This is where the magic happens!
Please note that up until the conference starts, there might be changes to the agenda.
Looking for someone special? You’ll find all our speakers in the list of Speakers!
Be part of the agenda and share your expertise
Do you have insights, experiences, or real-world solutions that others in the Claris community could benefit from? Then we’d love to hear from you!
EngageU brings together developers, business leaders, and experts from across the world and it’s the community-driven content that makes it truly valuable. Whether you want to present a technical deep dive, a business case, or lessons learned from real projects, this is your opportunity to contribute!
Speaking at EngageU means more than just presenting, it’s your chance to shape the conversation, build your reputation, and connect with a highly engaged audience.
Submit your session proposal and become part of EngageU 2026.
Categories
Announcement
AI
Technical
Social event / Dinner
Business
Sponsor
Fika/coffee break
Design
Lunch
Integration
| Time | Live 1 | Live 2 | Live 3 | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:00 - 09:00 | Other Check in open for new arrivals | |||
| 09:00 - 10:30 | Live 1 Opening Keynote by Claris - Ryan McCann - Giuliano Iacobelli | |||
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Live 1 | Other Fika | ||
| 11:00 - 12:00 | Live 1 Claris Technical Session - Robert Holsey - Stefano Morandotti | |||
| 12:00 - 13:15 | Other Lunch | |||
| 13:15 - 14:15 | Live 1 Just one more thing… How to avoid the ... - Rob Speakman - Mark Allen | Live 2 Observable Apps: What are your users rea... - Jesse Barnum | Live 3 Claris AI fundamentals - Joris Aarts | |
| 14:30 - 15:00 | Live 1 When your business is the product. How t... - Magnus Gandemo | Live 2 When Your Customers Are on Instagram: An... - Javier Dura | Live 3 fmJAML + fmIDEAS: Text-based dynamic Scr... - Russell Watson | |
| 15:00 - 15:15 | Live 1 | Live 2 | Live 3 | Other Fika |
| 15:15 - 16:15 | Live 1 Business panel discussion: tech meets st... - Sara Severson | Live 2 Practical AI Workflows: Real-World Use C... - Romain Dunand | Live 3 FileMaker Performance Under the Microsco... - HOnza Koudelka | |
| 16:30 - 17:00 | Live 1 Business Session | Live 2 Workloads distribution - worker server a... - Andrea Francica | Live 3 Talk to Your Data: Next-Gen Analytics in... - Johan Hedman | |
| 18:00 - 22:00 | Other Conference Dinner |
| Time | Live 1 | Live 2 | Live 3 | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:30 - 09:00 | Other Check in open for new arrivals | |||
| 09:00 - 10:00 | Live 1 AI on Your Own Terms: When to Run LLMs L... - Ian Jempson | Live 2 Consider and go deep further in your mea... - Koji Takeuchi | Live 3 Speaker session 27 | |
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Other Fika | |||
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Live 1 Beyond Native AI: Calling External LLM A... - Nicolas Franco Cerame | Live 2 Claris MCP: customer use case - Caroline Crémieux-Charpentier | Live 3 Sponsor session 3 | |
| 11:15 - 12:15 | Live 1 Why web-hooks can transform your systems... - John Renfrew | Live 2 Seven Practical AI patterns you can impl... - Matt Navarre | Live 3 What will Coders Sell when Coding is Fre... - Albert Harum-Alvarez | |
| 12:15 - 13:30 | Live 1 | Live 2 | Other Lunch | |
| 13:30 - 14:00 | Live 1 AI in project management: practical use ... - Leslie Audigane | Live 2 Open Quickly: from hidden gem to fully y... - Bo Vandermarliere | Live 3 Sponsor Session 4 | |
| 14:30 - 15:30 | Live 1 Some Of My Favorite Things - Vincenzo Menanno | Live 2 Modern Architecture in FileMaker: APIs, ... - Cristina Álvarez Dávila | Live 3 Almost Everything I Know About Building ... - Charles Delfs | |
| 15:30 - 16:00 | Other Fika | |||
| 16:00 - 17:00 | Live 1 From Code Analysis to Code Creation: Age... - Marcel Moré | Live 2 PDF? Yes, Please! — Building a No-Plug... - Giulio Villani | Live 3 Sponsor session 5 | |
| 19:00 - 23:00 | Other Social Event |
