Have you ever wondered what the difference is from a development standpoint of creating a custom FileMaker solution for a business compared to creating a vertical market solution for resale? The first and most obvious difference is that instead of developing a solution for a specific company with a very specific needs, the vertical market solution have a wide range of possible uses with more file management built and scripted directly into the solution, which makes it easier to setup and manage later by the user. While it’s easier to develop with a specific path to follow to create the best solution for the customer, it is also more limiting in nature. Vertical markets are more of an open path in which directions may change several times even after deployment of the solution; this is considered ongoing improvement.
I have found greater difficulty in estimating time and creating project scopes for vertical markets. The main reasoning for this goes beyond the core of the application that you are going to deliver. You have almost as much time or more that needs to be devoted to things, like ensuring that your solution is available on all platforms instead of just the ones your customer is using. There is also quite a bit of time in making sure that the solution is clean and easy to follow should the customer after purchasing the solution would want to work on anything on the backend themselves or has an in-house developer. Add to that, the time needed to prep for marketing and get all of your t’s crossed and i’s dotted, it adds a lot of undocumented time to the project.
Of course, with Vertical markets the hope is to create the solution, get the logistics down and get it out there and done, right? Wrong, our job as developers and keeping up with the latest technologies of a growing industry is to make sure that every solution we put out there has the latest updates and continued bug fixes as those technologies grow.
The developers at Cross IT treat every Vertical Market as though we are custom developing it for every customer we can think would use the solution (and all of their needs). This keeps our vertical market projects open enough to be used by many different companies but also specific in nature to still accomplish their objectives easily. We also pride ourselves in our follow-up to our solutions and customers, and also our need to implement the best designs to our FileMaker solutions as they are tested and available on the platform.
