“Content is king”, and one of the major goals of this site is to have quality up to date information on the latest Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The question I had was, how to best keep the site updated. Lets face it, typing out articles in text boxes is not the most inspiring activity. While Firefox does have a built in spell checker and Drupal, my choice of blogging web software ,has various Rich Text editors (MS Word like interfaces for typing in content, think web mail interface).

The older I get the longer it takes me to latch onto the latest fads. I finally decided to fully investigate the domain specific Gmail offerings. I have been a Gmail user from back in the day when receiving an invite to join Gmail was like winning a prize.

Pure reporting or business intelligence tools are not the only way to provide a business intelligence solution using free software. I have discovered that portal systems do have reporting functionality built in. Three such open source portals are:

• Stringbeans portal has a chart portlet along with a report portlet.
• Metadot portal has a business version which has SQL reporting capabilty
• WebGUI has SQL reporting capabilities

In my quest to find a viable reporting solution I think this is a viable option. I like the fact that portals have other functionality that could be used to enhance the solution. Some of these functions are CMS, blogs, RSS syndication and other functionality associated with web pages. This would mean that the user is presented with the same interface for using the web site(in most cases the intranet) and for the reporting application. A vaible solution if one looks at it from the user's point of view.

For a long time now I have been hearing the word portal and have actually used a few of them. I managed to install a few portals which are based on PHP and a few Java portals too. I hadn't made the effort to delve deeper into the architecture of the portals but now I am finding myself having to do so. I have decided to go with Java. The main reason is because I want to use the portal for business intelligence purposes, i.e. I want to include a number of reporting applications in the portal. Most of the web based reporting tools I found are java based and hence the decision to go with Java.