Claris Partners and our customers are pros at solving business problems. With their innovation wheels in constant motion, ideas about working better and smarter are always churning. They ask questions, such as:
- How can the company reach more customers?
- What can the team do to improve service delivery?
- What does it take to provide a better experience for everyone who interacts with the business?
- How can the organization quickly pivot in response to market forces like a pandemic or a possible recession?
Now, more than ever, these organizations are tapping into the ease with which the Claris platform can support anonymous, occasional, or guest users. From contact forms and surveys to event registrations and job applications, a single development platform can lead to big and broad business improvements – the efficiencies that enhance organizational processes and grow the business’ bottom line.
Elevate engagement with no login required.
The Claris platform is typically the efficiency launching pad for organizations — it’s the machine that fuels ongoing process improvements. The first app doesn’t stay a solo app for long, leading to new ways to innovate and make ongoing operational improvements. (See why and how in our last blog, One Claris app leads to another.)
The evolution of creating better ways to drive even better business solutions is what energizes organizations to shift from “What if?” to “What’s next?”
With the “What’s next?” mindset, organizations expand usage of the Claris platform to create internal and external interactions, support new events, and improve current processes by engaging with what we call “anonymous” users. Also thought of as guest, occasional, or one-time users, these individuals have two things in common:
- They don’t require login credentials, such as a username or password, to access your custom application.
- They are typically end-users who submit information for surveys, event registrations, and other use cases where you want to collect data.
Creating connections for anonymous users is easy for any developer to set up, manage, and expand. Plus, online forms are interactive, providing bidirectional data flow instead of a static webform.
The freedom to innovate.
The Claris platform is built to support the way you want to work, ready for the customization needed to make your organization more scalable. You can open up any of your custom apps to gather input from all sorts of anonymous users – customers, suppliers, students or their parents, event participants, or whatever internal or external audience you would like to reach.
Currently, your developers can use Claris FileMaker to set up anonymous users in just a few steps:
- Open a database in FileMaker Pro hosted on FileMaker Server.
- Go to the File menu > Manage > Security
- Enable the Guest account and modify the Guest Privilege Set to allow access via FileMaker WebDirect.
- Configure FileMaker Server to allow anonymous users: fmsadmin set serverconfig securefilesonly=false
These four steps lead to endless use cases to drive continuous improvement and create value.
Note: We’ve recently announced Claris Studio, the future of the Claris platform that uses native-cloud technology, which will enhance the anonymous user experience even more. Stay tuned for future details.
Use cases galore.
To help spark what’s next for your apps, integrations, and workflows, check out how current Claris customers bring automation and efficiency to their businesses with support for anonymous users. Here are some of the top use cases (and the list is growing):
- Contact forms
- Appointment scheduling based on calendars and time availability
- User surveys — either anonymous or named
- Event, conference, or online course registrations
- New client inquiries or quote requests
- Employment applications and associated forms
- Status of payments, invoices, orders, or projects
- Dashboards with views into tasks and events
- Membership registrations and renewals
- Web feedback, such as event attendee comments or event evaluations
So, what’s next to develop at your company? What ideas do you have to support workplace innovation? Will your solutions include anonymous users?
Don’t settle for done.
The custom app you’ve built is just the beginning to making the most of the Claris platform. If you're ready to explore additional workflows and elevate your tech strategy to give your business what's needed for success, Claris Partners can help.
Are you already working with a Claris Partner? Reach out and discover new ways to help your company run more efficiently and scale your applications with confidence.
Or, if you’ve spearheaded development on your own and could use additional expertise to bring your ideas – and perhaps a backlog of technology projects – to reality, find a partner near you and get started.