Last month I announced a CFDJ essay writing contest; the topic for the essays was "How ColdFusion MX 7 made me a hero in the office." I received many great entries and thank each of you for your submissions.

I chose two winning entries, and the authors of each will receive free entry to CFUnited, the largest ColdFusion event of the year. The winning submissions were not graded on writing style or grammar, but on the merits of their content. I'd like to thank Michael Smith and Liz Frederick from TeraTech for working with me on this and for donating these great prizes.

Our first winner, Mike Markowski, is a Macromedia/Adobe Certified Professional who works for the Air Protection Division at the Environmental Protection Agency. Mike is relatively new to ColdFusion, having built his first application in 2004. His essay not only describes how ColdFusion and many of the features introduced in ColdFusion MX 7 made him a hero, but also illustrates ColdFusion's ability to allow relatively inexperienced developers to quickly achieve results.

Our second winner is John Baldwin. John is the Director of Information Technology at Riley Children's Foundation, a non-profit committed to improving the health and well-being of the children of Indiana. In his essay, John describes how ColdFusion has helped to automate and increase the processing of online transactions (donations) and its reporting and PDF generation has been essential for generating donor statement letters as Acrobat PDF documents.

Both of these wining entries have been reprinted in CFDJ this month. They are a good sample of the wide spectrum of entities using CF, from large government organizations to smaller charitable associations. Everywhere, in every size business and in every industry, more and more companies are relying on ColdFusion to drive mission-critical applications and to take the needs and data within organizations onto the Web.

There's good news for those of you who had high hopes of winning a free entry to CFUnited but didn't win our contest this month. CFDJ is holding one more essay contest to win free admission to CFUnited. I apologize in advance as I do realize that this issue may not reach many of our print readers until just prior to the actual conference start date. News of this contest certainly should reach those of you who read CFDJ online (www.coldfusionjournal.com/) and/or who follow my blog (www.horwith.com).

Our next contest is quite simple. It's another e-mail/essay contest and one that pretty much all of our readers should be qualified to enter. Write me an essay, or even just an e-mail (simon@horwith.com), describing why you'd like me to send you to CFUnited. That's all. You don't have to write a novel - even something as short as a single paragraph will do if you feel that you can explain enough in one paragraph. I'm not judging entries based on length or grammar. The winning entry (or entries) will be selected based, once again, on the merit of their content. The author of the winning entry for this contest will receive free admission to CFUnited, but he or she will also be assigned some homework. I expect this essay contest winner to write me an article, immediately following the close of CFUnited, describing their experience and thoughts about the event. I'll be reviewing essays and e-mails for this contest until May 22, at which point I'll make a decision about the winner. In addition, I am also extending last month's topic until the 22 for anybody who would still rather write about how ColdFusion MX 7 made them a hero.
Good luck.