CBR Online is reporting that Liferay, an open source portal, and Pentaho, an open source business intelligence platform, are working on better integration between the two products. This is good news to Enterprise clients who often want to expose BI data such as reports and dashboards to users across the company via the web. Tighter integration through JSR-168 will make it easier to personalize and deliver Pentaho portlets through Liferay.

Mixing BI, or quantitative data and technologies, with ECM, which is more qualitative, can be powerful. Here are a couple of examples. Clients sometimes ask about reporting capabilities in Alfresco. Alfresco has pretty granular auditing capabilities. When you enable it, events get written into a set of auditing tables in your relational database. Once that happens, it’s simply a matter of using a reporting or BI tool, like Pentaho, to create all the reports you might need, and you could deliver them via your Liferay portal.

Thinking more strategically, maybe you want to monitor certain analytical aspects of your business and convene a response team if any metrics fall below a certain level. You could do that with a Liferay-Pentaho-Alfresco solution. Pentaho could generate the reports and fire of an event when a certain metric is reached. That event triggers an Alfresco workflow which routes a snapshot of the report through a workflow or creates a discussion thread in the Alfresco repository, setting permissions appropriately and notifying the members of the response team who can then use Pentaho’s analytic tools to slice-and-dice the data to their heart’s content.