Hi,
during my search on BI Tools i came across some of the aforementioned tools. Maybe my experiences can help someone.
Hidox:
This is what it mainly states, a 'Form Designer' which makes your Baan Reports look nicely (especially the outgoing ones). It is slightly integrated in Baan (part of it is coded in Baan 4GL in Baan itself). The logic of the Baan Reports is not touched.
I had a speech with the developer during an event of the german DBUG talking about the Integration of non Baan Data into the reports, which seems possible but is not the original intention of the tool.
Nice Tool, but not really a BI-Solution.
Quote:
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We're starting out with Pentaho, so far not bad (www.pentaho.org). I've played with BIRT which is OK too but has no front end for the users (other than via webtop homepages which seems like a bit of an overkill.)
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BIRT:
I use BIRT in another project for reporting requirements.
From my point of view BIRT is a very flexible and powerfull reporting tool for creating advanced reports. F.i. you can integrate javascript and java code in your reports, use crosstabs and integrated charts (nearly all types you can think of). It is also possible to build advanced environments by creating reusable elements in librarys and templates.
Furthermore they have a ready to use frontend to visualize and export reports (pdf, xls, doc, ppt) implemented as a J2EE application (the so called BIRT Web Viewer).
But you can also integrate Birt into your own Web App or Java Application.
I think what pcole means by 'no frontend for users' is the ability to look at your report repository by means of a real BI-Server. So that's true.
More on the integration of BIRT into Baan below.
Pentaho (based on the community edition):
The mentioned Pentaho Suite is a set of tools to build 'real' BI-Solutions.
The central Tool is the so called BI Platform or BI-Server which is a J2EE Web application. It is the central framework which provides services for authentication, rights mangement, scheduling, bursting and other infrastructural services.
The tools around this platform are:
Pentaho Reporting (aka jfree Report)
Pentaho Analysis (aka Mondrian)
Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle)
Pentaho Data Mining (aka Weka)
and some more to glue the single elements together.
By the way, you can integrate BIRT reports into Pentaho, as the platform is build in a way to plug in other Solutions.
The paradigm of Pentaho is to define the requirements of a BI-Solution and then use the different tools to put together a solution.
From my point of view the Pentho thing needs a lot of work to implement a consistent BI-Application (even if you pay for building and implementation / Enterprise Edition).
Integration into Baan:
The Birt integration into Baan is done by Infor in the following way (from an Infor webinar on that topic):
There are two types of reporting. Push and Pull reporting.
Push reporting means that the original Baan Report layouts are converted to a BIRT Reportdesign.
So in the report design you have the well known before.report, before.field, detail, ... sections.
You can now format the elements, add new elements and so on.
This report design is then saved in the Baan DD.
Now when you print a Baan Report all the logic of the report is executed like normal. You just choose a special device called BIRT, that serves Baan to generate a XML-Data-File which serves as the Datasource for the Report design file. So no database access from BIRT here.
This is OK for transactional reports.
Pull reporting on the other hand means that the Datasource is defined in the report design of BIRT itself. In that case you go directly to the database to access your data. Here you are free to develop in Birt what you want.
Not applicable for Reports with application logic of course.
Infor Integration Services:
Recently i attended an Infor Webinar on the technical aspects of Infor MyDay (aka role-based Homepages).
During this session there was shown how Integration Services will work. AFAIK LN is build in a way that if special transactions are fired in LN (f.i. a sales order is maintained ) then LN sends a message to Integration Services to update the Tables in the Data warehouse, so that the reports, charts, alerts or whatever is build on these tables can reflect these changes.
As i understood right, Infor open SOA is used for that.
So as a result:
I don't think there is a 'right' BI-Tool for Baan.
It depends very much on what your requirements are and what you are willing to invest (money and manpower).
As i wrote in Title, just my 2 cent.
Andreas
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