| Time | Live 1 | Live 2 | Live 3 | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00 - 10:00 | Live 1 FileMaker 2026 - new features and tips - Fabrice Nordmann | Live 2 Scaling the FileMaker MCP Server - Liam Geiger | Live 3 Building Modern Web Components with Reac... - Andreas Haandlykken | |
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Other Fika | |||
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Live 1 Beyond “One Day” in FileMaker - HOnza Koudelka | Live 2 Pure FileMaker - Modular RestAPI Integra... - Philipp Puls | Live 3 Devin Sponsor session - David Wollesen | |
| 11:15 - 12:15 | Live 1 Lessons Learnt from Delivering Our First... - Stathis Askaridis | Live 2 Standby Server - Here, Now and the futur... - Claus Lavendt | Live 3 Securing AI Coding Agents in FileMaker D... - Chris Moyer | |
| 12:15 - 13:30 | Other Lunch | |||
| 13:30 - 14:00 | Live 1 Side Projects: Build things you've been ... - Matt Navarre | Live 3 Speaker session 24 | ||
| 14:15 - 15:15 | Live 1 Panel discussion | Live 3 Join the queue - Steve Winter | ||
| 15:30 - 16:00 | Live 1 Closing session |
Check in open for new arrivals
Open for people to check in and setup exhibitor table
Opening Keynote by Claris
Ryan McCann, CEO of Claris and Giuliano Iacobelli, Vice President of Product Management open this conference with news from Claris.
Fika
Time to stretch our legs, grab a coffee and a snack, connect to other attendees and catch some fresh air before the upcoming sessions!
Lunch
Time to fill our stomachs instead of our brains!
Observable Apps: What are your users really doing?
Use analytics in your FileMaker solution to fix performance and scripting bottlenecks, spot security problems, and really see how your users work in your solution.Claris AI fundamentals
Everything you need to know about the current state of AI and the Claris platform.
We'll discuss:
- Natural language search & query
- Semantic search
- Image search
- MCP (Model Control Protocol)
- Agentic development
We'll briefly discuss the concept behind each topic, then quickly dive into practical uses with examples. We'll end each topic with an evaluation of do's and don'ts, plus an honest look at the pros and cons.
The demo files are free to download, and you'll receive one month of free access to experiment with our API key.
This is a "there are no dumb questions" session. Think of it as a primer for some of the more advanced presentations on these topics.
Just one more thing… How to avoid the dreaded scope creep
Just one more thing" is the phrase that quietly kills project timelines and budgets. Last year in Antwerp we showed how AI speeds up getting a proposal signed off, this year we tackle what happens next: stopping scope creep before it ever starts. Using a fictional case study, we'll show how to turn a scattered list of client requests into one clear, agreed blueprint.When Your Customers Are on Instagram: An AI-Powered Customer Service Story
The way customers reach businesses has changed. Email is no longer the first channel. It’s Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Buyers ask questions at 11pm on a Saturday and expect an answer before Monday morning. If you don't reply fast, they go to your competitor.
This session tells the story of a real car-audio shop that was losing customers because of slow response times, and how we solved it with an AI-powered assistant built on FileMaker.
The session focuses on why social media has become the new customer service channel, what problems AI actually solves for a small business, and what patterns work in production. Attendees will see a live demo and will be invited to message the system from their own phones.
A practical session for FileMaker developers who want to bring conversational AI into their solutions and turn a regular Instagram DM into a real, paid order.
fmJAML + fmIDEAS: Text-based dynamic Scripting (for Agentic AI Development)
What if FileMaker scripts could be written, reviewed, tested and even generated by AI as plain text?
This session introduces fmJAML and fmIDEAS (FileMaker JSON As a Markdown Language + fmIDE Action Scripts), a new text-first approach to FileMaker development that opens up possibilities previously difficult or impossible with the native Script Workspace.
