A momentous event occured in South African e-commerce when First National Bank (FNB) made an announcement that it was now possible for FNB account holders to receive payments from people using Paypal. Why is this a big deal for the cost conscious business or budding entrepreneur:

“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).

This is one more test of the Scribefire integration with Zemmata application to write blogs in an easy to use manner. So far not so bad but having problems with the integration. An change, lets see if a new blog entry is created or the old one updated.ANother update[This is an image]

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.

First and foremost I am just a hacker and not really a developer, so this process may work for you but then again it may not!!!

First download the bundled Liferay-Tomcat version from http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads. Simply put, unzip the file, navigate to the bin directory and execute startup.bat. There are instructions for installing this version on the Liferay web site.

Liferay is database agnostic, therefore it shouldn't really care what database you are using.

1. Copy the mysql driver jar file to %/catalina%/common/lib
2. Edit ROOT.xml in %catalina%/conf/catalina/localhost/

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.

I am in the process of conductin research with the goal being to create a viable Business Intelligence (BI) solution based on Open Source Software. These are my findings thus far:

Most Complete Software Suites

Pentaho and SpagoBI have the most complete offerings for BI. However my experience thus far has led me to believe they are not quite ready for public use unless you are a Java developer. These are probably the products to watch for the future baring an entry from another player. These two products jave solid backing and are resuing tried and trusted components from the OSS world.

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.

There are several free Content Management Systems (CMS) available for download. After a few weeks or reading through blogs and user comments I have settled on Drupal. One of the main attractions was the small installation size. This is my first trail blog so I wont say much more but I welcome all your comments about CMS software.