A New Day, A New Forge (JasperForge, that is)

It was July 2008 when we initially launched what is today our modern JasperForge community web site. How proud we were. Shiny new features all designed to make our community members more capable, engaged, and productive. Now, we’re just as proud of the new version of JasperForge that made its debut a few weeks ago.

How to expand on some pretty sophisticated features already delivered? Our initial Forge already sported features like JasperBabylon, the section of our site where community members can help translate and localize Jaspersoft’s core open source products – or feature voting which allows community members to help prioritize which features are the most important to add or improve next. And, we had already delivered some relatively unmatched scalability and performance, as our Forge hosts more than 180,000 registered community members who collectively log nearly 1M page views and thousands of Forum entries every month.

So, advancing our already advanced Forge platform wasn’t easy. Thanks to our colleagues at Essentia, though, we did it. And so we are now proudly live with the latest release of what may be the open source world’s most advanced individual Forge. What’s key to this new release?

• Upgraded monitoring and tracking of total visitors to a project page
• New project download monitoring
• 40+ canned reports to improve measurement of key site metrics
• Mercurial support for a de-centralized, high performance version control system
• Advanced search features to enable faster, more granular results

Of all the new capabilities, I may be most proud that JasperServer is now integrated within the JasperForge platform. This new Forge delivers a wide variety of Administrative reports and analyses designed to allow thorough review of the traffic and activity within the Forge community. Currently only available for Administrators, you can expect future Forge releases to expose relevant analytics to the entire Community.

In summary, I couldn’t have said it any better than Jaspersoft’s technical co-founder Giulio Toffoli:

"I'm extremely pleased to see Jaspersoft broaden JasperForge.org with a number of features that will increase productivity and ease of use. These are big benefits to community users, especially those who rely on low-cost, open source BI. The ongoing improvements to the forge tools re-enforces why Jaspersoft's user community continues to thrive and grow."

If you’ve not stopped by the new Forge, this is your formal invitation to do so. Comments and feedback encouraged.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

JasperWorld: The Open Source BI Conference

During the past few years, Jaspersoft has (mostly) quietly hosted a wide number of local “meet ups” called JasperDirections. These evening events bring together several of our closest partners along with attendees from our community and customer base. The results have been fantastic, as we’ve hosted nearly 30 JasperDirections events around the world in the past two years, meeting with thousands of customers and partners in the process. As valuable as our customers and community tell us these events have been, I have to believe that Jaspersoft has benefited even more from the interaction and feedback we receive that helps us constantly calibrate our company and product direction. To all of you who have attended a JasperDirections event, you have my thanks and appreciation.

But, now the time has finally come. We’ve reached the point where adding an annual event to these local meet-ups is required. Our thousands of commercial customers (across more than 100 countries), nearly 1,000 software subscription customers, and more than 180,000 community members require and deserve the next step: JasperWorld.

And so we’re in the countdown to our inaugural JasperWorld event, to be held in San Francisco on February 7 – 9. We’ve chosen the Hyatt Regency Fisherman’s Wharf for this first-ever event because of its landmark location and willingness to put up with a bunch of open source BI fanatics for a few days. And we’ve lined up some world-class speakers and entertainment as well.

I’m thrilled to announce that Howard Dresner will provide a keynote address on February 8 and Marten Mickos will do so on February 9. Howard is the well-known business intelligence analyst and industry expert who spent so many years at Gartner, then did an executive stint at Hyperion (until it was acquired by Oracle) and now is the principal of Dresner Advisory Services. Marten is the former CEO of MySQL, the current CEO of Eucalyptus Systems and has been a good friend to Jaspersoft for some time. I’m eager to share the stage with these gentlemen during JasperWorld.

We’re planning a wide variety of technical sessions that enable our partners, customers and community to learn, share and advance their BI agenda – all focused on Jaspersoft products and technologies. Of course, our technical founders (Teodor Danciu – JasperReports, and Giulio Toffoli – iReport) and many of our key technical staff members will attend, lead sessions and be available to meet with customers and community members. And, we have some great partners who will help sponsor this event, enriching the value for everyone. Lastly, we have some fun planned (of course) – Jaspersoft style. You’ll have to attend to learn more!

I hope to see you at JasperWorld 2011.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft