We just finished the second community technical WebEx meeting today where we talked about the BI Platform's Web Services architecture that will be in the next release of the platform.

We will be doing these meetings on the first and third Wednesdays of each month. To find out more information and to suggest topics, check out this thread in the Pentaho community forums.

In case you missed it, the recording is available on the WebEx service site. Click the link below to play it:
https://pentaho.webex.com/pentaho/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=33229877&rKey=747F974715CB5B1D

BI Platform Web Services-20090603 1404
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 10:04 am New York (Eastern Time, GMT-04:00)
39 Minutes

Thanks to everybody who participated!
Doug

Pentaho Community Metadata Meeting

Pentaho hosted a community WebEx meeting today and presented the Pentaho metadata architecture and road map. There were about 25 community members, a dozen or so Pentaho employees and all the architects in attendance. The presentation was 20 minutes long followed by 40 minutes of questions and answers.

The Pentaho community WebEx meeting will become a regular event with different topics either once or twice a month.

In case you missed it, the recording is available on the WebEx service site. Click the link below to play it:
https://pentaho.webex.com/pentaho/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=32742892&rKey=321220DEA823DD9E

Metadata Discussion-20090513 1404
Wednesday, May 13, 2009 10:04 am New York (Eastern Time, GMT-04:00)
1 Hour

Thanks to everybody who participated!
Doug

2009 SourceForge Community Choice Awards

Nominations are now open for the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2009. The awards program allows the community to recognize open source software projects that are built with the highest quality, creativity and ingenuity.

Get the word out – Blog, Tweet, Post, IM, IRC, Chat, Write on walls, Text, Sext, Call your mom or actually talk to people about nominating Pentaho!

We qualify for three categories:

• Best Project for the Enterprise
• Best Commercial Open Source Project
• Best Project

You can Nominate Pentaho in all three categories.

URL to Nominate Pentaho:
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/nominate/?project_name=Pentaho+-+Business+Intelligence&project_url=http%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fprojects%2Fpentaho%2F

HTML you can add to a blog etc:

<center><span style="font-weight:bolder;"><a href="http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/nominate/?project_name=Pentaho - Business Intelligence&project_url=http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/"><img border="0" src="http://sourceforge.net/images/cca/cca_nominate.png"/></a><br/>Nominate Pentaho</span></center><br/><ul><li>Best Project for the Enterprise</li><li>Best Commercial Open Source Project</li><li>Best Project</li></ul>

Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, and the ten projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party, held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA, starting at 6:00 pm PT on the night of July 23rd, during the week of OSCON.

For more info: http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/

New Pentaho Install and Evaluation Guide

The Pentaho BI Suite is a collection of software that can do some amazing things. It is not just an application that "does something" that can be easily explained. It consists of a suite of tools and technologies that can be used alone or in combination to build BI solutions. Tools that a user can use to collect, transform, describe and store data. Technology that lets you add structure and relationships to that data in order to make it easier to analyze. There are applications for formatting, presenting and distributing the data as things like reports, charts and spreadsheets. There is even software that will analyze your data and help find hidden relationships. Lots of capabilities to try to explain to people with wildly different skills and needs.

Our crack documentation guy, Jem "I'll delete your wiki comments" Matzan, may have broken the evaluation barrier with the first ever* Installation and Evaluation coloring book. Pentaho top management exclaimed "...something this obviously valuable should be reserved for Enterprise Edition customers." Well, it took calling in some favors and a lot of behind the scenes deal making but I just received approval from "Pentaho Towers" to make it available to the open source community.

I haven't read completely through the document, but from what I have seen so far...
Great job Jem!!


You can download The Pentaho BI Suite 3.0 Installation and Evaluation Coloring Book here.

* I have not validated this claim

Community Projects

I thought it would be appropriate kick off the blog with a roundup of the most active Pentaho community projects.

Community Dashboard Framework (CDF)

This project started out as a tech tip from Ingo Klose of SHS VIVEON AG way back in August of 2007. Since then it has become it's own project on Google Code. It has been included as a part of the Pentaho BI Server version 3.0. It is currently being led by Pedro Alves of WebDetails.


Pentaho Flash Charts

This project started life as an entry on Nick Goodman's blog in June 2008 and eventually found a life of it's own on Google Code. Due to popular demand, it is being included as a standard part of the Pentaho BI Server version 3.0. Nick Goodman of Bayon Technologies and Pentaho contributor Tom Qin are the main developers.


Pentaho Analysis Tool (PAT)

PAT is a GWT based analysis tool designed to replace JPivot in the Pentaho suite. It is based on an earlier project, Halogen, used for demonstrating the usability and features of the olap4j library. PAT is being led by Tom Barber, Luc Boudreau and Paul Stöllberger of Aschauer EDV GmbH. The project is starting to gain momentum and they could use more help. General mondrian/analysis knowledge, CSS, GWT and Spring skills are a plus.


Kettle Documentation en Español

The first full scale translation of a Pentaho documentation wiki space is underway. Tomás Di Doménico of Datalytics is leading the effort to translate the Kettle documentation to Spanish. A Kettle wiki space has also been created for an Italian translation of Kettle which I expect to start soon. If you are interested in helping out or would like to start a translation space of your own, contact me and we can get started.

Community Build Framework (CBF)

The CBF is another project being led by Pedro Alves of WebDetails with help from Daniel Einspanjer of Mozilla and Pedro Reininho. It is an alternate way to setup and deploy Pentaho based applications. Focused on a multi-project/ multi-environment scenario, it gives you the ability to switch from totally different projects on the fly, supports multiple environments (eg: development, production, worker1, worker2...), keeps changes to the original files from being overwritten in a upgrade and generally helps you manage your dev process. It has been recently upgraded to be compatible with Platform version 3.0.

Great things happening in the community - Thanks for all your hard work!

Doug

Hey Everybody

Setting up a blog has been on my to-do list for a few years now. I think it was even on my Q1 2008 quarterly objectives list - hmmm... little late on that one. I assume that since you are reading this, you are already familiar with Pentaho, you know me personally or your name is "Doug Moran" and you just googled your name to see what "the other" Doug Morans are like. For the latter, I am the "Community Guy" and co-founder of Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence.

The intention of this blog is to post news, information and observations that I think the Pentaho community will find useful or at least mildly entertaining. I answer a lot of Pentaho related questions via email, the forums, in wiki comments, on IM etc. I will attempt to provide some of those answers here in case they are generally useful. Please feel free to comment and ask questions.

Doug