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I'm looking for recommendations for an easy to use reporting/business intelligence tool that can interface with an sql server or access database. It can be web-based or a desktop tool.
Ideally it would be freeware or low cost, and easy to use for users who are not that technically savvy (below the level of someone who can generate reports and complicated queries in Access).
Any tools I've seen so far (such as Crystal Reports) are either too expensive or too complicated to use for non-power users.
I think the two most well known open source alternatives are:
Pentaho Reporting
JasperReports
I've been looking at them previously, but honestly haven't tried any of them as my company at the time decided to go for a commercial (expensive) alternative.
Your requirements are very unspecific. You are searching a simple tool. Do you mean an ad-hoc reporting tool such as i-net Clear Reports?
Pentaho reporting (from the Community edition of the Pentaho BI Suite) might be worth a look.
Reporting Services Report Builder for SQL is about the simplest.
You do have to provide a model of your data for it but that would be necessary for users who dont understand the data structures anyway (sounds like you have that sort of user).
RS comes free with SQL Server too.
I hate to say it, but the one thing you'll find users doing even if you get a reporting tool is that they'll move their data to Excel for final output.
This is one of the reasons why SQL Server's BI tools integrate so nicely with Excel - they did some studies that found users have a tendency to revert to Excel, since everyone knows how to use and and knows how to make Excel output look exactly the way they want it to.
Having said this, you might want to consider some Excel based reporting solutions, or tools that integrate with Excel.
Palo, which is free, is similar to Cognos TM1 (spendy!) and will let users create reports in Excel. It also has a very Excel-like web interface.
You can go through SBOeCube, this is a Business Intelligence Reporting Tool for SAP Business One.
will this work for you?
http://www.hkvstore.com/phpreportmaker/
and of course you can always start your own.
If they're that technically unsavvy, you'll also need to make sure the database presents useful entities. If they have to assemble their own Orders, for instance, they're not likely to be successful no matter how simple the tool is.
I've seen the "you can write your own reports!" thing blow up several times.
I invite you to try DBxtra.
www.dbxtra.com
QlikView is one of the emerging reporting tool
http://www.qlikview.com/
Perhaps you can try Quick Reporting Tool. It is simple and easy to use. The SQL scripts created from its Developer Module can be directly executed by user in the End-User Module without any screen design or programming skill needed.
Online demo:
Quick Reporting Tool Demo
WebSite:
www.little-creations.net
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I like Pivotal Tracker, however I do not agree with their approach of using a "star" system, rather than asking programmers to provide real time estimates. I think there should be accountability so that programmers learn to get better about providing time estimates. The star system appears designed to insulate developers from this, which I think is counter-productive.
Is there something like Pivotal Tracker where programmers provide real time estimates?
I would also like something that has a report which shows the total estimated time for all outstanding issues, on a per-programmer basis.
In the past we rolled our own using Trac, but would prefer a more modern solution. I'm considering using Github Issues (we already use Github for source control), and building some tools that use the Github Issues API to facilitate per-issue time estimates in the manner I've described.
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
TargetProcess (www.targetprocess.com) is the cleanest and most fluid tool I've found.
make it work for you: just go to your pivotal tracker project's settings and choose custom estimates, or maybe Fibonacci, and use that for hour/day estimations
Check out Assembla Agile Planner - it s very similar and free for unlimited users/tasks: http://www.assembla.com/catalog/tag/Free
Try Breeze, it allows you to add estimates (in hours) and also log work done under every task, plus it has a time tracker built in. Reports are also available, showing totals for projects and work done per task. You can also export the reports to CSV.
Overall it has a similar Kanban style layout and system.
You can try JIRA or Version one.
JIRA : very powerful and flexible , it supports Scrum , kanban or you can invent your customized issue tracking workflow.
Version one : very organized and has an easy workflow (Scrum only) & supports managing dependency of user stories & tasks.
Finally , Github is good tool for managing projects as well but it will not be a good solution for you because you can not add an estimate for issues you can only set a dead line for a milestone also it has some constraints that you should be aware of while choosing.
You can only one level of tasks , there is no nesting which will make it tricky to manage a user story and its sub-tasks - a work around for that we use labels.
You can not delete an issue , you can only archive it or close it.
You can not attach an image or file directly to it , you'll have to do it using the Markdown syntax and push the images to the repository first.
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What is a best way to organize many software development projects, interaction with clients, project documentation, sources, emails, knowledge, time tracking, issue and features tracking, support for releases and versions etc. for a small company?
