Alfresco Business Reporting on the move

We probably all know, GoogleCode is shutting down. The downloads of the Alfresco Business Reporting already were hosted elsewhere. Now the actual code has moved over to GitHub. The good news is that the GitHub code is the actual source code (GoogleCode ran ‘a bit behind’). The documentation on the wiki and tickets still need to find their way to the new platform. Please issue your new tickets in the GitHub issue system. Thank you!

New release of Alfresco Business Reporting improves performance

Silently, last month a new version of the Alfresco Business Reporting module (version 1.1.0.0)  has been released. The focus of this release was improved performance, mainly in repositories serving a lot of content. The focus of this release was mainly the harvesting process, getting the Alfresco metadata into the Reporting database. In order to do so, some restructuring had to take place.

Alfresco Business Reporting using new Pentaho Reporting version

Alfresco Business Reporting uses an ’embedded’ version of Pentaho Reporting. That’s why you can develop your reports in the Pentaho Report Designer, and Alfresco can execute those and store the results back in its repository.

In the previous release of Pentaho Reporting there was a nasty bug in the PDF’s generated, if you happened to use Adobe as a PDF viewer. Some fields or labels were just not displayed (although showing fine in other viewers).  Pentaho recently released a new community version of the Report Designer (5.1) that actually fixes this bug. So, I implemented this into the Alfresco Business Reporting module, for download as of ‘now’. And you get some minor bug fixes for free too.

Enjoy reporting!

Alfresco Business Reporting 1.0 released!

Hurray! Version 1.0 of Alfresco Business Reporting is released! After some blood, sweat and some tears (what did the world do to deserve the Oracle SQL dialect?) this new release is finally there. The long requested feature of supporting other database vendors than MySQL is finally there. You can store the reporting database in MySQL, Postgresql and Oracle.  The report execution is also able to report against these database vendors (of course!) and store these reports back into the Alfresco repository.

Review of “Icinga Network Monitoring”

I am a fan of monitoring. And of (implementing) Alfresco. There are too many organizations that could do better with some monitoring, for a whole bunch of business reasons. Especially at the start of the project until their IT department can catch up using their own tools, or from the starting point onward. I roughly know what Icinga can do, I know why an organization needs to have monitoring. I got the Icinga Virtual Appliance up and running and monitoring Alfresco at some 30-something parameters (Thanks for the plugin Tony de la Fuente, also note his Lightning Talk at the Alfresco DevCon 2012). Now I discovered Ansible, and I have a dream… Then this book arrived at my inbox…

Alfresco Summit Site Rocks

This year I was a speaker at the Afresco Summit in Barcelona. It was quite an experience, and sharpened my skills. Also led to good discussions, great new contacts, nice chats and something nice with wine.

And what I like about Alfresco, is that they eat their own dog food (and it taste good!).

Alfresco lockscreens

On a drizzling and/or foggy Saturday morning trying to take a deep breath before a fully packed working week bursts on Monday. Time to get my lock-screens online. Since I got this new smartphone I can (of finally know how to) change the lock screen. This is the screen that pops up if my phone needs to be unlocked, or if it has been idle for so many time, before it powers off the screen.

Reporting at the Alfresco Summit 2013

A week ago, at the Barcelona edition of the Alfresco Summit, there was a “Alfresco Reporting” session. Francesco Corti, Matthew Patin an myself presented their solution. We had a great audience with among others John Newton, Jeff Potts and John Iball. Alfresco is considering how to implement any kind of reporting themselves, so it became an interesting discussion.

Alfresco Business Reporting – The Current Status

It has been quiet around the Alfresco Business Reporting tool for the last few months. The usual; family and work. I intended to release a new version before the Alfresco Summit in Barcelona, but it did not make it. A huge tender needed more attention than time available, so my side-project slipped unfortunately.

Tech Talk Live feat. Alfresco Business Reporting – Replay

Yesterday Alfresco Business Reporting featured on Alfresco’s Tech Talk Live. Thank you all for watching live, participating, or enjoying the replay. And thanks Alfresco (Jeff Potts, Richard Esplin and Maxine Hamilton) for facilitating it all. I hope you all enjoyed it. Feedback is always welcome…

Since we used Google Hangout (instead of WebEx) the replay is available on all platforms, and I am able to embed 🙂