Tag: Reporting

Combine the qualitative and the quantitative with Alfresco and Pentaho

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.

Alfresco Tech Talk Live moves to Hangouts On Air; this month’s topic “Alfresco & Reporting”

hangoutsonair-300x171We’re going to try something new with Tech Talk Live. The May episode, which airs this Wednesday, May 1 at 10:00 US/Central, will be broadcast on Hangouts On Air rather than WebEx. This means you don’t have to sign up beforehand and you will be able to watch the recording on YouTube rather than using WebEx’s proprietary format that cannot be replayed on Linux clients.

If you are already signed up for the WebEx this Wednesday, don’t join it. Instead, just head over to the Event page. We’ll embed the live broadcast there. We’ll also include an embedded IRC chat window tuned in to #alfresco on Freenode IRC to facilitate real-time questions and discussion.

What’s on the agenda this month?

So glad you asked. This month we’ll be talking about Alfresco and reporting. We’ll have Alfresco community member, Tjarda Peelen, showing us what he does to solve the problem by integrating Alfresco and Pentaho. He’s made that available as an open source project so we’ll be looking at that code, seeing a demo, and talking about other ways people do reporting against Alfresco. If you want to throw in your ideas, join us in the chat.

We’ve tried Google Hangouts before, but this is the first time using it for Tech Talk Live. We hope it works well and that you’ll like the new format. Of course it could be a complete disaster. Who knows. Tune in to find out!