Knowledge Base

Maintaining a FileMaker system involves more than making changes to the custom solution. Responsibility may be divided among Portage Bay Solutions, your internal staff, your IT provider, and your hosting provider depending on how your system is configured and which services are included in your agreement.

A FileMaker system includes the custom solution, FileMaker Server, operating system, hardware or cloud environment, backups, networking, security, licensing, and user administration. These areas may be handled by Portage Bay Solutions, your internal staff, an outside IT provider, or a combination of all three.

Our role may include FileMaker development, solution support, hosting, licensing assistance, server maintenance, monitoring, upgrades, and backup review depending on your service arrangement. Services that are not included in your agreement are handled as requested and should not be assumed to be monitored automatically. 

Your organization remains responsible for notifying us about staffing changes, business-process changes, new integrations, security concerns, and problems users are experiencing. You should also maintain appropriate internal ownership of user access, data policies, disaster-recovery decisions, and communication with any outside IT provider. 

An internal or outsourced IT team commonly manages workstations, local networks, internet service, VPNs, firewalls, identity systems, endpoint security, and physical server hardware. Clear coordination is important because changes in any of these areas can affect FileMaker even when the FileMaker files themselves have not changed.

We recommend documenting who monitors the server, verifies backups, installs updates, renews certificates, manages accounts, and responds to outages. If these responsibilities are unclear, contact your Portage Bay Solutions project manager so we can review your current arrangement and identify any gaps.