We are happy to announce our next stable build release of the Pentaho Report Designer, milestone release 1.1.7. The Pentaho Report Designer simplifies and streamlines the report creation process, making it easy for report authors to quickly create sophisticated, visually rich reports based upon the Pentaho Reporting project, JFreeReport.

This release takes great strides forward integrating the Report Designer with the rest of the Pentaho Open BI Suite. Improvements include:

• The ability to open reports generated by the Pentaho Report Design Wizard,
• Support for XQuery, Mondrian, and custom data sources,
• The addition of a SQL query builder,
• The ability to publish a report to the Pentaho server,
• ...and many more enhancements and new features!

Download the latest release of the Pentaho Report Designer today at http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest.html.

Like mushrooms, Pentaho team member blogs are sprouting everywhere. Here are some old and some new blogs, all owned by Pentaho team members. Check them out, then subscribe to them via RSS! You are sure to find some genuine pearls of wisdom on business intelligence, open source and Pentaho.

http://www.nicholasgoodman.com
Nick Goodman is Pentaho Director of Solutions, and an all around knowledgable guy when it comes to open source AND business intelligence.

http://www.ibridge.be/
Matt Casters is the Kettle project founder, and Chief Architect of Pentaho Data Integration. In his past life he was an independent BI consultant who implemented numerous data warehouses and BI solutions for large companies.

http://julianhyde.blogspot.com
Julian Hyde is the founder of Mondrian, THE open source OLAP server, and the core component in Pentaho Analysis Services. Julian brings his expertise to Pentaho as Chief Architect of OLAP Technologies.

http://gretchenmoran.blogspot.com
Gretchen Moran is the Pentaho Community Leader. Gretchen supports, advocates and collaborates with Pentaho's open source community, the Pentaho Nation.

While this new feature will require you to download the latest development Kettle binary, it's well worth it. Thanks to supporter Sven Boden, Kettle now has support for LOB, BLOB and other Binary database objects.

You can help the team test out this new feature by simply following the tech tip that Matt has posted at http://www.kettle.be/tips/WeeklyTip6.htm . Get involved and try out the latest feature addition to Kettle.