For me (and I believe for many others) it is obvious that it must be some sort of web-based solutions. It would be great if it could provide an interface for iPhone (if not, it is also OK).
Important thing: it must be hosted on our servers, so PHP + MySQL is the best platform so far.
I have found the following system to consider:
http://www.activecollab.com/ (but I didn't found issue tracking as well as support for releases and versions, so it is not the best match for software development company)
http://www.mantisbt.org/ (Great tool, but no project planing...)
http://www.twproject.com/ (didn't try yet, but it has very strange interface)
But none of them is a 100% solution for me.
It also should (but not must) support SCRUM
We have about 25 people in our team and about 50 from client side. At once we run about 3-7 projects (some in dev. phase, some in support).
So, my questions: does anybody knows any good web-based system that gives everything software development company needs? I believe this information will be useful for many of us.
I would recommend FogBugz
They have a very interesting (admittedly not everyone's cup of tea) scheduling system and is apparently supporting scrum.
Their support for release management is something i'm particularly fond of, but i should also say that i have very little experience of other similar systems.
Another feature that I like is the ability to link different e-mail accounts as well as pure HTML forms to different projects.
Oh, and it is not a MySQL/PHP solution.
Some of the features are:
Issue tracking
Project planning
Scheduling
Customer support
Wiki
References:
Scrum and Fogbugz / Fogbugz questions / FogBugz Knowledge Exchange
I think it really depends on your company size. I used activecollab for a while but it never really convinced me and then they made it commercial anyway. There is an open source fork of it called ProjectPier.
Even if it is not MySQL + PHP but Ruby On Rails Redmine convinced me the most from all tools I tried (and installing the ruby module into apache is a question of 5 minutes). It is simpel and yet has anything I need (including Eclipse Mylyn, SCM integration, E-Mail Notification and time tracking). With a little RoR knowledge it is easily customizable, too.
The most popular Open Source sollution is probably Trac. It is written in Python, so it is not a PHP either.
But maybe it makes sense to consider a non PHP sollution. I didn't find any PHP open source tool that had the functionality and simplicity of Redmine or Trac. If you don't mind a hosted sollution Basecamp is probably the first address to turn to (never tried it though).
Trac with Agilo plugin might be a good option.
Here is link for Trac pluigns, some category are:
Code Documentation
User feedback and discussions
For another pespective - having used many of the above solutions, and liking them very much for bug tracking, wiki documentation and tracking information - I tend to move towards keeping much of my project "meta-data" (summary information pulling together wiki, bugs, schedules, communication) in spreadsheets now.
For those now climbing onto the top rope of the ring preparing for a takedown, here's why... I come from a programming background, and one of the best books I read early in my career was The Pragmatic Programmer. One of the tenets they preach is finding a fundamental editor that you like, and get good with it (for various Very Good Reasons). After trying (frustratingly) to port and adapt my PM/Dev Management approach multiple times to multiple systems, I've extrapolated that Pragmatic tooling philosophy to the product/project management world I now inhabit. To stretch the metaphor, my editor is now Excel.
I can't guarantee that for any company I work with, they have "Software Project Management xyz" or "Bug Tracking System abc" with the proper plugins - but I can be darn well sure they have Excel or some variant available. I know if I get ninja-like with that tool, I can continue to use it - and focus on the project, not the tools.
This spreadsheet approach comes with some caveats:
Excel done poorly can suck. We've all seen that. Watch for bloat and stupidity.
Keep the bugs in the bug tracking system, the wiki stuff in the wiki. The spreadsheet is meant to pull this stuff together, not replace it.
Keep it readable. Don't stuff everything in just because you can. Summary sheets are good.
Try to standardize your templates and macros meaningfully for tasks and information, to maximize reuse over time and projects. Just like good programming.
Back it up - use a document management system if you can. This approach isn't in the cloud or hosted centrally by default, so be aware of that.
Have you tried Assembla? They've recently released a new product called Portfolio which is great if you have to manage multiple projects + you get free clients! :)
You might like to consider http://targetprocess.com/ We use that in my current job and it works pretty well, from a developer point of view. I'm unsure as to whether it supports your installation requirements, however.
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At the place I am working we are moving to a more agile approach to project management.
For tool support for project management I used MS Project and Target Process in the past. But I think they both have serious weaknesses:
MS Project is not very intuitive and therefore hard to use especially for novice users. It doesn't really fit the agile approach
Target Process seems only half done. E.g. users can set their own privileges to admin. Size of user stories is measured in hours instead of a unitless size which I think is really a bad idea. The UI feels bloated and overly complicated not really supporting usage by keyboard only.
