Happy Birthday to Idealware!

It's the third anniversary of the founding of Idealware - man, time flies, huh? Three years ago, Idealware wasn't much more than a dream and a really darn expensive hobby for me. It's pretty thrilling to see how we've grown - these days, we're a vibrant and sustainable community of folks committed to effective nonprofit software.

And 2008 has been a big year for us. We've published 26 articles and three reports - our Consumers Guide to Grants Management Software for grantmakers, Get Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features, and Comparing Lower-Cost Online Integrated Applications. Well more than a hundred people have contributed their time and expertise to make them happen, and more than 180,000 different people viewed the information on our site. Our workshops continue to be very popular - we've trained more than 500 people through our online seminars, and hundreds more in person.

And we've done all this on an annual budget of less than $100,000.

We have tons of great things in the works for 2009. We've already begun work on three reports planned for the first half of 2009 - Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone; A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems; and A Guide to Data Visualization Software on A Shoestring. We have four brand new workshops planned. And of course, we'll continue to keep the smaller articles rolling as well.

Thanks to all of you - our board members, our bloggers, our donors, our article contributors, and all of you who read Idealware resources and pass them on. I'm humbled by your support. Here's to many more years to come.