Google Maps Demo, Check It Out

You really need to check out our demo of Pentaho's Google Maps integration, put together courtesy of Jake Cornelius, Product Manager for Pentaho Dashboards.

I like this demo for alot of reasons, but first for it's content quality. I will be the first to admit, I have a short attention span for any type of sales or marketing related collateral. Unless it's funny or can incorporate a bit of irony, I tend to hear the adults in Charles Schulz's Peanuts cartoons - wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Jake's demo is a great, get-to-the-point example of location intelligence - solving a problem that has a geographical component in the equation. Jake takes you through a common case where a business executive takes a trip to the East Coast, and wants to know who are the key customers by sales volume he should visit during his travels. They need to be big spenders and - that geographic component - should be located relatively close to one another so he can maximize the number of customers he can visit.

The solution was simple with Pentaho BI and Google Maps. Check it out - you will be impressed.

From a developer's point of view, I liked the demo because I know I can download this solution in the Pre-Configured Install, and not only do I have a great example Pentaho Dashboard that I can pick apart, but I also get to see AJAX and the Google Maps API in action. For the hands-on learner like myself, this demo is a nice introduction to some very cool tools I can now put in my BI toolbox.

So go get it. Download it, listen to it (it's less than 8 minutes long) and come back and tell me what you think. Not your typical demo, right?

A Whole Lot of Community Goin' On...

I haven't had the chance to get back to blogging lately. This really is a quandry - there is so much going on at Pentaho and around the Pentaho community, I have so much to blog about... but there is so much going on at Pentaho, I haven't found the time to blog! :) So today's a fun day, because I get to catch you all up on so many great things that are happening to and for the Pentaho community.

SourceForge.net Project of the Month

Let's start with Pentaho being honored as the SourceForge Project of the Month. If you have worked with open source for even a short while, you have heard of SourceForge.net. It is THE place to go to download open source software and source code. I have heard the number of projects hosted on SourceForge.net to be somewhere around 130,000, so to be chosen and highlighted as the project of the month for October, well, we take that as a very big deal.

This is a huge win for us the community because this showcase should draw alot of attention from savvy developers who are looking for an interesting and well-architected project to work on. I just can't convey all the great possibilities that could come out of this highlight. We are very excited! I will keep you up to date on the happenings around this win, as they unfold :)

New Web Sites for Mondrian, JFreeReport and Kettle

The next great community move is the new web sites for Mondrian, JFreeReport and Kettle. We have built new sites for the projects and the web team will be maintaining them and providing the TLC that the sites deserve.

This a big plus for the leads of the projects, since that takes the maintenance burden off of them and they get to concentrate on doing what they love - implementing the vision for their projects! The content for the sites is roughly the same, mostly just the look and feel, and the URLs have changed. Content changes will come slowly over time, when it makes sense to update and re-organize it for each team. The new URLS for the sites are listed below:

Mondrian: http://mondrian.pentaho.org
JFreeReport: http://jfreereport.pentaho.org
Kettle: http://kettle.pentaho.org

Pentaho and MySQL Webinars

We have had an awesome series of webinars running with the MySQL team. Since MySQL requests in the community seem to dominate, this series has proven very valuable to both the Pentaho community and the MySQL community. If you haven't viewed them, you can watch the replays here:

Business Intelligence with MySQL and Pentaho

ETL for MySQL using Pentaho Kettle

And coming up October 24, you can register for the latest webinar, OLAP for MySQL using Pentaho Mondrian.

Contributor Update

As always, we have recieved numerous contributions from different corners of the world over the past few months. I would like to share a few of them, just to demonstrate what is POSSIBLE for any community member, and what is being accomplished today.

A few weeks back, I recieved an email from Marc pointing me to a forum thread where Steve sent an example of his solution, which contains .NET consumption of Pentaho web services, producing an ADO dataset. Hoowah! I still need to contact Steve and see if he would write us a a nice technical article on his solution, but you know, so many hours in a day:)

Radek, a regular contributor, sent us the code for outputting multiple reports into different worksheets of the same Excel workbook. If your interested in that feature, you can track progress on it here.

By far our biggest avenue for contributing is in the translation of the platform. Last week alone, I recieved updates to 4 different language translations, 3 new Brazilian Portuguese documentation translations (thanks Fabrizio!), and a request to start an Italian translation of the project!

Thanks to the Pentaho Community!

At the end of the day, we know that our success is attributed to the the hard work of the Pentaho team, and the dedication and commitment of our community. We would like to say thanks again for the support. Running an open source project is a great experiment in trusting teams to provide resources for a common goal. It's with pleasure that we participate in this process, and see people at their best, making things work to achieve a common benefit.