You’ll see how a concise, human-readable scripting language can drive dynamic FileMaker automation, power an automated test framework, and provide an AI Action Bridge that allows AI agents to help explore and modify FileMaker solutions directly via the FileMaker Client GUI, making the AI-supported development process much more natural, fine grained, guided and safe.
The session includes:
- A brief introduction to the concepts behind fmJAML and fmIDEAS
- A live demonstration of the system in action
- Real-world examples, including automated testing and AI-assisted development
- A discussion of where text-first FileMaker development could take us next
Along the way we’ll explore the design philosophy behind the project—“Beauty is mathematical. Confidence is architectural. Seeing is believing. Proof is divine.”—and how those principles have guided a system that has already proven itself in day-to-day development.
Enjoy
When your business is the product. How to buy or sell a FileMaker‑dependent business
Companies with FileMaker dependent business will change ownership. Founders that created the business are about to retire. We will talk about the process where the buyer and seller find common ground.Fika
Time to stretch our legs, grab a coffee and a snack, connect to other attendees and catch some fresh air before the upcoming sessions!
Practical AI Workflows: Real-World Use Cases for Your Customers
I will first present several real-world AI use cases that can be integrated into FileMaker solutions. I will then dive deeper into one of them to explain how it works, the issues I faced while building it, and the key decisions behind the implementation.
The session will cover architecture, model choice, FileMaker integration, privacy, cost, and customer value, with the goal of helping attendees identify concrete AI-powered solutions they can build or propose to their own customers.
FileMaker Performance Under the Microscope
FileMaker 26 brings new performance expectations — but the most interesting performance questions are not always answered by version comparisons alone. After Initiative ’24 helped make the “faster calculation engine” the #1 voted feature request in the Claris Community, HOnza continued benchmarking and stress-testing FileMaker from new angles. The results revealed surprising cases where FileMaker invokes the calculation engine far more often than expected, creating hidden overhead that can significantly affect real-world solutions. In this session, HOnza will compare FileMaker 2026 with FileMaker 2025 using real benchmark data, share findings from a custom layout benchmarking framework, and explain what these discoveries mean for developers building or maintaining demanding FileMaker apps. You will also learn from a real-world optimization project where a customer’s solution had already been optimized several times — yet still had measurable performance gains left to uncover. Expect practical techniques, surprising benchmark results, and a deeper look at the invisible work FileMaker may be doing behind the scenes.
Business panel discussion: tech meets strategy
Sara Severson, Director of Client and Partner Relations, and Business Solutions Architect at Soliant Consulting will lead a panel discussion with Claris customers, Claris partners and Claris staff.Workloads distribution - worker server and queueing
Your solution’s functionalities have different goals: - light functions whose result should be immediately available to the user (es. browsing) - heavy functions whose results should be immediately available to the user - heavy functions whose results doesn’t need to be immediately displayed The first 2 cases need local execution and PSOS with wait. The third case no: it can be delegated to a worker server to lighten the load on FMSE of the main server. We’ll see how to set up a worker server, tips to manage failures, thing to keep in mind.Talk to Your Data: Next-Gen Analytics in Claris
What if you could simply ask your database complex business questions in plain language and get instant, executive-level insights? In this session, I will guide you through how defining relational schemas and roles transforms raw FileMaker data into a powerful, conversational analytics engine. I’ll take you through real-world business scenarios showing how simple queries expose critical cash flow risks, identify customer concentration bottlenecks, and automatically generate interactive visual dashboards. What You’ll Learn & See• Schema & Role Setup: How to teach the system your relational data structure step-by-step.
• Conversational Queries: Formulating complex, multi-table business questions in plain everyday language.
• Automated Insights: Uncovering hidden financial risks and navigating smart follow-up prompts.
• Instant Dashboards: Transforming plain text answers into dynamic, exportable visual charts.
Conference Dinner
Check in open for new arrivals
Open for people to check in and setup exhibitor table
AI on Your Own Terms: When to Run LLMs Locally, When to Reach for the API
Your customers are asking for AI features. The easy answer is to wire up an OpenAI or Anthropic API call from a script step and ship it. Sometimes that's the right call. Often it isn't, knowing the difference is becoming a core consulting skill.
