Posted by emjayess on August 4, 2008 at 8:30pm
Has anyone here implemented or worked with the Pentaho open source B.I. Suite? I'm curious about what potential avenues and possibilities exist in bringing Drupal & Pentaho together for reporting & B.I.
Thoughts? Discussion? Experiences?
Comments
No Love for Pentaho BI Suite?
Nobody eh? I thought this might be a pairing that at least a few folks might get excited about...
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
Drupal+Pentaho
Hi Matt,
I have been doing some research in the same field and would really like to contribute to this project.If you have any findings or some stuff to start with, please do share with me.I will soon share my findings.
Rachit Gupta
www.blisstering.com
I have used Pentaho and Drupal-yes-interesting possibilities.
Good morning Matt,
I've been playing with Pentaho for a few years and Drupal for about a year and a half.
I wrote some of my thoughts on this in my this blog entry
http://cognitivemetaphors.com/drupalpentahoblog
Afterwards, I googled Drupal Pentaho to see if anyone else had similar thoughts. Your article was first on the list.
I know a while back, Pentaho's own website was built on Mambo. That's actually how I started looking at content management systems. I was a business intelligence professional (Pentaho is open source business intelligence software) but really got interested in CMS. I went from Mambo to Joomla and then finally settled on Drupal where I am happily staying.
I've done side projects for both Drupal and Pentaho but nothing yet where I bring the two together. I'd love to find a web host that would support Pentaho. Then, I could really build a nice looking demo to illustrate the combination. I'm on bluehost.com now but I don't believe they support Java. I'd really rather not worry about the details of setting up my own server, putting it on the web, and installing all the necessary items PHP/Apache/JBoss/Java and keeping up with issues like configuration. Also don't want to spend too much on monthly $ for an expensive host. Right now, it's just a hobby.
In real life, I'm forced to use things like Sharepoint / SQL Server Reporting and ETL. Don't understand why companies spend money on these bloated tools when something like Drupal and Pentaho could do the same thing for so much less.
Regards,
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Convene & Collaborate?
Hi Anthony,
I saw your comment & your blog post last week and am just now getting back around to this (hectic right now ;). Your observations echo my sentiments exactly! I'd very much like to advance this idea... what do you think about collaborating on some prototypes / proof-of-concepts to aid in bringing this blend of a solution to market... and potentially even collaborating on full-fledged projects?
I've got some ideas Re: hosting that I'd like to discuss with you, and even a potential project in the wings with a colleague I've been visiting with offline. Leave a comment and/or contact me directly.
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
In a previous life, I was a lead...
for a small analytics team that supported a large E-Commerce platform. We wrote sales, returns, inventory, marketing, visitor reports for the analysts of web stores we supported.
Currently, I am working on a Drupal/Ubercart project. I can definitely see how Pentaho could provide the complementary reporting to provide a dashboard for a Drupal e-commerce site.
I'm sure there are a number of scenarios such as this that would be viable offerings and worthwhile to collaborate on.
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Ubercart
I've got Ubercart work to do in my immediate future, too... is yours a D5 or D6 project? Mine's D6, so I've held off for the summer while the D6 version has been under heavy development! Gonna be testing it very soon tho.
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
no experience yet, but very interested
This sounds like a pretty exciting project, I am talking with a couple of students that would like to do a "Drupal thesis", I will discuss this option with them.
I read about an integration of Pentaho and Alfresco (integration is easier for them though since both are Java), anybody tried out the combination before? What kind of functionality do they offer?
Do you have any practical ideas on how the integration could work for Drupal?
I guess the biggest value lies in dashboard creation from the information you get out of your Drupal database, is there any other extra functionality you would get from the pair-up?
A quick check of the current charts/graph contributions brought me the following projects:
http://drupal.org/project/charts
http://drupal.org/project/swfcharts
http://drupal.org/project/fusioncharts
http://drupal.org/project/graphstat
Is there any way that we could integrate with these projects?
Drupalcon Szeged was a blast! Check out the video's on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions
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Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.
Summer of Code?
I've read about Alfresco in high regard (and in good company!), but have never used it. Do you have a link to the Alfresco+Pentaho project?
I think stating that Alfresco & Pentaho are easier to integrate because they are both Java-based is a dangerous assumption to make. Integration/interoperability doesn't become easier solely because two systems are using the same language. It's more the architecture that determines whether a system is 'mashable', or a monolith.
There are a lot of possibilities and potential directions/applications for this pairing; just some early ideas...
The flow of ideas for applications will be strong, I have no doubt. It would be great to get some students involved -- maybe you could even think about proposing a summer-of-code '09 project!
