On behalf of everyone involved with CorelDRAW.com and with the products of the CorelDRAW portfolio at Corel: THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Today, we will pass the 10,000th registered members mark on this site with over 16,000 posts in the forums and over 150 galleries, adding about 50 to 60 new members every week-day in the last few months. When we went live on May 14, 2007, the small team at Corel who manages this site didn't really know what to expect. We strongly believed in the importance of it and we hoped that you would find this to be a useful place where you could share ideas, thoughts and learn from each-other. Almost a year later, looks like this is the case.

Some of you might have added yourself to the online map of CorelDRAW users. As you can see on that page, we have a clear world-wide representation of visitors to this site. And to share a little more details (taken from the web site statistics), you come from over 16,000 cites in 217 different countries around the world, with the top countries being, since the launch, the United States and Canada, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom as well as Brazil, India and China.

With over 4.5 million pages viewed (and I must have generated a few of these), it's been amazing so far. Yes, we had a few people crating accounts with the sole goal of posting advertisement (anyone interested in shoes or medication? ), but overall, everything has been running very smoothly. We are continuing to fight with anti-spam filters to make sure that you get the emails automatically generated from CorelDRAW (new account creation, subscriptions to forum posts) and hope to have a much better solution in place in the coming months (and please stop registering with @coreldraw.com email addresses, they don't exist)

So what is next for CorelDRAW.com: One of the main goals of this site has been from the beginning to enable you all to share your knowledge with each other and we will continue to push forward in that direction. If you've looked at the top menu and you are logged in, you will have noticed a new option called "Chats". Yes, CorelDRAW.com is adding real-time chat rooms where you can participate in discussions with other members of CorelDRAW.com. We will be running this in a "public beta" format. This means that we want to give the chat capability a try to see if this is something you will find useful, and also if the technology we have implemented is capable of supporting your needs. Please provide your feedback and comments about the new chat feature in the Community forums.

And after the chat capability, we have way more ideas than time, especially as we also try to keep up with everything that happens in the community... I am a little late on reading through the forums (yes, I am trying to read everything that is posted). One of the thing we want to do in the future is to add some sort of mechanism to enable you to collaborate on the creation of documents such as tips & tricks, instructions and more by adding a Wiki capability... but it might take a little longer than I would personally want as we also want to make sure that you have a smooth experience between the various features of CorelDRAW.com. Oh yes, and those working on this site also have a day job focussing on getting you the best possible graphics software

As for the development of the CorelDRAW products, your feedback is very important to us for the development of the community site. Don't hesitate to provide it at any time through the forums, private messages or emails.

Thank you all for making CorelDRAW.com such a fantastic resource for users around the world.

Gérard