March 26, 2020
This is an unprecedented time in our history. The COVID-19 pandemic is having an impact on the health of our loved ones, the businesses we rely upon, the health of the global economy, and the way we live our daily lives. Although small, we would like to contribute our effort to help.
We are here to help our customers
We stand ready to help you with safe, secure and affordable reporting solution. KoolReport framework is continued to improve with new features and bug fixes to ensure your report application relied on us continue to run well. We are working hard to fulfill our support responsibility to our customers and all KoolReport's users. We continue to get outsourcing projects done even our customers may be late on payments. We truly understand "a friend in need is a friend indeed".
Discount our licenses
In this flat world today, every businesses is connected to each others. Crisis somewhere else reach us in the way I could not think of. Job loss, project halted, late payment, all can happen putting financial burden in our shoulder. That's why we discount 40% for all KoolReport Pro licenses during this hard time. We understand and would like to share the burden with you.
Take care of our employees, who serve you
Supporting our employees during this crisis period is critical to providing you the service you need and expect. We have taken actions as Covid-19 spreads to protect the physical health and financial security while supporting our customers. Our employees are allowed to work remotely. We provided them with tools to work effectively from home. During their transition from workplace to home, you may see some impact of wait time for our support answer. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding as we work through this together.
Thank you
We would like to say thanks to all for your trust you put in us everyday. We believe that the crisis will be gone soon and we together be back stronger than ever.
<3 koolreport team
October 8, 2019
We would like to inform that we have released new version KoolReport 4.3.0 ready for your upgrade. This is a worth upgrading version containing many improvements and important bug fixes.
Details
For further details of the changes in this new version, please follow these links:
This upgrade is backward compatible so feel free to upgrade now!
Some more good news
On further update, we have released a new chart package called D3. The package is built on top of D3JS (Data-Driven Documents) to provide visualization strength for KoolReport. D3JS is very famous Javascript library which is behind many beautiful charts and graphs. Except for the most common charts like Line or Pie, we have added Waterfall and FunnelChart to extend choices for your data visualization. IT IS JUST THE BEGINNING! More and more stunning charts will be added to D3 package.
KoolReport Pro 4.3.1 has been released as well with new core and the upgrades of 14 packages including Pivot, DataGrid, Export and more.. If you have KoolReport Pro license, you may upgrade now via manual download or composer installation. If you have not owned a license yet, please consider to get one now. You will love it!
P.S: KoolReport team wish you have a great day and do not forget to support us. We are and will work hard to bring you to best product saving you time & effort. That's our promise.
<koolreport team
July 16, 2018
LET PARTY to celebrate the new version of KoolReport 2.78.0. We are very proud because we thought everything was just perfect in the previous version but still this new one comes with a lot of improvements. We have been working hard to find every enhancement point even tiny. So here come the new version, all are backward compatible so you need not to worry. Please upgrade!
The core
In this version, we have reviewed all datasource classes once more time to assure they are totally safe from any security threats. Furthermore, we have improved datasources for MySQL, Postgre, SQLSRV and Oracle to reduce their response time and memory usage by enabling the connection sharing. It means that, if you have multiple queries to the same database, connection will be shared between them thus reducing the unneccessary of re-connecting time. This technique has been implemented for PdoDataSource but have not done for others.
We have improved the src($name) function as well. Previously, this method requires us to specify the name of datasource. However we found that 80% of the cases, we have only ONE datasource. So we thought that it would be nicer to just write src() without any parameter, KoolReport will automatically get the first datasource to use. A tiny improvement but it can free our mind and reduce the typo of datasource name which resulted in error.
We have also enhanced the SubReport feature. In the previous version, we use HTML comment tags to mark subreport section but we found that some web servers remove the HTML comment tags for the purpose of optimization which will cause big issue for SubReport so we change to use HTML element. As a result, SubReport now works perfectly.
In previous version of KoolReport, we may need to remove the resources folder when upgrade to new version. It is quite troublesome and easy to forget. In this version, we use KoolReport's version and widget's version as a factor to generate widget's url. It helps us to reduce the unneccessary work when upgrade library, KoolReport will make sure all generated resources files stay updated.
Another great improvement in this version is the ability to write Javascript function inside Widget creation. We have created an advanced jsonEncode() function which able to detect javascript string and later turn them into javascript function at client-side. As a result, we can write PHP and Javascript in an unified block of widget creation. Furthermore, this feature will unleash features of many widgets with heavy client-side code. Please check our case of DataGrid usage in this forum post to understand better this enhancement.
Last, we have improved the event of Google Chart and Table. Now in those events like rowClick or itemSelect, we will receive selectedRow with associate data beside the array one. For example, you can access the row id by selectedRow[0] or by selectedRow['id']. This will add convenience to get data cell value for further processing.
Above are highlights, you may view the full release note.
Packages
Together with the new core, we have release below new package version:
- DataGrid 1.5.0: Adding formatValue for footer and enable data-search and and data-order feature.
- Pivot 4.1.0: Add count percentage and sum percentage to pivot process
- Cube 2.1.0: New
SuperCube widget
- Excel 3.0.0: Change to advanced
PHPOffice/PHPSpeadsheet library and discard the deprecated PHPExcel library.