This session is a practical decision framework for FileMaker developers on where to run LLMs for client work. We'll cover what you can genuinely run locally in 2026, how serverless options fit it, when hosted open-model providers make sense, and when you should reach for Claude or GPT despite the cost and data implications.
We'll cover the GDPR conversation your clients aren't having yet but will, the unit economics at realistic FileMaker-scale workloads, and the integration patterns that work cleanly from FileMaker scripts. Through demos, you'll see a FileMaker solution with local extraction, classification, and summarisation. All entirely offline.
You'll leave with a framework for advising clients, concrete starting points for your own stack, and a clearer view of where this is heading.
Consider and go deep further in your meat-and-potatoes
If you've been developing Custom Apps on the FileMaker platform, you might have many techniques you commonly use. But didn't you ever think, "How do other people do in this case?"? In this session, we will talk about techniques that appear frequently in our development and discuss how many approaches we have to get the same results and how we can make it efficient, faster, and sometimes better results. Also, this session will compare some techniques (container field alternatives, save/restore found sets, etc.) I used it in the past and now, and what advantages can be made.Fika
Time to stretch our legs, grab a coffee and a snack, connect to other attendees and catch some fresh air before the upcoming sessions!
Claris MCP: customer use case
We implemented at a customer the ability to create dashboards and extract data autonomously using Claris MCP and Claude.I will show you how Claris MCP enables Claude to interact with a FileMaker database (set-up, benefits and limitations).What will Coders Sell when Coding is Free?
The first wave of agentic code has caused us to talk & write more about code. That’ll change when the shine of AI wears off. When code is automatically written, dependably tested & reliably debugged by AI agents, we will lose interest in it as a topic of conversation.
Code will be ever more present, as the cost to make it plummets. And the value of Coding—this thing that we do that for the time being is still called a profession—will tend asymptotically to zero.
How are smart team leaders responding to all this? Our team is building specs like we’ve always built code. We factor our specs into four layers, so that Ongoing Development doesn’t become Scope Creep or even The Run-On Project. This means we can deepen our bandwidth for new projects & quicken the pace of deployment, all while staying focused on serving our patron’s business.
Why web-hooks can transform your systems
For the first time ever, we can alter the behaviour of a FileMaker file without ever opening it! Webhooks that are triggered by changes to your data, one table at a time are a powerful new feature, but with scant documentation. We will review how they work, what they can be used for, and some tips from helping others use them in their solutions.Seven Practical AI patterns you can implement in an afternoon
AI can do big things, but it can also do small, immediately useful things, which become building blocks.Lunch
Time to fill our stomachs instead of our brains!
AI in project management: practical use cases and daily impact
I propose a 30-minute session as part of the Business sessions, focusing on practical experience in using artificial intelligence in project management. The aim is to demonstrate how these tools can be integrated into a project manager’s day-to-day work to improve efficiency and the quality of delivery. Particular attention will be given to confidentiality, GDPR, and the European AI Act considerations.Open Quickly: from hidden gem to fully yours
Most FileMaker users navigate their solution the same way every day: menus, scrolling, repetition. Open Quickly offers a faster path, but few people know it exists, and fewer still know how deep it goes. This session explores the native feature in full, honestly examines where it falls short, and then shows what becomes possible when you build your own version, tailored to your solution and your users. A practical, eye-opening look at one of FileMaker's most underused interaction patterns.Almost Everything I Know About Building Agents
The whole landscape of building AI agents, laid out in order, from your first one to the ones that run without you watching. Everything I have learned, shared as completely as an hour allows.Some Of My Favorite Things
This session explores three areas I’ve been spending a lot of time over many years, recently and places where I will be spending a lot of time in: measuring performance, managing technical debt, and AI-assisted development. While they may seem unrelated at first, they all connect back to something FileMaker has enabled for decades — rapid iteration and the ability to continually evolve what we build. Today, AI-assisted workflows and “vibe coding” are accelerating that capability even further, creating both exciting opportunities and important new challenges. I’ll share experiments, observations, and lessons learned from projects, while exploring the broader implications for our community, and how to maintain a focus through this incredible transformation.Modern Architecture in FileMaker: APIs, Webhooks, and Microservices
FileMaker solutions today rarely work alone—they connect to other systems, exchange data, and automate processes. This session looks at practical ways to structure those integrations using APIs, webhooks, and simple microservice patterns. Through a mix of concepts and real examples, we will focus on building solutions that are easier to maintain, more reliable, and better prepared to grow over time.Fika
Time to stretch our legs, grab a coffee and a snack, connect to other attendees and catch some fresh air before the upcoming sessions!
