To read about the challenges, milestones and successes in Pentaho's first two years, visit http://www.pentaho.org/news/releases/20061018_pentaho_two_year_anniversary.php .

We thank you for the last three months of testing and feedback on the release candidates for Pentaho BI Suite 1.2. We have made it to the home stretch: release candidate 3 has been released and the generally available (GA) release has been planned. Here’s how we’ve done.

• 427 bugs have been reported against the release candidates; 327 of them have been closed as of RC 3
• 59% of the issues were rated severe or greater
• Average severity ranking for all RC bugs is 3.57 (on a 6 point scale with 6 being the most severe)

Download RC 3 today! In addition to the bug fixes listed in the online release notes and change log , this release includes

• a variety of security fixes to protect against SQL injection and the malicious publishing of reports and action sequences
• updates to the German, Chinese, and Dutch translations
• update to JFreeReport 0.8.7-9

We are in the home stretch and need your continued support and contributions in the form of testing and suggestions. Thanks for making Pentaho the most popular open source BI project!

Download Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 RC3 today at http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest.html .

Penthao Open BI Suite 1.2 Release Candidate 3 includes an improvement to Pentaho Dashboards that provides live, dynamic integration with Google Maps! 

The integration leverages new Pentaho AJAX components to provide interactive geographical visualization capabilities, facilitating the deployment of location intelligence applications that enable in-depth geographic-based analysis of business patterns.

To see the Google Maps integration in action, download the Pentaho Open BI Suite Pre-Configured Installation (PCI). In the samples that ship with the PCI, navigate to Solutions, Samples, Steel Wheels, Dashboards, Google Maps. There you will find an interactive sample that demonstrates mapping with Pentaho Dashboards and Pentaho sample data.

Download release candidate 3 and test drive Google Maps integration today at http://www.pentaho.org/download/latest.html.

We are pleased to announce Pentaho has joined IBM’s Partner Program, and that Pentaho Open BI Suite and Pentaho BI Suite Professional Edition are now validated on IBM’s popular DB2 9 database.  This partnership opens new markets for Pentaho, and provides IBM and its partners with an attractive opportunity to expand its presence in international markets and in the small- and medium-sized (SMB) business market.

Read the full press release at http://www.pentaho.org/news/releases/20061017_pentaho_ibm_partner.php .