We received some decent feedback in our discussion thread on OpenI’s future roadmap. Here’s one from “noblomov” that describes how OpenI is different from other open source BI tools and where we should focus next (we couldn’t have said it any better – so thanks!)

Hi Sandeep,
thanks for sharing with us what should be the future of Openi and giving us the opportunity to tell you and the Openi dev team what we like about Openi compared to other open source products out there, and what featuers we’d like to see in future versions.
For me there are various very interesting points about Openi compared to Pentaho :
  • Openi is pretty easy to install, where Pentaho isn’t as straightforward to my mind
  • Openi is very simple and “basic” : create reports and see them through Dashboards, where Pentaho is trying to do more things and as a result isn’t as easy to use for the end users
  • Openi offers a real BI SaaS platform, allowing several clients (different departments of the same enterprise, but also different companies) to connect to the same infrastructure, where Pentaho is a dedicated solution. This is for me the main advantage of Openi over other Open Source BI Solutions, and this is a big one.
The features I’d like to see on Openi 3.0 would mainly be :
  • allow finer control of users rights on a project. Today there are 3 users type : application admin, project admin, project user. It would be great to have optionnal settings on project admin for example, giving this profil the rights to create a limited number of accounts for its project. So an optional “accounts quota” setting would be nice.
  • As I see Openi as a great SaaS BI solution, it would be great to allow complete separation of different projects databases. Today to my knowledge the Projects in OpenI use different tables, but in the same database (same MySQL database for example). I would like to be able to define separate database for different projects, and then permit a total separation of projects datas (each project could have its own MySQL database). That would be a real plus in terms of scalability and security.
That’s my 2 cents for OpenI, which is a great BI tool.
By the way, is there any plan for a General Availability version for OpenI 2.0 ?
Cheers,
N.