Pentaho has introduced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, saying that it has been designed to provide an easy to use report authoring environment, technical and packaging changes in order to enable broad use of Pentaho for embedded business intelligence by OEMs and Software as a Service providers.

 

Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 features a new Pentaho Report Designer. Company officials said that it provides “unmatched” productivity for report authors and also new self-service capabilities that help business users to create new BI content in Pentaho Dashboard Designer.

 

Report Designer capabilities include a streamlined report design wizard, an interactive preview mode that lets authors view changes in real-time -- eliminates the need to toggle between design and preview modes -- the ability to add cascading parameters to reports in the designer, and more. In addition, a new thin-client report viewer allows users to change parameters, change output formats, or jump to a specific page while viewing reports, said officials.

 

For business users, Pentaho Dashboard Designer 3.5 builds on Pentaho’s self-service dashboard creation, and provides the ability to create new data and chart visualizations in Pentaho’s thin-client user console. Officials said that with Pentaho’s centralized metadata layer, business users can query data in business terms without knowledge of underlying database structures or SQL.

 

Additionally, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition. In addition to technology and documentation enhancements, this offering includes royalty-free pricing for organizations that embed Pentaho.

 

Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition incorporates all of the resources required by a report including query information, images, layout, and templates into a single file. Officials said that this simplifies deployment and maintenance.

 

Along with Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, Pentaho is also offering the Escape program, a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable service. Officials said that this offering scales Pentaho’s migration capacity while reducing migration costs for customers.

 

Officials said that the service converts reports from traditional proprietary BI tools to commercial open source BI from Pentaho for a nominal amount per report. Pentaho’s Escape program offers conversion from Actuate (News - Alert) e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports, and Oracle Reports.

 

Boyne Resorts is the third largest resort network in the U.S., and has switched to Pentaho from Crystal Reports. “We're very impressed with the new report and dashboard design capabilities in Pentaho BI Suite 3.5,” said Noah Meister, vice president of Information Technology at Boyne Resorts, adding that the product has matured “very rapidly” over the last couple of releases thanks to the efforts of Pentaho and the Pentaho community.

 

Darrin Blocker, Decision Support Services at Loma Linda University Health Care, said that Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 gives a lot of “power and flexibility” to the organizations’ report authors, and business users will appreciate the enhanced self-service capabilities.

 

 

comments powered by Disqus