Putting Database Online Just Got Faster and Easier.

IF all the hype about the "information economy" is to be believed, then your business data -- things like customer information, product descriptions, sales records, etc. -- is one of its most valuable assets.

And the more you can do with that information, the more valuable it becomes.

Database applications keep becoming more powerful, and they are putting more and more capabilities in the hand of small businesses. Even a one-person operation can now put together a sophisticated database and share it online -- something that used to require software that is more complicated and expensive.

One of the most promising new database tools to arrive is the latest upgrade to FileMaker Pro (www.filemaker.com) that offers a number of important new capabilities.

By far the most significant is the ease with which FileMaker lets you put a database online, whether over a local network for in-house use or out there on the Web for everybody and her sister to see.

By "put on the Web," I don't just mean a clunky export to a static HTML document, like the ones you can create with the "Save as Web Page" option in some applications. When you do that with a database, you usually just get something that doesn't look much like your original, and which users can't interact with.

The new FileMaker, on the other hand, makes it possible to serve your database directly to users online so they can look through, search, update and change it, depending on the kind of access privileges you give them. Best of all, you can put a database online with just a few steps in a matter of minutes. It really is remarkably easy.

Users can access your database through their Web browser, and this is possible thanks to support for a technology called cascading style sheets, known as CSS. Currently, CSS is supported by Internet Explorer 4.0 or 5.0, and is expected to be supported in the forthcoming Netscape Communicator 5.0. Security options also let you set access privileges for different users, specifying what they can see and change, down to the level of individual fields.

When might this be useful? Well, consider descriptions of all the products you offer. Ordinarily, you might maintain this kind of information in different files. For instance, you might write the description for a particular product in Microsoft Word, and then turn that over to the Web people to include in a page for your site. But every time you make changes to the original, you have to ask them to update your site.

FileMaker avoids this by letting you keep your catalog in a database and put it directly online. The same database that you make changes to is instantly and automatically available via the Internet because a FileMaker Pro plug-in called Web Companion is the Web server for it.

Another example: Say you're asking people to register online for an upcoming demonstration or conference. Previously, you would have had to use somewhat complicated scripting to get people's registrations into a database. Now you can just put the database where you want that registration information right on the Web.

Even if you don't want to open your database to just anyone, employees on the might appreciate the ability to check or update records stored back at the home office. Now they can interact with this kind of database through any computer connected to the Net.

Doing the same thing in Microsoft Access -- the database application that is part of the Office 2000 suite -- requires more steps, and also requires certain software on the user's computer. Anyone wishing to access a FileMaker Pro database needs only a browser that supports CSS.

One caveat: You do need to be able to run FileMaker Pro on your Web server and keep your online databases open all the time. If you only have remote access to Web space through your Internet provider, you're out of luck. But if you have your own Web server (Windows 95/98 or NT, or Mac OS 7.6.1 or higher) you can simply run FileMaker there.

Another potentially valuable feature for businesses that need to reach a multilingual audience is the ability to choose the language for the databases that you serve on the Web. This doesn't mean you can automatically translate the contents of your database, of course, but it does mean that navigational commands in your online database (like Find and Sort) can be presented in any one of seven languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch or Swedish.

Other FileMaker Pro features include open database connectivity, or ODBC, which lets you access other databases or serve your information to other ODBC-compliant database applications like Oracle or Microsoft Access. You can also store things like digital video in the database, so that a catalog you put online can have a multimedia dimension as well.

FileMaker Pro 5 also features a new interface that somehow almost manages to look and feel more like Office 2000 than Office 2000, and version five enables drag-and-drop conversion of Excel files.

FileMaker Pro 5 is available for Windows and Macintosh. An individual copy costs $249 (about $140 for an upgrade) and entities you to share files with up to ten users of a local network, or up to 10 individual users via the Web within a 12-hour period. Other versions without these somewhat odd limitations are also available (at higher prices) if you're a larger operation or need to reach out to more people online.

Microsoft Access lacks some of FileMaker's features, but it has its own strengths, including extensive and wizards to get you started building and sharing your databases.

Christopher Ott is a freelance technology writer and author of "Global Solutions for Multilingual Applications" (Wiley, 1999).