From Code Analysis to Code Creation: Agentic Development for FileMaker
A new workflow for FileMaker development combines agentic code analysis with agent-based code creation. Especially in large legacy solutions, this approach offers major advantages for understanding, maintaining, and evolving complex codebases. Using tools such as DuckDB for structured analysis and Claude Code for agentic implementation, the session shows how traditional development workflows can be fundamentally rethought. Customizable interfaces and supporting tools make the approach practical and adaptable to real project needs.PDF? Yes, Please! — Building a No-Plugin PDF Engine Inside FileMaker
From AcroForms to flat layouts, AI field detection, and FileMaker 2026's new print settings — all inside a single portable module
Social Event
Please Note: Participation in this event requires a separate ticket, which is not included in the standard conference registration.
Join us for a night of inspiring conversations, great food and something to clench your thirst!
At Malmö Brewing Co & Taproom you can enjoy a nice glass of in house brewed beer as well as international craft beer. Or try some mead for that sweet, old school (or is it ancient?) vibe! There’s also wines, craft ciders and sodas for those who are not too keen on beer.
Food will be served as a BBQ buffet: You can build your own burgers and choose your preferred toppings and ingredients to create them just the way you like.
A vegetarian burger option will also be available.
FileMaker 2026 - new features and tips
FileMaker 2026 was released in June, but have you had the chance to explore everything it brings? Join us for a deep dive into the new features and discover how they can help you build even better solutions.Scaling the FileMaker MCP Server
Once FileMaker data sits behind an MCP server, you don't get to decide how many agents and users hit it at once. A single instance runs out of headroom fast. OData has connection limits, it's weakest at exactly the aggregate questions people ask an AI, and agents ask a lot of questions. Claris ships a hosted MCP connector, and for a lot of projects that's the right answer. This session is about the projects where it isn't, and what we learned building something we run ourselves. We'll go through the options we weighed, from scaling compute with demand to keeping a warm tier to moving analytical work off FileMaker altogether, why we ruled out the ones we ruled out, and where we landed. The constraints did most of the deciding: how long compute really takes to be ready to serve, how much of that a user will sit through before a chat feels broken, and which queries genuinely need live data versus which only feel like they do. We'll close on cost, which shapes these decisions more than people admit. How we modeled spend before committing to a design, which variables actually move the number, and how to run the same estimate against your own deployment before you build anything.Building Modern Web Components with React
Learn how modern web technologies can extend the capabilities of FileMaker while maintaining a smooth and efficient development process.
Fika
Time to stretch our legs, grab a coffee and a snack, connect to other attendees and catch some fresh air before the upcoming sessions!
