Jaspersoft 3.7 Community Release: Next-Generation BI for Everyone

[This post represents a brief break in my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series to recognize the official announcement of Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release, available today.]

As the leader in open source business intelligence, Jaspersoft shoulders an important responsibility to its open source community. In return for our community’s involvement and contributions, we sponsor and create an incredibly valuable set of BI platform projects and then make them available for all to download and use (mostly under the terms of the GPL). I’m thrilled that our Jaspersoft 3.7 platform is now available in the Community Edition, source code and all, just a few weeks after we released our commercial versions. You can download the Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release here.

I’m particularly proud of this 3.7 release because nearly 5,000 community members downloaded and helped us evaluate, critique, test, and ready it for release. Accordingly, v3.7 includes so many new features and capabilities, a short list of which includes:

• Search-powered report repository, making it easier to find reports and report objects;
• Support for report output types such as open office and the latest Microsoft file format extensions (xlsx and docx);
• New cascading input controls enables smarter, easier-to-use reports;
• New native support for Macintosh OS X;
• Support for XLS as a data source;
• Expanded user management web services; and
• New reporting enhancements such as list component, multi-band for a single report, footer positioning, and sorting for crosstabs.

Our primary job is to make our open source BI platform feature-rich and highly useful for a broad range of customers. If we are successful, many will download and use this freely-available version. To ensure our platform contains the functionality required by a broad BI-using audience, we have gone to some length to involve our Community in its development.

Two of the most helpful possibilities for our community’s involvement are project-based feature-voting and community-based translation (called JasperBabylon). Here is an example of feature voting (for the iReport project), which has been available since last October and allows our community to help us constantly calibrate our product roadmap. JasperBabylon is our community-based translation project for developers to collaboratively develop language packs for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. Based on our community’s involvement, we have many language translations available for each of our core projects (iReport, for example, has about 40 languages available at some level of translation!). These are two of my favorite examples of our community in action. I appreciate this every day.

Take a look at Jaspersoft 3.7 Community Release and let me know what you think. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

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