[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss jBPM] - Re: Reporting Engine Integration

[fady.matar]

Apologies for the late reply and thanks for the feedback. I'll highlight things in here pretty quickly. 

BAM Vs BI: 
The ultimate question of Business Intelligence Vs Business Activity Monitoring narrows down to this differentiation: BAM addresses real-time data while BI addresses historical data. BAM & BI are focusing on two different business problems; BAM is focusing on a quick response to immediate changing condition affecting the work environment while BI focuses on the analysis of historical data   that can help enhancing the future operations. I hope all of us agree on this so that we proceed further with the discussions. 

Reporting Framework:
I'm absolutely agnostic to the reporting tool, our selection must make sure that the reporting framework can perform or can be extended to perform the following:
1.Provide an easy for business analysts to design their reports.
2.Provide all business graphs (Pivot tables, clean charts (2D-3D) that can help visualizing trends and differences of values. 
3.Provide an approach of easily querying the underlying jBPM database to extract those values. 

Reports:
The solution must provide a set of basic reports that are embedded by default. However, we must ensure that the solution provides deployable report-templates into the system. Those report templates must be easily designed and fine-grained at the UI level. (Must be able to decorate / enhance the UI) and should be generated in a number of formats, HTML, CSV, PDF, and Office compatible files. 

Dashboards:
the BAM solution is based on dashboards and auto-refreshing AJAX panel components that would auto-update to reflect the real-time data. 

The BAM Database
The jBPM database is not optimized for querying and reporting. One alternative would be to create an OLAP-enabled database out of the jBPM database to enable end-users to perform ad hoc analysis of data in multiple dimensions, thereby providing the insight and understanding they need for better decision making. Ideally I would like to use Hibernate to build the BAM queries however I think this must be integrated with the reporting framework, a factor we need to take into account while evaluating the reporting frameworks. 

What do you guys say?


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