Beyond “One Day” in FileMaker
Many FileMaker solutions have grown over years of real business use. They work, they are valuable, and they often run critical processes — but underneath the surface, they also carry issues that everyone knows should be addressed “one dayâ€: historical architecture decisions, hard-to-change logic, fragile integrations, unclear dependencies, slow workflows, and parts of the system that only one person fully understands. Today, there is also a new question: with modern AI tools and other rapidly evolving technologies, should a company keep investing in FileMaker, extend it, integrate it with new tools, or gradually move some processes elsewhere? In this session, I will share practical lessons from real-world FileMaker projects where long-postponed issues were finally analyzed, prioritized, and improved. We will look at these challenges from several angles: technical, architectural, organizational, psychological, and strategic — because the hardest part is often not knowing that something should change, but deciding what to change first and how to do it safely. You will walk away with concrete ways to look at your own solution differently: how to identify hidden complexity, separate symptoms from root causes, choose low-risk first steps, and make meaningful progress without rewriting everything or waiting for a major project to be approved.Pure FileMaker - Modular RestAPI Integration
We have discovered, that increasingly more projects need external data (source & target) than in the past. We have alyo found , that implementing a restAPI over and over again is a) boring and b) hard to maintain, as many of our implementations were done individually and the code was not always up to standards. Readability issues, performance … Sometimes you need to convert, merge or split information, this can be done in variables, in fields, in calculations or auto entries … We wanted a standard that is easy to implement, easy to maintain and the same in every solution, so that a new programmer can learn it easily. We have succeeded to separate the settings from the structure and process and can now utilise the same framework for all RestAPI-connections, parameterise the connection and field mappings. This is all done in classical FileMaker code, some nice JSON calculations and our set or standardised C.R.U.D.-Filemaker scriptsLessons Learnt from Delivering Our First Vibe-Coded FileMaker App
Last year, we presented the concept: a FileMaker application with its entire UI built inside a single vibe-coded Web Viewer. This year, we made it real. We designed, built, tested, and delivered our first solely vibe-coded FileMaker application, and this session is the full debrief. We'll take you through the complete journey: development, QA, UAT, and beyond, examining how each phase looks different in this new era of AI-assisted development. Where do the demands shift? What do you need to rethink? And what does "done" even mean when AI is doing the heavy lifting? Everything we learnt from delivering this application, the wins, the surprises, and the hard lessons, will be laid out, analysed, and shared with you.Standby Server - Here, Now and the future
With FileMaker 2026 a new option has been added to the FileMaker server to allow you to ensure a simple business continuity option. What happens if your primary server crash ? How long will it take you to get back from a backup ? How much downtime can you allow ? What if you can’t get to your primary server, nor your backups ? The standby server option is here in a version 1. And this is a feature you can use to have a standby server ready in the event that something bad happens to your primary server. It allows you to be up and running in minutes. While many cloud services offers snapshots and features that allow you to get a new machine fast - what if you can’t get to that ? What if the service is down for a longer period of time ? While this feature is now here in a version 1, Claris is not done with this feature. Next version is already in the works. Get to know all about this feature, how to set it up. How you can utilise 3. party services to extend the usage. It’s really like an insurance policy. But this feature is also very useful when you need to apply security updates and patches on your primary server. Now you don’t need to have a service window, often during the night. After this session you will know all the mechanics under the hood, how to setup and use this feature and know about where the feature will evolve towards.Securing AI Coding Agents in FileMaker Development
FileMaker itself and a rapidly growing ecosystem of third-party FileMaker tools are shifting toward agentic development, increasingly relying on industry-standard AI coding harnesses. This session looks under the hood at the specific attack surfaces they introduce to your deployment pipeline. We break down the 'lethal trifecta' of AI agent coding risk and discuss concrete controls across credentials, MCP, prompt injection, exfiltration and supply chain across 4 widely used AI coding harnesses—Claude Desktop/Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.Lunch
Time to fill our stomachs instead of our brains!
Side Projects: Build things you've been thinking about for years but never had the time
This isn't your typical FileMaker session: it's about building projects you've thought about for years. Now you can build in weekend instead of a someday, using the rare skill set you already have for building apps.Join the queue
I’ve previously spoken about off-loading work to the server, but what If you wanted to perform batch operations on large data sets, or you wanted an external system to be able to do that for you - that’s where queues come in.
In this sessions we’ll look at different techniques for queueing tasks in a FileMaker based system - roll your own, using a FileMaker-based queuing system like SimpleQ, or an external queuing application like RabbitMQ or Amazon SQS. We’ll take a look at how each system works and the pros and cons of each.
Closing session
Thank you all, good bye and see you next year?
Floor plan
The conference will take place on the bottom floor of Clarion Hotel Malmö Live. During Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon, Live1 and Live 2 will be combined into one single room, holding up to 250 people.
Outside the session rooms, you will find the exhibitors’ area.
Restrooms can be found just outside he conference area, as seen on the map.
All lunch and fika will be served adjacent to the conference area. The Wednesday dinner will be served one floor up from the conference area.
Click the image for a better look!
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