First impression

[lasse]

Hi,
I played around with the demo, I liked what I saw.
But there was features missing e.g. I could not find the portal.
It’s not clear to me if there is a functional version of Pentaho, or if the demo is all there is at the moment.
Some comments.

I like to interact with Pentaho using PHP, I do not have the time to become fluent in Java it’s to cumbersome.

Ms office.
DW users want prefabs to download to Excel and Access. An Excel button on frames that show data is a must.

Reports.
Few DW users are interested in formatted reports.
Few users ever use a report generator. Again users want prefabs in Excel format.

E-mail.
Most DW users prefer data pushed as emails with Excel attachments.

Graphs and scorecard.
DW users like to create their own scorecards from Excel sheets.

Cubes.
Few DW users are interested in cubes, they want two dimensional tables in Excel format.
If users are interested in cubes it is in the form of Excel pivot tables.

SAP.
Sap connectivity is importent for a BI product. Sap Idoc is the standard protocol for SAP communication, it’s good for small data transfer and online data sync, but it’s not a protocol for bulk data transfer, due to the extreme amount of XML tag data. Using Idoc for bulk transfer demands very high bandwidth and massive processor power.

Microsoft’s Mendocino is a promising way to interact with SAP from Ms Office. Today Mendocino does not support Lotus, and LN is (still) ‘big’ in the enterprise community.


At last three words of advice – Focus on Excel.
:blink:

[ngoodman]

lasse wrote:


At last three words of advice – Focus on Excel.
:blink:

I commend you for your recommendations to the community... I think an Excel integration would be beneficial over all. There's been some blog posts in the past couple of days about Office 12 (due out next year) havings some really significant BI improvements... Historically, the BI in Excel has been pretty "closed" and folks on the Mondrian (OLAP) project have found that the XML/A implementation is not exactly, ummm, "open."

"Few" is a subjective term... I agree it's beneficial to the community as a whole, but I'd vote for a working platform over a great widget. After all, integration with Excel would only be an alternative way to get at the data...

And honestly, if someone is going to pass on Mondrian because they can't see a little dancing paper clip in the corner then they really should be buying a commerical OLAP product (Cognos/MStrgy/etc).

My two cents... Excel would be awesome... but it's not king to everyone. :)

[jdixon]

Thanks for this is great feedback.

The portal is inlcuded in version (0.9.7.2), but it is not in the earlier versions. If you are running 0.9.7.2 you should see a link to it on the demo home page.

The demo includes all the functionality that is available right now. We will have a GA version later this year. If there is sufficient functionality for your needs right now, we can provide support and services if you need.

If you need to utilize Pentaho using PHP there is a PHP/Java bridge for some versions of PHP. We have not tried using it yet.

We completely agree with you recommendations when it comes to Data Warehouse (DW) users. We are trying to satisfy the needs of the various communities within the BI space (Reporting, Analytics and Data Mining) and welcome your input on the needs of DW users.

[lasse]

Hi,
I downloaded the last vs. and all functions are there, thanx.

Pentaho looks what I’m about to do myself, finding quality open source software and bundle them together. This is to enhance a DW application we built with PHP/Mysql on some Linux boxes.

I will look into Pentaho to see if we can knit it together with our present solution. Personally I’m sceptical about a BI level, I see it more like bells and whistles. But BI is good for promoting, these days you need a BI-layer. Would I to start from scratch, I would definitely build the DW within a framework like Pentaho.

Pentaho have what I like to see when I’m looking at open software: a well structured project, a clear business idea and neat design. And it looks like there are members with a track record.
Explore Pentaho will be interesting.

Promoting Excel.
I’m just stating the fact, without Excel capabilities a DW product is dead in the enterprise community, like it or not. Ten years ago we were three consultants developing a DW based on SAS institute software for a multibillion dollar telecom company. We did the initial training with 50 new users showing them all the nice reporting capabilities, but our users were not happy. Just before lunch a pissed off lady told us ‘I don’t want this crap, I want Excel buttons on all screens’. We managed to this during the lunch. After lunch we had happy users. We never mentioned the reporting capabilities again, we just clicked the Excel buttons.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have alternatives. But Excel buttons – sine qua non.
:huh: