Pentaho revamps BI suite

Pentaho has released the next milestone version of its business intelligence (BI) suite of tools which focuses on putting reporting and analysis tools in the hands of non-technical users, primarily through the addition of a Web-based report creation feature, reports ZDNet.

According to the CIO, the newly released version 4.0 of the open source software features a new interactive, Web-based designer, which allows business users to build out their own reports.

The new module is a simpler alternative to the suite's production reporting module but it works with the same reporting format, writes the Information Week.

Thus it can read existing reports and create new reports that can be enhanced in the advanced reporting module. The module replaces an earlier ad-hoc query and reporting module that apparently failed the ease-of-use test.

Interactive Reporting users create new reports by pointing at data sources and then interacting with the sorting, filtering, and summary controls.

Reports or specific report output can be pulled into Pentaho Dashboards, where users will find common controls similar to the sorting and filtering options in the Interactive Reporting module.