Sunday, November 25, 2007

Open Source Reporting and BI for MediBlog

I've been concerned for some time about how to present reports to the users and now Liferay has announced a partnership (or something) with a group called Pentaho. This seems to be the answer to all the reporting issues and interestingly they have settled on the same sort of approach as SAP: publish reports in the Portal! So it must be a promising partnership. Probably.

Still plodding on...

Well, not much to report lately. We've been busy with day jobs, sailing training, etc. and the incentive has dimmed a little following the Google revelation. We decided during a recent meeting that we would go ahead. We have only a few dozen days of Steve's time before he's off around the world in a boat so will be concentrating on getting some basics done.

Meanwhile, my customer has agreed to donate some hardware (a couple of old Sun servers) so we have an opportunity there, also, the EU have agreed to fund the Histio Net project but with far less cash then we asked for and far less than we need. Given the Google scare and the general lack of time we're not going to pitch Medys/MediBlog for the work - too risky!

There have been a few "full & frank exchanges of view" about how to divide the new reduced budget amongst the clinicians' institutions and across the Work Packages. One of the original team has already pulled out and it's make-or-break time this week to agree the new budget or lose everything. If things are salvaged I will be travelling to Vienna, Austria this week to discuss this and also to review the offerings from the potential IT providers. It will be interesting to see what sort of quotes provided as I can't see how any normal IT company could deliver the services to the meagre budget that is now available.