The recent version of Palo 3.2 is a significative step ahead for the Jedox Business Intellitence suite. Palo 3.2 offers more performance (expecialy in the GPU optimized version), better reliability and usability during reports generation.
Pentaho Business Intelligence paltform provides several tools to design and deploy reports, the easiest is the Pentaho BI web reporting wizard (see pentaho_reporting).
One of the most requested features in Business Intelligence is the ability to let the final user to perform custom data analysis without the need of IT staff.
jStat is a statistical Javascript library which incorporates a number of interesting functions. The library aims to provide advanced statistical analysis directly from the browser. The project is still at the beginning and some features are on active development.
The R project like functions names helps statistician, data mining and business intelligence developers who are confortable with this famous open source statistical software.
A recent study by Dresner Advisory Services found that Open Source BI solutions have fresh growing customers compared to commercial BI vendors, and most of the customers have been achived by the last two years.
Plenty of video tutorials of Pentaho Report Designer to help on getting started.
http://sandbox.pentaho.com/2011/08/comprehensive-report-designer-tutorial/
Reports in Pentaho can be quickly created from Pentaho Business Intelligence portal directly or by using the external tool Pentaho Report Designer.
Pentaho Business Intellitence enterprise edition provides and easy way to design dashboards, unfortunately this component is not provided in the comunity edition.
An interesting snapshot on the Business Intelligence market.