FM Server 13 on Windows 2012 Server R2

June 20, 2020

Hi Filemaker Friends!

My son and I are spending weekends lately trying to do some server upgrades at my office. We run a small business that has ups and downs and we are using the shelter in place time to upgrade some things in our IT room. We are upgrading servers and now we have the task of moving Filemaker 13 to the new servers. We wanted to upgrade from FM13, to FM13v3 and then to FM13v10 just to get as high up the food chain as we could with our fully paid license on Filemaker 13 Server Advanced. Well, we seem to have hit a snag with the upgrade to FM13v3. It basically won't work as we've learned that Windows 2012 Server R2 doesn't work with Filemaker 13. Since we ultimately want to move up and up on both Fllemaker and Windows Servers, the idea of "reverting" back down to Windows Server Basic (not R2) is not ideal for us.

So that has me thinking about upgrading well beyond FM13, maybe even to FM18 as I've seen some forum topics that seem to suggest that FM18 can use the FM12 file format which is what our current FM13 Server uses.

Any recommendations on what to do on this? My basic plan is to leave FM13 as is with version zero and then slowly upgrade / migrate our servers to Windows Server 16 or something like that and then, maybe do an upgrade to FM18? Not sure of a good path as I'm a novice FM guy and a novice Windows Server guy too.

Any advice would be most welcome!