At long last.

While the blog has been silent, the behind the scenes of Creative Pro have been busy. Those of you interested in installing CPO on your own server finally have that option.

First, a big thank you to all the commenters and emails that have nothing but good things to say about CPO. It is encouraging to see the application meeting the needs of so many people. Those encouraging emails are not falling into the abyss, but are inspiring further time investment to work out the little issues of getting CPO all packaged up to sell.

And things are so close to being ready I can taste it. But I want to wheel and deal with some of the existing users to help roll out CPO as a downloadable product.

For those of you who are interested in installing CPO on your own server, beta testing the CPO download and reporting any bugs with installation or use, you can buy the source code through December 31 for the reduced price of $75.  The beta testing should be done by New Year 2009 after which, the cost of the source code will increase to $150. 

Click here to buy the CreativePro Office source code now!

Of course, the hosted version of CPO is still free.

Once I see that things are running smoothly for folks who buy the CPO souce code, I will then turn my attention to updating the online version of CPO, fixing some bugs and adding new features.

Smashing Magazine gives a nod to CPO!

In other exciting news, Smashing Magazine featured CPO on November 13 and had this to say about it:

"CreativePro Office is very robust for a completely free application and is definitely worth checking out before shelling out for an expensive paid solution."

Since Smashing Magazine is one that I read regularly, it was pretty cool to have them recognize the work I have cobbled together quietly over the past 6 years.

Welcome baby Sylvie!

And, if you are still perplexed by my silence for the past 6 months or so,  I would like to assure you there has been good reason for it most recently.  Her name is Sylvie Roberta Denton and she was born September 30.  We couldn't be more happy to have her.

I'm am thrilled to announce two new members to the CreativePro Office development and customer support team.

First up, Matt O'Connor of Stump Town Slingers has agreed to join the CreativePro Office development team.

Matt has spent the better part of his career building large special education data systems for Oregon, Iowa and most recently, Nevada. I am confident that he will bring both the skill and passion required to push the CreativePro Office project to the next level of usability and, hopefully, profitability.   

Better still, Matt now works right down the hall from me over at Western Oregon University so we collaborate quite frequently on other projects already.  As some of you know, I have been struggling for some time over whether to bring outside help from distant places into the CPO project.  I think we've found the perfect solution in Matt.

Heather Denton of Chez What? will bring some much needed customer support to CPO.  Heather will be responsible for keeping the blog up to date, responding to questions in the CPO forum, answering email, and providing triage for bug notifications and feature requests.  

Heather is tri-lingual, fluent in Spanish and Russian so she will also be helping extensively with the first non-English release of CPO in 2009.

So head over to Stump Town Slingers and Chez What? and give our new team members a warm welcome.  I'm excited about the future of this project.  Be looking for a CPO development roadmap in the near future.

Thanks for reading.