if you only have a couple of users. In short it comes down to a couple of key issues, performance, stability, reliability, and security. First of all FileMaker Server is good for performance since it is multi-threaded meaning it can do more than one thing at a time. Also for performance FileMaker Server has optimized routines for reading and writing to the server's hard disk. And let's not forget that FileMaker Server 9 and 10 have features that allow it to run a multitude of tasks on the server meaning they don't have to be run on the client anymore they can be performed at the server and can be performed much faster. For stability, FileMaker Server is a service on Windows and daemon on OS X. What this means is that it all runs in the background with no user interface. Availability comes from among other things from FileMaker's ability to do live backups. Users can just keep on working on their files as backups are performed. And availability also comes because FileMaker Server lets other technologies like XSLT, XML, PHP, .NET, ODBC to be seen all connect directly to the data hosted directly on FileMaker Server. FileMaker Server is meant to be run on server class hardware. And that will improve reliability. FileMaker Server also has a couple of new features that will increase reliability. FileMaker Server 10 for instance lets you run a consistency check schedule on your files, which is a brand new feature. FileMaker Server 10 is good for security because among other things it allows for external authentication which will be explained later and it can also encrypt data that is sent between the FileMaker Pro client and the FileMaker Server. There are two versions of FileMaker Server available, the standard FileMaker Server and FileMaker Server Advanced. When you choose Server Advanced you get the ability to use the host at FileMaker data outside of FileMaker specifically with instant web publishing and ODBC-JBDC. In addition to that, you get almost 1,000 FileMaker Pro client sessions instead of the 250 that you get with the regular FileMaker Server. Normal web publishing with PHP and XML based technologies is already available in the normal version of FileMaker Server, you don't need FileMaker Server Advanced for that. But we have a bunch of movies in this tutorial that will show you all of that. Before you can host files with FileMaker Server you need to create them of course, and you do that with FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advanced. This means that FileMaker Server can only host files that were created with the equivalent family of FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Pro Advanced. The family of FileMaker products that share the same file format, you can tell what the file format is by looking at the extension of a FileMaker file. FileMaker 7, 8, 9, and 10 share the .fb7 extension. So FileMaker Server 10 and host all files created with FileMaker 7 through 10. But not files created with FileMaker 6 or earlier. In the same token only FileMaker Pro 7 through 10 can connect to files hosted on FileMaker Server 10.