Yesterday we had our monthly Tech Talk Live session. The topic was “Business Intelligence for ECM Practitioners” and it was all about how BI can be applied to the data that lives in your Alfresco repository. We were joined on the panel by Francesco Corti, who is experienced in both ECM and BI, as well as John Iball, the product manager for Alfresco One.

Here is the broadcast in case you missed it:

During the broadcast we saw Francesco’s AAAR solution which extracts data from Alfresco and puts in a data warehouse. Pentaho, an open source Business Intelligence platform, is then used to create a dynamic dashboard that end users can use to interactively answer business questions about that data. Francesco showed a live demo of reporting using Alfresco auditing data, but with his CMIS connector for Pentaho, you could report on anything stored in the repository.

John Iball shared with us that reporting and analytics was one of the top features requested during a recent discussion with 70 or so Alfresco customers. Rather than very basic reporting features, John said that customers want the ability to do deeper analytics on the data stored in Alfresco. Some will already have BI platforms in place. Others will benefit from a complete solution. Either way, John says that meeting this need is high on Alfresco’s roadmap right now.

About Tech Talk Live

Tech Talk Live occurs on the first Wednesday of every month barring a holiday or some other conflict. During each episode, the Alfresco community team focuses on a specific topic and invites panelists from Alfresco, partners, and the broader community to take part in the conversation. The session is broadcast to the public live on Google Hangouts on Air with Q&A taking place simultaneously in #alfresco on freenode IRC. Check the wiki for links to prior and future episodes. The Alfresco events page also has entries for Tech Talk Live.

Our next episode will be on March 5 when Nathan McMinn joins us to recap some of the killer projects that were created during the Alfresco Summit 2013 hack-a-thon.