BIRT - A Newbies Perspective

I recently attended the Maximo UK and Ireland User Group meeting at IBM’s fabulous Bedfont Lakes facility where we were treated to a demonstration of Actuate’s new BIRT reporting capability.

Although rather hampered in terms of performance by the virtual PC on which the demonstration was running the software and technology looked rather appealing. The interactive “flash” based reporting seemed to suggest that the long promised and tantalising possibility of “easy to create” dashboard style reports, over which the end user has an unparalleled degree of control may finally be a reality.

Just to set this in context, I have been a software developer for over 30 years, currently working in the field of interfacing Maximo with financial systems, it is rare that a new technology spikes my interest and imagination. So when I say that I spent a whole Saturday (much the chagrin of Mrs B) downloading, installing and attempting to understand what BIRT was all about, you will realise that this is indeed something worthy of note.

Working for a software vendor and yet still being granted the opportunity of attending the user group meeting I thought I would give something back by publishing the findings of my weekend’s toil so that other members of the group may benefit.

I was recently invited by Virgil to post the report here as it may well be useful for the members of this forum. It is not strictly Maximo focussed but does (I hope) serve as a good introduction. Also I am working on a full installation guide for the Eclipse build which will be available soon. Please visit my web site for further details.

Finally, if you like my report then I would love to hear about it!

Warm regards

Paul