Saiku UI Enhancements and new Excel export

Hi everybody. As promised we've some chestnuts that are ready to be eaten and here we are! We decided to start working on one of the major pieces of the Pentaho CE suite: the newest OLAP client Saiku. We have some enhancement in our pipeline to help the Trout, Paul and the other guys of the crew; this is the first of the list. We decided to start with two enhancements that makes all more beautiful to our customers eyes:

1) Improved columns header management
2) New and improved Excel export functionality

Improved columns header management

A thing that I totally don't like in Saiku was the way it managed the columns headers any time we had repeated values on it. You can see a sample of this old behavior in the figure below.

Now the things are totally different. With a little UI improvement column headers with repeated values are grouped together as displayed in the picture below to have better visualization of your data.

New Excel export

Here we have completely rewritten the export module using Apache POI instead of JExcelAPI. This gives us more power and more feature that could be useful in the future to enhance the functionality. The look and feel now is more elegant and exactly equal to what the user is seeing in the user interface. You can see a sample of the new output below

This is a first release beta release of these features so be careful if you decide to use it. Any feedback about how they work and what you would like to have next is fully appreciated.

Where you can find it

All the code is committed to the GitHub Serasoft repository. You can find it here. We're planning the installation of an Hudson server on our servers in the cloud so that you can pickup anything already compiled so be patient. At the moment you can only grab the sources and compile it. Remember that our code is always aligned with all the new functionalities of the standard Saiku distribution. So what else? Stay tuned for the next things that are going to be released...

I'm back after a long time missing....

Hi everybody and sorry for not writing anything for so much time. Write a post is a nice thing and I love it but it takes time and during this last period I haven't had any time to write anything here or to cooperate tightly with my favorite community: the Pentaho community. During that time I was taken starting my own little company here in Italy (initially I spent 7 years as a freelance consultant) called SeraSoft. I decided to do that because I though it was the moment to change something in my professional life. This is a new job for me and it is really hard: manage a new business in a  so competitive environment as for the Information Technology is much harder than developing and designing good software. We have a little office in Boffalora Sopra Ticino, a little town located 20 km far from Milan near to the river Ticino. It is a good place to stay away from the traffic of the city but at the same time we're near and it takes us really a few to be in the city.


Visualizzazione ingrandita della mappa

During these last months we made a lot of interesting things on real life projects with Pentaho and also other interesting Open Source technologies like Liferay, SugarCRM and Openbravo working with companies of any size in sectors like Banking, Telecommunication, Services, Industry and Automotive. Lastly I decided that it was the time to came back heavily working in the community and I re-started doing something I hope interesting for anyone giving my two cents to help the Open Source ecosystem to grow. I'm trying to take this idea of cooperating also to my colleagues so we hope to be able to quickly give our contribution as a company.

That said I thought it's time to came back and start sharing with you all the experiences of myself and my team about Pentaho and the other products we're using and I hope they could be of interest for you all. So stay tuned and for the next news from this channel and also follow us on GitHub to look directly at what we're doing. So see you soon! There are some chestnuts that are cooking on the fire and that are almost ready to be eaten.