Ease of Use

Pentaho made major investments in ease of use throughout 2007, and this will continue to in 2008. In the coming year, we plan to:

• Provide web-based, business user-oriented interfaces for adhoc query building and for the creation and distribution of reports based on AJAX technology.
• Simplify and streamline report creation by integrating the Report Design Wizard into the Pentaho Report Designer.
• Simplify the creation of multi-source reports and sub-reports by exposing these capabilities in the Pentaho Report Designer.
• Accelerate dashboard creation by delivering a dashboard design tool.
• Streamline the creation and editing of chart definitions by providing a graphical chart designer.

The next major version of our platform will also add a Pentaho metadata services layer which will uniformly define data source access and queries. This will allow administrators to map relational data sources into logical groupings of information called "business views". The "business view" will provide the following capabilities and benefits:

• Business users will be able to query data from the business view without having to write or understand SQL and relational schemas.
• Business users will be able to select from subject areas predefined by administrator and apply filters (for example, certain time periods or product lines) to select the subset of information they need.

Maintenance and Administration

Administrators will also be able to take advantage of the new “business views” abstraction layer as data sources change. Business views can be remapped to an existing or a new data source, without having to recreate queries or redefine reports.

Additional enhancements for maintenance and administration will include:

• Wizard-driven interfaces to streamline the deployment and optimization of OLAP cubes (Subscription).
• SNMP and/or JMX support to enable monitoring and administration from third party consoles and management systems that support these standards (Subscription).
• Installation utilities that can install client- or server-side components, including the option to install MySQL as a default solution repository, and to optionally install default open source security management systems including OpenLDAP or ApacheDS.
• Easily incorporate data from multiple sources into Pentaho Data Mining solutions via Pentaho Data Integration.

Extending the Platform

Extending our platform, we plan to:

• Broaden our support for other application servers such as WebSphere CE (Apache Geronimo).
• Offer integration with Content Management Systems (CMS) to store and manage access to generated reports.

Disclaimer: This roadmap is for information only and represents Pentaho's current view of its product direction. None of the information should be interpreted as a commitment on the part of Pentaho Corporation. PENTAHO MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.