Dear ebase Community Members,

We are diligently working on our port of the mature, refined and valuable to many NPO’s, nonprofit management tool and database, ebasePro 2.20, to the current .fp7 file format. Much progress has been made, and we’ve identified the project pathway and needs, to stay on track on to getting this done We've undertaken several of the steps in working on producing a new version of ebase that will be compatible with currently available FileMakerPro software. It will use the .fp7 file format.

As the transition from FileMaker 6 to FileMaker 7 was a major change in the underlying data structure, this update was difficult of us to achieve using only volunteers. We had looked into outsourcing this, and made some dedicated efforts into asking for grants to perform this work, but with little success. So we are financing some of the work from a long-term ebase volunteer, and so your contributions and renewals of memberships are critical in helping in these efforts and building and supporting the ebase community.

So, please renew your annual memberships, especially if they've lapsed and there's a donation page, see menus above, so that you can contribute additionally to these efforts. Donations, from individuals, are tax deductible within the guidelines set forth by the IRS for nonprofit donations!

A couple of key benefits from transitioning the mature robust ebasePro 2.20 database to the next generation will be:

• Being able to work in the new FileMaker environment.
• Also, most apparent will be the small number of files required for installation.
• Another ability that we think will be very nice in the new file separation model will be the ability to easily swap in any of a number of "test" data sets. We think this will be very helpful for troubleshooting, etc.
• Another new feature, which may appeal to implementers, will be the return of peer-to-peer sharing as an option for small multi-user deployments. Of course server-client deployments will be supported for robustness and data integrity and backup.

We will post more news as we have it, but for now, please renew memberships and consider a donation to really further these efforts and build the ebase community. We are excited by the commitment and direction to update ebase, but we need your support.

With warmest wishes for the Holidays, yours in ebase - the ebase Board of Directors and the ebase TAC (Technical Advisory Committee).