This year I had the chance to visit the Claris FileMaker conference in Japan. It is a bit different from the other conferences I visited before.

The conference takes place in the Toranomon Hills Business Tower, a huge office building within a complex of multiple buildings. Within that tower the conference is in the forum section on the 5th floor. Below in 2nd and 3rd levels, you find shops and restaurants, so you can get refreshments. In one of the neighbor towers, you have the subway station below, so you can easily come by train and walk over unterground.

Tickets a free as everything is paid by Claris and the sponsors. I decided to join with a smaller sponsorship myself. Over a thousand developers come to learn what is new about FileMaker. At the registration you get a bag with the conference plan, a brochure about FileMaker 2025 and promotional materials from the exhibitors. Then you walk into one of the rooms to watch the keynote. Since not everyone fits in one big room, they split the audience. Everyone gets a headset as they provide English and Japanese audio tracks. And they do live translation!

While people arrive for the keynote, they play promotional videos on the screen. I recognize the video about FileMaker being used to service trains. They have a master of ceremony to guide from one section to the next one.

Ryan McCann (CEO of Claris) starts the keynote with talking about his recent family vacation in Japan. Then he transitions to present the vision of Claris, the unified platform and what is coming. He explains how they leverage AI in FileMaker with an upcoming MCP Server.

For the Japanese users, Claris will include support of Japanese era calendar and flashlight control for FileMaker Go.

Next is Ronnie Rios to talk about the roadmap of the FileMaker platform. He shows upcoming features like remote backup to cloud servers, a new standby server feature and he shows a couple of Claris Studio enhancements.

One of the Japanese Claris staff presents how to create and configure the standby server feature. First they will do warm standby and later the plan a hot standby. Then he demonstrates remote backup setup.

Another Japanese shows how to implement zero trust in FileMaker for enhanced security using certificates. Then she demonstrates flash light feature for FileMaker Go, a feature added due to customer requests. Finally she shows how to use a voice Ai feature to ask for a booth recommendation to visit for a given topic. The AI answers over speaker and it works!

After a few more demonstrations, they announce a few awards for notable solutions built with FileMaker. And these were made by student developers. One of them is a 9 year old developer, who receives an award directly from Ryan McCann and an applause from the auditorium.

For the exhibition area, there is a quiz. You scan a qr-code for each booth and the FileMaker Go conference app has a question. The one collecting most points in the quiz will get some price. A great way to have people visit all the booths!

Also they show how to find sessions, provide feedback and get slides later.

After the keynote and over the next three days there were over 70 sessions. Each of the three days had a specific topic as the third day concentrated on medical use. Some people came only for one day, others for all three days. In general I am impressed how many young people came. Whatever Claris does in Japanese, we may need to do something similar in Europe and America to get more young developers to engage with FileMaker and the community. See you at the next conference!