Open Source Research

In looking at some open source Business Intelligence options, I found two that look pretty good - JasperSoft and Pentaho. If anyone has any feedback on either or both of these, I would definitely appreciate it. They both look pretty complete and mature. I know looks can be deceiving. I'm especially wary because these are reporting tools and they can probably do wonders with graphics and charts so I'm sure they can make their web sites look nice.

I'm also intrigued by Alfresco. That seems like a pretty nice document management solution. I haven't tried it yet but I've read that it integrates very well with Zimbra too. Could be something to check out.

For my open source desktop, I'm looking for tools that are cross-platform, open industry standard (MS) file formats, are easy to use and have active development communities.

Here is my open source desktop for business right now:
-- SUSE Linux - because of its AD and LDAP integration.

-- -- I'd go with Ubuntu if it could do this.
-- -- Maybe all the distros will do it when (if) Samba 4 comes out. (That will be about the same time as Duke Nukem 4-Ever.)
-- OpenOffice Novell Edition
-- -- 3.0 currently reads and writes MS Office files including Office 2007 files.
-- -- OOo 3.1 is going to have some nice updates - coming in March '09.
-- Dia
-- -- Pretty good Visio replacement
-- -- I like Kivio better but it is Linux only though
-- -- Dia doesn't open Visio files
-- OpenProj
-- -- Nice MS Project replacement.
-- -- Opens and saves MS Project files too.
-- Zimbra webmail
-- -- It requires a beefy server on the backend.
-- -- I'd like to look at Zarafa too - it looks promising with a great webmail UI.
-- Browser - Firefox.

That's all I have for now. Feel free to comment.

Steve