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Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
integration
I was hinting at the server stack, if you already have your CRM in Java, adding Pentaho is not that big a step.
From my first look at Pentaho it seems like it shouldn't be a problem to pull data from Drupal databases, I guess the issues will lay in integrating the output right? In their documentation they state however that they try to accomodate mashups (that's also where I read about the Alfresco mashup). However I haven't tried anything of this, so anybody with real experience please prove me wrong/right.
The way I understand it at this point this will only get you integration of predefined data processes, that you need to build in the Pentaho interface.
Drupalcon Szeged was a blast! Check out the video's on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions
--
Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.
Low hanging fruit for Pentaho / Drupal.
From my perspective, the most important place to start would be to bring in Pentaho reporting and dashboard content as a Drupal node. This right away gives you dashboards and graphical reporting. Pentaho has the option to render it's reports as PDF or HTML or XML.
If you add Organic Groups and Notifications to the mix, you get a powerful channeled business alerts system.
I could think of a number of community sites where this would be killer.
I'm still trying to close up some project work I'm doing but when I free up, I'd like to work on getting a working Drupal / Pentaho environment up. Once I have that, I can build out some examples and maybe ask the community for help on the first Pentaho report as a node step.
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Anthony Garcia
www.cognitivemetaphors.com
Re: business alerts system
"From my perspective, the most important place to start would be to bring in Pentaho reporting and dashboard content as a Drupal node. This right away gives you dashboards and graphical reporting. Pentaho has the option to render it's reports as PDF or HTML or XML.
If you add Organic Groups and Notifications to the mix, you get a powerful channeled business alerts system."
+1
bi in drupal with Ubercart
guys,
this is an exciting thread for me. I was looking for jaspersoft and drupal integration ideas when I ended up here. I have heard of, but never played with pentaho. We have ubecart, OG and notifications, ehich is the exact setup you are discussing. I would love to learn more about your experiences with pentaho, and se if any progress has been made. We also have developer resources if we can prove value in the project.
any updates?
thanks
I can help
My employer has asked me to look into this sort of Drupal + Pentaho cross. Unfortunately I have no prior experience with Pentaho, so I have a bit of a learning curve to overcome. I'd be interested in helping out with this/doing some of the grunt work if more experienced Pentaho users can help point me in the right direction.
Pentaho Book could help with learning curve
"I have no prior experience with Pentaho, so I have a bit of a learning curve to overcome"
The community Pentaho documentation is shockingly bad. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks they purposely cripple it to get you to buy their commercial support. However, there is a book called "Pentaho Solutions" (available from Amazon and elsewhere) that is pretty good. Talks a lot about BI design, but discusses Pentaho details in enough depth to be worth the $30.
confirming
Bought today the book. Hope will come handy.
Community is almost inexistent for such a great product.... and to give vale to your conspiracy theory I can tell you taht I donwloaded it tody, checked a webcast (to do so I had to put in my phone number ...) and after 2 hours the commercial support called me asking if I needed any help..... hopefully not to much.
Any progress on this? I am
Any progress on this? I am very new to Pentaho but am interested in helping.
We are interested in venturing out into the BI Space.
Hi Guys,
My name is Sameer Kohli. We are interested in venturing out into the BI Space.
About My Company (http://www.netclickonline.com/):
NetClick is an industry leading full-service internet marketing agency and specializes in the design and building of content management systems websites for Large and Small Corporations, Estate Agents and Property Developers, and eCommerce for Retailers, whilst managing Google Adwords Paid Search and Natural Search campaigns to drive sales, user generated enquiries to convert to `qualified leads'.
Our expertise is not limited to one vertical. We offer extensive professional consultation and management services across multiple areas of search-engine marketing (Pay-Per-Click / SEO), affiliate marketing, and online media planning and management.
NetClick's core search-engine marketing services include PPC Management and Search-Engine Optimization (SEO). In addition, we offer automated PPC Management Software to businesses of any size and advertising spend.
Also check out our online store : http://netclickonline.duoservers.com/
Thanks,
Sameer
sorry but this is not allowed here
This is a message without any Drupal value as such this is not the place for it. If your company is doing Drupal BI work, the way to talk about that here is by providing use cases or feature descriptions, along the lines of: we built this BI site using Drupal and that's how we did it.
An add for your company will get removed.
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Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.
We are actually on it
Hi everybody,
I'm currently implementing the "Pentaho B.I. Suite" to work on the Drupal datasource for a company that works with medical data mobile applications (using Drupal as a backend).
Having lot's of fun and much of the work is the learning.
Will post here when we get to something solid.
progress?
Did you make any progress in your implementation? Any lessons learned? We are considering using Pentaho to work on a drupal datasource and a legacy home grown php/mysql system.
We are in production with it
Hey there, I'd say big lesson learned is to well design you datawarehouse so it can provide you the right answers.
What are you interested in mostly ?
Only thing that you have consider when working with Drupal is the fact that your DB structure might change, especially if you work with CCK, and therefore you have to reflect this changes in your transformations.
Pentaho Drupal integration
I am famliar with both Pentaho and Jaspersoft on a whitepaper level, but I have not implemented an ERP or BI. We have been using Drupal 5.x and Ubercart for a little over a year. We work heavily with OG, and sell services through ubercart. I am wondering if there would be any benefit to developing a Drupal Module that help update the warehouse structures when changes are made to selected content types, as well as initial configuration, selecting content types and their fields for replication to the warehouse, as well as mapping of common fields across the drupal installation, and any data elements defined in the warehouse.
how did your pentaho integration turn out?
Looking at an integration project now. Curious to know how you did. Thanks.
Ray
A link to a collection of tutorials and videos on PENTAHO
A link to a collection of tutorials and videos on PENTAHO
Tutorials:
http://www.dataminingtools.net/browsetutorials.php?tag=pentaho
Videos:
http://www.dataminingtools.net/videos.php?id=5
Any developments with this?
Hi, just wondering if anyone who had explored Drupal + Pentaho had managed to successfully implement any aspect of this, and whether they could share some advice, or point towards any other guides on the web about this?
Can anyone recommend a host that would support both platforms, or offer any other advice about installation?
Also, those reading this thread may be interested in this project, currently at an early stage- http://drupal.org/project/forena
Pentaho with Liferay
“Integration of Pentaho with Liferay” Looking for input on this..
Thanks,
Srini
pilot project with Pentaho
We are in the process of implementing a pilot project with Pentaho. I am concerned in hearing from people with actual implementation experience and have begun to hold up pentaho applications, particularly dashboard implementations. We are working out to know whether this is an appropriate tool set which can be used with a widespread business user environment currently using Crystal Reports X. What is the most technical support skills required? As per convenience I would like to follow up on phone for further discussion.
Thanks,
Amit
Fully agree on Pentaho
Pentaho has indeed the ability to be the hart of all kinds of data intergration projects, Not only all kinds of databases, ERP, CRM, HR etc but also connections to properitary systems like SAP.
The only downside on pentaho is that it is java based, however it does support XML RPC and other Connectors.
The ERP project is almost mature, the current version take some slight tweaking to become a fully functional ERP. (the install profile and the theme where not satisfactional, however the ERP module istself is good enough)
This linked to Ubercart, some invoices/ticketing and basic Charting make a fully fledged Drupal ERP/CRM system.
The full capacity of BI and datamining is better to be left in Pentaho for it is imho better and much broader equipped.
See #pentaho on irc for more information and the official pentaho wiki
Currently im also working on a Pilot version, modified the Rootcandy theme and am currently in the process of connecting the loose ends.
One of the biggest loose ends is the dataflow. (What go where and how is that processed.)
When the pilot is finished i plan to make a install profile out of it.
I'd love to exchange experiances and learn from other projects.
You can find me on IRC as Zelfje or sometimes as Idevit on freenode
Any Progress on this
Hello all, I stumbled across this thread while looking up info on BI analysis and reporting for Drupal. I am in a position that I need to find a solid reporting solution for data coming out of my drupal system. We have built a complex issue tracking system and have some robust reporting and analysis requirements. Our first thought was to off load the reporting to Crystal or another enterprise level reporting tool, however due to some data transfer / translation issues this has become a second or third choice. We are now looking for an open source, web enabled flexible reporting solution. One requirement we have that has caused us trouble with other systems has been the need to utilize large text fields (CCK Text Area) to hold descriptive and requirement data. These fields need to be available and viewable on reporting side.
I am interested to hear if anyone has had luck with integrating Pentaho with Drupal.
Forena
Go have a look at Forena : drupal.org/project/forena . It doesnt look like it but it may happen to be THE reporting solution. And it already is pretty usable now.
subscribing
subscribing
Ray
Drupalcon Chicago BoF?
anyone on this thread planning to be in Chicago next week, and interested in a little birds of a feather powwow on this topic?
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matt j. sorenson, g.d.o., d.o.
Yes to BoF
That would be great. There will be at least two of us.
You may want to join this group - http://groups.drupal.org/pentaho-drupal-integration
Ray