Avatar Digital Publishing Solutions [http://www.avatardps.com/] is a Pittsburgh (PA) based FileMaker Business Alliance Member that works with organizations seeking to improve their catalog and advertising and publishing production workflows. As an acknowledged world leader in this area, Avatar also provides consulting and custom designed applications for advertising and publishing production management.

Avatar's PAM2 is a set of FileMaker Pro based Product and Catalog Content and Image Management components that is highly configurable and customizable. PAM2 facilitates automated page building and content linking to InDesign and QuarkXpress. It can also be integrated with enterprise systems and website applications. Despite having customers located all over the world working in many different environments, Avatar has found there are common elements all customers need and request. CEO Coletta A. Perry describes it this way: "Our customers want to know who changed a data element in their system and when. They want to know what the data used to be, and they want to know what it is now."

Avatar needed a robust and feature-rich audit logging capability to track what changes were made to data, when they were made, and who made them. One of the more difficult aspects of constructing such a system with native FileMaker Pro capabilities is capturing the before value and the after value when data are changed. The fmDataGuard product does that–and more—through its Audit Log capability. Avatar turned to fmDataGuard to solve its business need for logging changes. "It’s now a standard part of our PAM product," according to Perry. "It brings a high degree of functionality to our solutions for a fraction of what it would take us to develop or code it on our own."

Avatar has selected an option found in fmDataGuard that allows the end user customer to modify and to control the fields whose changes are logged by using a specific specially-designated layout in the file.

fmDataGuard works without any requirement for scripting or shadow fields and tables that can dramatically add to a system's overhead and significantly diminish system performance. It creates a complete field-level audit log for all additions, changes, and deletions in any FileMaker Pro 8.5 (or greater) table. It works on hosted files in conjunction with FileMaker Server 8.0v4 (and above) and captures all methods of data modification, including Import, Replace Routines, xDBC and Instant Web Publishing or Custom Web Publishing.