I had never had to deal with FileMaker before I started at my current job, six months ago. Since then, I've become relatively familiar with it.
We've been having some issues with our Container objects dropping references to files, and I have been working on a solution of my own. Well, someone told my boss about 360Works SuperContainer, and he told me to check it out.
It seems to me that SuperContainer is just a virtual server for organizing images. The way that our image database is set up, it would be no hassle at all to just create a field that returns an image's path based on the item number, then pas that to a Web Viewer - which is basically all that SuperContainer does, anyway. Given that I could explain to some of the other employees how to put images in the database correctly, nobody would ever have to manually add an image through FileMaker again. We're not really very interested in the FileMaker Instant Web Publishing features, either, so there's that.
Right now, I'm having a pretty hard time justifying spending $200 of my company's money to pay for additional software that does something that I'm already taking care of. Are there any ground-shaking, game-changing features of SuperContainer that I'm just not picking up on? (Keep in mind that I can batch-process images down to thumbnail size for free with XnView, or that, if push came to shove, I could easily build a webapp to make an in-program slideshow of pictures.)
What do you guys think?
You're right. SuperContainer could help to deal with the dropped references when storing files in FileMaker by reference instead of storing the entire file within the database. Personally, given how large FileMaker files can be, when working with documents, I tend to simply store them within the database and script their retrieval. But SuperContainer isn't doing anything that you couldn't do yourself with scripting and a web server. By using SuperContainer you might save yourself some coding time, which might make it worth the purchase, but it won't add any capabilities that you couldn't code yourself.