We thank all our readers who have participated in the survey of Christian Donner . Christian Donner has posted the results of his survey.

Top answers from the results include:

Does your organization currently use any of the following
COMMERCIAL business intelligence tools?
Reporting (Q1A3) 84.62%

Does your organization currently use any of the following OPEN
SOURCE business intelligence tools?
None of the above (Q1aA5) 57.69%

Has your organization evaluated an Open Source business
intelligence product in the past 12 months?
None of the above (Q2A5) 53.85%

Are you currently in the process of implementing or planning to
implement any Open Source Business Intelligence
products?
None of the above (Q3A5) 61.54%

If you are planning to implement Open Source Business Intelligence
products, will they replace any commercial BI products in your
organization?
Reporting (Q4A3) 19.23%

Pentaho and Simba Technologies announced today their Spreadsheet Service allowing Microsoft Office users to access Pentaho OLAP using Microsoft Excel's Pivot Tables. Under the terms of their agreement, Pentaho becomes the exclusive distributor of Simba’s Microsoft Excel connectivity technology for use with Mondrian, which will be delivered and branded as Pentaho Spreadsheet Services.

We're trying to get more information about this new service.

[Quick Update:] Lance Walter of Pentaho quickly responded to our request for more information, and provided a link from the Pentaho Analysis page to the Pentaho Spreadsheet Services FAQ.

Spreadsheet Services is basically a client-side library. It sits on the client machine, and translates ODBO calls from Excel’s PivotTable Service into XML/A calls that go to Pentaho Analysis Services / Mondrian. [Pentaho Spreadsheet Services] works with Mondrian “standalone” – meaning Mondrian deployed without any of the rest of the Pentaho platform. So if you’re an existing, happy Mondrian user and want to use Pentaho Spreadsheet Services, you don’t need to deploy or configure the Pentaho platform to use it.
-- From Lance Walter, VP Marketing, Pentaho

The online article Sun and Greenplum Launch Commercial Open Source Data Warehouse Appliance for Business Intelligence by DMReview.com announced the use of Solaris 10 OS and Bizgres MPP "to deliver a turnkey appliance capable of analyzing hundreds of terabytes of business data at a better price-performance than virtually any product on the market". It sounds really neat (and we’d love to play with such an appliance ) but as I read the article, I couldn’t help but wonder if the market is ready for it. Yes, there is a lot of buzz about Open Source BI right now but are enterprises really investing on new infrastructure and technology?

OSCon 2006 started today. For a variety of reasons, we had to cancel our plans to be there. But being very interested in the news from OSCon, we found the best was to keep track is through the Technorati Tag...

The Open Source Business Intelligence Book, as originally conceived, is dead. Despite the transparency of the blogosphere, we don't feel the need to go into the details as to why. The Open Source Business Intelligence research project, blog, wiki and lens, will continue, and improve, without the distractions and roadblocks posed by the book project.

We do want to share some of the things that we have learned during our year long attempt to have our book published.

The traditional process of publishing a book doesn't serve the needs of the technology industry. Joe Wikert, in his "A Book Publisher's Blog", discusses many of the issues. A simple summary would be that it simply takes too long; by the time a book is accepted and published, it is, in many cases, out of date.

One lesson that keeps coming up over the years, is that every partnership, every business arrangement must be in writing, with as many details and contingencies thought out as is humanly possible. Until everyone is willing to put things in writing, you aren't doing business.

Some large publishing houses are hopeful that eBooks will be the answer for their technical book sales woes. But as long as the model is the traditional publishing model, the problems aren't addressed. Whether the end product is a static eBook or a static physical book, books sales will continue to slide.

Our frustrations with attempting to use traditional methods, and our learning experience with online publishing platforms, as well as our use of various eBook systems is causing us to reconsider our formulation of the TeleInterActive Press, with its blogs, podcasts, wikis, surveys, CMS and document management systems. What would other authors want? What do consumers need? How must the publishing industry change? How will all of this come together into a viable new publishing model to make technical publications relevant, immediate, easily updated and convenient?

We'll see as we continue to develop the OSBI wiki, this blog and related lens, surveys, and total content/document management, all in the context of researching other book topics.

We've been rethinking our podcasting strategy and hardware - mostly due to the poor sound quality of our previous podcasts. We also realize that we want to podcast on more than just open source topics, so "Open Source Conversations from the Open Source Café doesn't cut it.

Merienda in Tagalog [via Spain] and Merenda in Italian, mean snack or the small dishes that make up the snack, such as might be served in an Enoteca. Podcasts are very much the same, a small dish for the mind, to be taken in hand, and consumed on the run, or savored as you while away the time at your favorite wine bar, enoteca, caré or caffé. So, Meri^enda will be the name and tag for our podcasts going forward.

We did some web research, received recommendations from friends who are podcasting, and advice from Mike at Manor Music, Inc. and have begun investing in some podcasting gear [Note that links go to our Amazon store].

• A digital recorder, the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96
• AUDIO TECHNICA ATW-222 Microphone
• A pair of AUDIO TECHNICA ATR-35S Lavalier Microphones
• And a bunch of adapters and cables and stands

This gives us the capability to record directly to MP3, for quick podcasts from the field, the ability to do higher quality recordings, to roam around an audience, and even to record off the phone or skype or computer. We have some podcast plans for the summer, so keep a look out for Meri^enda. Enjoy.