We are also using Jira for Issue Tracking and I guess one could modify it and add some custom fields/reports to make it an agile project management tool.
So my question is: What software tools do you use for agile project management and what do you like or dislike about it?
Addition: I am aware that physical tools like a whiteboard or post-its are in a sense the perfect tool but if you want to get an overview about what is going on in the complete company it is kind of cumbersome to run from office to office to look at the whiteboards or to force people to copy it in a different kind of document. A similiar argument applies if you are working in a setting where the customer is not on site.
I'll try to list some features I'd consider interesting:
easy accessible by management, customer, team potentially from different sites. This almost requires a web app.
option to configure the app to fit the flavor of agile preferred by the team or company
it should allow multiple people to access it in parallel. E.g. a developer marking a task/story as done, shouldn't block the customer from adding a new task. This pretty much rules out Excel.
Nice usability for keyboard only usage, at least for things like updating a lot of stories or adding a lot of stories
Ability to integrate with Jira (entries there should become tasks or something in the system, changes should get synchronized or at least be impossible if they don't get synchronized) and SVN (commit comments with a story id should appear in the tool)
Ability to integrate with other systems using a Java API.
Mostly we use whiteboards and post-its. If we have to use software we usually use Trac or a simple wiki.
It's our experience that using a project management tool actually makes your project less agile. The tool tends to become the focus point of the whole development process and its data more important than the actual software.
I can really recommend using a physical tool instead of a software one. It keep everybody focused in the same location and is much more public and accessible then even the simplest software equivalent.
There is value in using a tool to provide visibility into your agile project when it is not pragmatic to come to the team room. I would not recommend using a tool other than the big visible charts in the team room in place of the big visible charts. When a person has to go to a tool to pull the information as opposed to see the information continuously visible in the team room, it looses its effectiveness.
Of the tools we have used my comments are as follows
Mingle - Programmable and the most customizable, largest learning curve but you won't be boxed into a corner and the learning curve is quickly picked up by a developer
Rally - Does what you need it to out of the box. Enforces agile practices and has a small learning curve. Reports are good.
Version One - Swiss army knife of agile tools. Easy, full of features, great query tool to extract project data, need to ensure hosted service provides the performance you need
XPlanner - free, basic but non-evolving, easy for the team to use, less capable in the reporting department
Excel - works great, most people start with it and the file can be posted to a WIKI that can be downloaded and viewed by anyone
Consider the licensing. A number of the tools can post results in HTLM which can be read from a WIKI as a dashboard report. If you need to control access to the data then providing a license to the tools or providing a login to the WIKI should meet your needs.
Redmine, it is easy to use and contains enough features.
What specific problems are you facing with your current project management software that you want to address.. What specific flavor of agile are you moving to ?
The first bullet is kind of shaky... in that novice users should not really be doing project management. Other arguments read like 'MS Project should not behave like MS Project'
If you want a simplified tool for a product backlog which seems to be what you're looking for.. use a spreadsheet and see if it works out. If not, move to complex ones.
There's a similar thread in SO ... dupe or does this thread deviate significantly ?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426458/recommendations-for-project-management-software-for-scrum
I actually use Atlassian's JIRA for all my Agile project management. And with their recent acquisition of GreenHopper, they fully integrated SCRUM into the project management as well. This is only available in the Beta version right now though.
My team is using Rally. I also used VersionOne a few years ago, but I think Rally is better. I am not an expert in all features, but I think it does most of the things you need.
Don't even try MS project ...
Axosoft's OnTime
CounterSoft Gemini (at least take their 5 user license for free)
There's a new tool - Bright Green Projects. It allows you to capture and prioritize requirements, build estimates, manage iterations, track issues.. etc. Nice interface and really easy to use: http://www.brightgreenprojects.com
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Is there any free IDE for Pl/SQL development
I use SQL Developer every day to develop packages. Whilst it's not perfect, it's got some useful features:
Syntax highlighting;
Autocompletion;
Debugging (although not of live requests as far as I can tell);
Simple connection configuration (JDBC-based as well as TNSNAMES);
...
It's also free, unlike the (admittedly better) Toad mentioned previously.
Toad gets reasonable comments from the developers around me that have to work with Oracle. Everyone hates Oracle SQL developer. I have little personal experience.
I am using PL/SQL Developer from Allround automation, too.
I kinda hate it dearly for all its bugs and that we paid a full year maintenance w/o seeing anything new in that period.
But for some rather strange reason it still beats the hell out of all the other outrageously overprized and underfeatured tools for PL/SQL.
