Hi<br />
<br />
I recently attended the Maximo UK and Ireland User Group meeting at IBM in the UK and we saw a presentation of the Actuate BIRT implementation. Having had no prior knowledge of BIRT or what Actuate had to do with it I decided to download the various components and<br />
investigate! In a single day I was able to acquire, install and use these open source (i.e. completely FOC) tools to write reports and publish them to a remote web browser.<br />
<br />
<br />
I wrote a short pdf so that others could gain from my experience and published it on a few online forums. The response I had was incredible with so much positive feedback and thanks from people who were struggling to get started with BIRT. The only problem was that it very quickly became impossible to manually respond to all the emails. <br />
<br />
I am currently just finishing off a complete download, installation and getting started guide to the Eclipse BIRT tools and will be moving on to reviewing the Actuate tools soon. This time though, to save myself the pain of cutting and pasting hundreds of email addresses I set up a small web site and automated mailing list. It’s one of those things where you submit your email address and the server sends you out an email with a link. You click this to confirm your address, then I can mail everyone on the list easily when I write a new review or publish some tips and tricks. <br />
<br />
If you are interested in reading what I have found out about BIRT so far or if a step by step, quick start guide would be useful then please go along to <a class='bbc_url' href='
http://www.BIRTReporting.com'>Home</a> and sign up to the BIRT Alert mailing list. <br />
<br />
I’m doing this as a free knowledge sharing service so the only thing I ask in return is feedback about my reports and web site including ideas for subjects that you think it would be good to cover in the future.<br />
<br />
Warm Regards<br />
<br />
Paul
