Procedure for Automated Mailing List in Filemaker - Advice?
Our supervisor has asked for a routine where an agent sends an initial email to a large number of recipients, and in so doing, the email addresses are imported into a Filemaker DB. From there, an email must be sent to those recipients whenever some detail of our properties for sale (also stored in a Filemaker DB) changes.
*It should be noted that, due to server limitations, we cannot use a Listserv application.
I don't know of any way to automatically grab Outlook data into a Filemaker DB, so these are the two methods I am considering for the process:
1- The agents fills in a protected web form, the emails are thus put into a text file on the server (via PHP), which is downloaded to our office server on a regular basis, which is imported into Filemaker, where the emails reside for future mailings.
2- The agent accesses the DB directly through a Filemaker "PHP Assistant" form, which would cut out a lot of overhead, but would also require setting up the Filemaker Web Server. I'm not completely sure our firewall will allow that... I'm also not sure whether it will conflict with other server software on the same machine (such as MS Exchange). But I'm willing to give it a shot, as this seems like a more elegant solution.
Prerequisites: the process needs to be as automated as possible, and the agents must have remote web access.
May I have a consensus on which method I should use? If either...
Thank you.
*It should be noted that, due to server limitations, we cannot use a Listserv application.
I don't know of any way to automatically grab Outlook data into a Filemaker DB, so these are the two methods I am considering for the process:
1- The agents fills in a protected web form, the emails are thus put into a text file on the server (via PHP), which is downloaded to our office server on a regular basis, which is imported into Filemaker, where the emails reside for future mailings.
2- The agent accesses the DB directly through a Filemaker "PHP Assistant" form, which would cut out a lot of overhead, but would also require setting up the Filemaker Web Server. I'm not completely sure our firewall will allow that... I'm also not sure whether it will conflict with other server software on the same machine (such as MS Exchange). But I'm willing to give it a shot, as this seems like a more elegant solution.
Prerequisites: the process needs to be as automated as possible, and the agents must have remote web access.
May I have a consensus on which method I should use? If either...
Thank you.
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