Jaspersoft, maker of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced availability of Jaspersoft Business Intelligence 4.7, with reports generated by JasperReports Server now give casual users the ability to interact with more of their data. According to Jaspersoft, its open source business model and zero-cost per-user licensing fees make interactive reporting affordable for even the largest scale reporting projects. Additional improvements in Jaspersoft 4.7 include direct native connectivity to big data sources and expanded mobile device support.
Jaspersoft 4.7 delivers self-service capabilities for production reporting environments with a complete open source-based, interactive reporting and analysis solution. The new release reduces report development costs through built-in interactivity, enabling new levels of personalization of pixel-perfect, print-ready and web-based reports. The enhanced report functionality lets users quickly and easily move, hide, sort, and filter their data without the help of a BI expert or the need to export to Microsoft Excel.
“This is exciting for a couple of reasons,” Mike Boyarski, director of product marketing for Jaspersoft, tells DBTA. “One is that no BI tool out there so far has this level of interactivity for what we call casual BI users. These are the everyday users of BI tools – people who are accessing reports on a daily basis and they want to get insight into their information and often they are constrained because the report is just not flexible enough or it doesn’t give them enough insight to ask the next-level questions or the insight to get a broader set of information made available to them. We are giving these casual users this interactivity so they can get more from their data but also not have to pay on a per-user license fee for this information access which is unique thus far in the BI industry.” In addition, Jaspersoft will make this capability available in its free open source product as well. “It is fairly disruptive in terms of the type of functionality and where we are giving it in terms of our community edition product,” says Boyarski.
With this release, Jaspersoft has also enhanced its native MongoDB connector to enable real-time reporting and analysis of web-scale application data. The connector provides a direct link intelligently connecting JasperReports Server and the MongoDB source data, thus enabling de-serialized, filtered data to be reported on and analyzed. “A lot of other solutions out there in the market rely on an ETL process to connect to these other data sources. But ETL simply means you need to move data from MongoDB to some other environment so that you can connect to that tool and do reporting and analysis. When you add extra steps you are talking about latency and waiting whereas our solution allow you to directly access MongoDB data to do real-time reporting and analysis against that environment,” says Boyarski. This extends the selection of native big data source connectors which includes Hadoop, Cassandra, CouchDB and others.
Jaspersoft 4.7 also adds a new native Android application and software development kit (SDK) in addition to support for the Apple iOS
Jaspersoft’s complete mobile solution allows developers to embed BI in their native mobile smartphone applications while also offering full-featured tablet-based, touch-screen BI through a mobile browser.
Jaspersoft 4.7 delivers sophisticated, enterprise-class report scheduling, providing assured report delivery and programmatic control of report schedules for tailored report management and execution. The new robust scheduling features help ensure data is accessible anywhere, anytime.
Jaspersoft 4.7 is available for free download or cloud-based evaluation. And, Jaspersoft 4.7 will be featured at this year’s JasperWorld Conference, to be held September 24-26 in San Francisco.