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EngageU is the unofficial counterpart to the annual Claris Engage conference, and attracts the same crowd of leading FileMaker developers and Claris staff and leaders. It’s organised by a pair of European FileMaker development firms, one of which is based in Sweden and the other in Belgium. EngageU alternates between the two countries, and this year it was Belgium’s turn.
The conference took place in a historic hotel in Antwerp’s old market square, where keynote speeches were held in the original ballroom – a wide, uplifting space beneath a huge chandelier. Nearly 250 of us had arrived there from 27 countries, an indication of how wide FileMaker’s reach is today.
We were keen to meet with senior Claris leaders, and were particularly looking forward to a one-to-one session with the Vice-President of Product Management. We are pleased that Claris want to hear our views and to share their plans with us – a reflection of our experience and knowledge. It’s nice to know we’re recognised as experts on the FileMaker platform.
In our meetings with the Claris directors, we were reassured to hear their strong commitment to maintaining the platform’s stability. When developing features, they will prioritise reliability over rushing to market with new innovations. At the same time, they are continuing to invest in significant long-term enhancements – for example, making it far easier to set up a standby server that can take over almost instantly if the main server fails.
It was good to hear that the business is stable and continues to be as profitable as ever. We were quizzed for our views on various new features and future ideas and what we consider most important, and we emphasised the platform’s reliability and longevity. Our conversations reminded us what a well-run and dependable business this is.
Many of the presentations were about AI, and here there are some interesting new developments in FileMaker 2025. AI in FileMaker is getting better and more useful to work with. However, we noted with interest that in many of the sessions that were ostensibly about AI, the solutions discussed were frequently more about how to use programming in smart ways than AI per se.
When asked we gave our view – that AI is a new and powerful tool for certain tasks, such as pattern recognition or working in ‘fuzzy’ areas. For example, we are currently developing an AI-based tool for a client which will extract key information from numerous invoice PDFs structured in many different ways. But the results will need checking and correcting by a human. We pointed out that there are other kinds of tasks that require deterministic logic – in other words, given the same input, the code will reliably produce the same output.
When the sessions are in full swing, four rooms are used simultaneously. That’s a lot of sessions. You can’t attend them all, but you wouldn’t be able to absorb everything anyway. Some of the sessions have speakers explaining and demonstrating a technique they have developed. Others are business-focused, giving guidance on things like how to market your business. There are even entry-level sessions for beginners.
In every session we attended, even when the topic didn’t sound especially useful for us, there was always some valuable nugget we could take away.
Some of our most rewarding experiences were the conversations outside the formal sessions, in the corridors and break-out areas, and at a social event organised at a local brewery. Here we could speak to other FileMaker developers and discuss their work and the solutions they come up with, from a system that helps run a hospital in Greece to an education system used by schools in Italy.
Talking to people doing a similar job in different parts of the world, hearing them share their struggles and the answers they have developed, is mind-opening: it challenges our own thinking, teaches us different approaches and triggers new ideas. And it builds a sense of community, the feeling that we share the same endeavour of trying our best to make the world run a little bit better.
That on its own would be worthwhile. Add in the discussions on the future of FileMaker and one-to-one contact with Claris’s key decision makers, and EngageU 2025 was an occasion not to miss.
We recommend it to any FileMaker developers, both fresh-faced beginners and experienced old-timers like us who believe they’ve seen it all (but haven’t).
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