And I am not talking about Oracle administration, which it can do quite good as well, thx to how fast one can script things in it.
Its focus is PL/SQL, not point & click table creation. But than, my Grand Ma could build a tool for managing tables, users, etc. A good code editor is not as easy. g
One thing, besides the countless little bugs that face every time is, that it is completely ignorant to the fact, that Oracle has an escape syntax for non-standard identifiers.
You can't do much using its GUI with such objects but have to resort to the command window or any other editor to script it yourself.
btw, the fact that I still use it and prefer over its alternatives doesn't reflect very well on the market of commercial Oracle IDEs, IMO.
I think for writing DB code it is better than anything from any DBMS I have come across so far.
It has very little GUI support for stuff, but its different code editors are very capable and productive.
I personally like http://www.allroundautomations.nl/plsqldev.html
Quite usefull for PL/SQL and Oracle in general. But not free.
SQL Tools is a withdraw PL/SQL IDE that is lightweight and prompt, and it's unconstrained. Although one dimension it's absent is a debugger agree.
SQL Tools is a free PL/SQL IDE that is lightweight and fast, and it's free.
Although one feature it's missing is a debugger support.
There's also the open source plugin for NetBeans, named PL/SQL Editor.
It's currently (version 2.1) very rudimentary, requires a live database to work on (no offline work with on-disk PL/SQL script sources) and I couldn't get the navigation ("Go To Declaration") to work on my Oracle 10 application.
I have been using Squirrel SQL for years and like it b/c it's database independent. it does have some limitations but if I need something with more DBA tools I would also use SQL Developer.
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What advice would you have for someone who wants to start in the BI (Business Intelligence) domain?
I where and what I should start with: Books, Blogs, WebCasts...
What I should pay attention to and what I should stay away from.
Are the Microsoft technologies worth while ?
The MS technology stack is quite good and is by far the most accessible (try to get hold of a copy of Cognos Reportnet for self-learning). Where you will run into trouble (and this is the main barrier to entry for gaining a B.I. skillset) is to actually get experience working with real data. It's quite hard to come up with a realistic toy scenario for this sort of thing.
This means that you have to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem that this poses. One option would be to try to get a job as a B.I. developer somewhere like a government department or other place that has trouble recruiting due to salary constraints. Clear evidence of technical skills and a demonstrated interest in the business might get your foot in the door.
This will be a bit harder in a recession. However there is still an ongoing skill shortage of good B.I. people. The reason is (IMO) not the lack of technical skills (the technology isn't rocket science). Instead, I think it is the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem and the fact that the B.I. domain involves customer intimacy to do it well. It lends itself to working in an analyst/programmer mode with direct customer contact (one of the reasons I do this type of work). If you like working in this mode it might be a good line for you to get into.
Edit: Someone who's just had a job offer in this space asked whether he should take the job.
I found the "project real" from microsoft really helpful while getting into the bi-world. Its a real world bi project, supported by microsoft, to develop and show best practices regarding to all the areas of bi like etl, data warehouse design, cube design, etc.
Business Objects http://www.businessobjects.com/ are quite a big player in this area and familiarity with their products will also help you break into B.I. roles.
For practise data, I would recommend something like the anonomised search records from aol that came out a couple of years back - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/ This is real world size and is an interesting database with some published search sets.
I would stress you to read this book; might seem kind of outdated but the same theory still applies today. It is probably the best starter for general BI.
The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Ralph Kimball
Regarding Microsoft's BI it is a medium-sized tool that can do the job in your first steps (I have more experience with Cognos though). Haven't used MS tools since 2005 so I can't tell much about it.
In case you happen to be interested in Cognos, I have a few videos which can be of help: Cognos Tutorials
Good luck with your project.
Get the Kimball Books (specially this one http://www.amazon.com/The-Data-Warehouse-Toolkit-Dimensional/dp/0471200247) and for starters you may want to start with the MS BI Framework The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit and the SQL Server Enterprise (MS BI Bundle with the database, ETL and reporting), it's easy a readily available, specially if you are a student with the MSDNAA, you can get the enterprise version for free!!!
For general business intelligence, I found the Kimball Group as a great source for best practices.
If you would like to start building your own project, check out GoodData Platform. We have full BI stack Platform as a Service and you can start for free (evaluation period) with access to all resources and learn from Tutorials on our Developer Portal.
I would say try to find a few classes. Microsoft technologies are worth the time. There are many large companies running on the .Net framework.
We use this to get a feel of Microstrategy: http://www.teradatauniversitynetwork.com/apply-and-do