Base: A beginner's Qs

English
#1

I currently use filemaker but as a small business hoping to sell low cost solutions to the NHS (national health service), there is no low cost way of deploying these solutions. I didn’t previously consider Base because though Writer is good, Calc uses Basic which is difficult cf VBA and has limited columns. I am concerned that Base is similarly limited:

1. How could you deploy a Base solution? Eg. can muliple users get to it on a server from remove PCs? Can it be accessed over a cloud network?

2. Cost: LO is free aside from donations but what costs are likely associated with making or deploying a Base solution? I am most concerned with components that might need ongoing licence payments. Eg. I didn’t mind paying for Filemaker itself, but the server per user costs make it a ‘software as a service’ before you’ve even charged a user for the solution.

3. Functionality: How does Base cf Filemaker and other competitors? And in 1 review, it mentioned that Base doesn’t work well with MS software; does it mean Excel/Word or Windows?

4. Licensing, protection and security: Can you lock a solution so that only paid licensees can use it, protect its forms and back-end from accidental alteration and secure it from people capturing data and scripts.

5. Base forum: Filemaker does have a v. good forum. Does Base have a good one?

6. Examples: Any links showing examples would be useful, especially if they covered the above topics.

Thank you,
Stephen

#2
  1. Base is not a database server on its own. When you use the “embedded database” it runs a limited (single user) server connecting to the data embedded in your file. To have multiple concurrent access, set up a database server on your network. To have cloud/internet access, place the database on an internet-connected service. (Most web hotel services offer database service.)
  2. There are multiple free “unlimited” database server titles out there. Some are more or less business standard for large scale deployment (PostgreSQL, MariaDB) but will still run on modest hardware to serve a few clients. I routinely run MariaDB (which is the free version of MySQL) on my workstation. While the servers are free both as a service and “per seat”, a web hotel subscription with DB service usually is not.
  3. When running a separate DB server, Base only acts as a front end. Communication with server for data manipulation and extraction is not a problem. Data structure changes (new or removed table/field/index/key) may require “backend tools”. I do not know Filemaker so I cannot say anything about how this compares to that.
  4. User authentication is typically set up on the DB server side, so you can provide free access to the Base file (which may contain forms, scripts, queries) but the user needs username/password to access the data content.
  5. For specific questions, this place is good. There is also forum.openoffice.org which more or less caters for all StarOffice-forked software. The Base subforum there is quite active.
#3

Forgive the ignorance on some of these Qs. Typically there will be 6-40 users in a hospital that will have PC access linked via an intranet:

  1. Base solution deployment: So I can make a DB for a single user using LO. But if I were selling to say a hospital, which because of security issues would want data on their own server, what would I sell as a package for their, as you say, multiple concurrent users?

  2. DB’s: You mention PostgreSQL, MariaDB; does Base work with these as a front end?

  3. User authentication: So I would be setting this up through the DB, not Base?

  4. Genaral Q: Have you found Base to be a good front end solution, assuming you have seen others?

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.