This time the company has announced Pentaho Open Suite 1.2 which comes with improvements in ease of use and administration around reporting.
The release builds on version 1.0 of the Open Suite that was released in December 2005, adding new report templates and charting options in Pentaho’s Report Designer component and drag-and-drop BI workflows, and enhanced administration tools in the Pentaho Design Studio.
A library of standard report templates is provided in Report Designer, a graphical report design tool that Pentaho released in June this year, for key corporate functions like finance, sales and human resources. New chart types have been added as a result of contributions from Pentaho’s open source development community.
There is also a new display option that lets users create a tree-like view of report objects. Additional report object property editors, multi-selection, subtotaling and conditional formatting capabilities have also been added to the Report Designer.
Design Studio’s user interface has been given a complete facelift and now supports the drag-and-drop creation of BI workflows using a new design panel new design panel that provides a graphical, flowchart-style view of BI workflows, including report bursting, business logic and more. It also comes with a new embedded report design wizard that lets administrators create reports without leaving the Design Studio environment.
Integration with Pentaho’s new Data Integration software has also been tightened up to let administrators define and edit ETL routines more easily. Finally there is also a new embedded preview capability to validate changes to impacted BI applications.
Pentaho announced the new 1.2 Open BI Suite at the Linuxworld Expo conference in San Francisco. Development builds are currently available to the Pentaho community members only. General availability, which comes with full testing and validation, is planned for September.
Started in 2002 by BI executives from Hyperion Solutions, Cognos and SAS Institute, Pentaho is starting to assemble an impressively broad set of interoperable Java-based OLAP, reporting, data mining, data integration and workflow software components that can be deployed individually or rapidly configured into a comprehensive BI system.
The company has been busy acquiring and integrating BI open source projects to achieve this goal. The Report Designer is based on proprietary software originally coded and later acquired from the Gridvision Engineering GmbH. Pentaho has now donated all the source code to the open source community as part of its rapidly evolving Pentaho BI project.
More recently it has also announced its SpreadSheet Services module as part of a joint project with Simba Technologies Inc, a company that specializes in developing Microsoft connectivity technology.
SpreadSheet Services links Microsoft Excel to the open source Mondrian OLAP server, another open source project that Pentaho took over as chief steward and owner. Penatho effectively productized Mondrian OLAP as Analysis Services and integrated it as part of the Pentaho Open BI Suite. And in July Penthao issued an upgrade and re-branded version of the Kettle ETL open source project that is now called Pentaho Data Integration 2.3. Pentaho acquired Kettle in April this year.
Separately, Pentaho also announced a partnership with Adaptive Planning Inc, who unveiled its open source performance management software for budgeting, forecasting and reporting for mid-market firms at the Linuxworld show. The unique aspect of Additive’s offering, besides being open source, is that the company can host it as a software-as-a-service application.
Pentaho also announced certification of its Open BI Suite on Novell Ink’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform.