- ChartJS 1.2.0: Return associative array on event
- SparkLines 1.20: Add ability to write js in widget creation.
- Inputs 3.5.0: Add ability to write js in widget creation.
- Morris Chart 2.0.0: Use advanced jsonEncode() function.
- DrillDown 2.0.0: Ability to work with
Table and ChartJS.
Beside the new version of above packages, we have add two brand new packages
- Codeigniter 1.0.0
- Laravel 1.0.0
Those two packages are free and born to make KoolReport work seamlessly in CodeIgniter and Laravel environment. In the future, we will add more packages like those two to support KoolReport working in other PHP Frameworks like Symfony, Yii2 and etc.
KoolReport Pro
And not to forget, we released KoolReport Pro 2.78.0 containing all above released packages. If you own KoolReport Pro, you may upgrade now.
Wrap-up
Have thought that the previous version was perfect, we are proved to be wrong by this new releases with a lot of enhancements. Listening to users is the key point and we will continue to do so. We thank you so much for all of your suggestions, bug reports, your case of usages that you shared with us. That's priceless! Thank you!
If you have any questions or comments, please post on this forum topic.
Enjoy!
<3 koolreport team
February 8, 2018
Business analytics is a method of diving in organization's data, using statistical analysis to explore the hidden information in the data. The ultimate goal of business analytics is to enhance the view of business and to support decision making process.
In those recent years, the term data-driven business has been emerged to indicate those companies treat their data as an assets and utilize it as the important competitive advantages. Sale and marketing, customer relation management are frontier areas that those companies aiming at. The business are transforming with data-back decision making. It is the trend, unavoidable trends that those who do not utilize will be left behind.
There are three (3) types of business analytics:
Descriptive analytics (Business Intelligence)
Descriptive analytics is normally used to track the performance of a business. It answers the question of how good is the state of business within specific timeframe. It answer the question of
- What happens in business?
- Who involved?
- When?
- Size of effects?
There are boom of tools for this kind of descriptive analytics that we can name some such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and Qlik. Those tools will help organization to get insight view of current state of business, setting up the business alert through threshold, real-time report and so on. The tools are even made easier so that people with little knowledge of data science can access and use. There are no need of data analyst, although better to have, to use the tools.
Predictive analytics
If descriptive analytics is the basic of business analytics, the predictive analytics is advanced one. It use the data to sketch out the trends and predict the future outcomes. This is difficult area and normally required data expert in an organization. The work involves so much in building predictive model which can be simple as linear regression or complex as neural network AI.
Prescriptive analytics
This is the highest level of business analytics in which the past business performance will be used to create recommendations to handle similar situations in the future. It can help to answer questions of
- Why did it happens?
- Will it happens again?
- What will happens if we change X?
- What else data tell us what we never thought to ask?
Do not confuse this with predictive analytics since predictive analytics may show us the trends, the possible outcomes but it does not tell us why. On the other hands, the prescriptive does. Predictive analytics know what will happens but prescriptive analytics know why it happens. It can simulate the situation when some variables change. This advance will provide the management level in an organization the ability to browse through the options and know what will happen. Furthermore, it can tell us things we are not aware of. It kills the business risk of being unaware of unknown problems.
Business Analytics is wide area and the it will change business profoundly. The recent technology such as big data, cloud computing, deep learning makes us to get close to business analytics ever.
Some questions related to KoolReport
Where is KoolReport now in this big picture?
KoolReport now is early stage of business analytics. Specifically, it is in the state of descriptive analytics (business intelligence), the lowest level. It helps to unite data from different sources, process and summarize it then visualize it in meaningful way. It is suitable for creating report (KPI. metrics), online dashboard (the summarization of current state of business), OLAP(pivot, cube, slice, drilling report).
It is like a baby need to learn crawling before he/she can walk. We believe that doing well in this stage will be a foundation for us to move to the next.
Where KoolReport is heading to?
Of course, we want to move up step by step to the latest level of business analytics.
Why are you confident?
KoolReport is built as open-source framework for reporting. Why? Because it will be open to any contribution of third party. Everyone can build extended packages to process data. The hidden power of KoolReport is lying in its lego structure in which extended package can be used in plug and play manner. KoolReport hopes to be the hub to connect business who need data processing solution and third party who can provide it. In general, we aim at creating a market for it. And by this way, KoolReport will have chance to move up step by step from lowest level of business analytics to the highest one.
June 2, 2017
KoolReport is a poweful PHP Framework for reporting. It can be a sale report for printing. It can be a dashboard to centralize information. And it can be a business intelligent tool to support management decision. It is you who decide what KoolReport will be.
There are three terms that people used to confuse: reporting, dashboard, business intelligence. Reporting normally is related to summarize the past information, analyze data to come up with good information of what happened ex. last year sale report. When we talk about dashboard, we talk about what is going on right now , the data is gathered from many sources and presented to you in an interactive format of charts and tables. Different from others two, business intelligence is working toward future. Data from the past are also gathered and analyzed but not only for purpose of reporting but predicting the incoming future. Business intelligence tool uses past data to discover pattern and use them to guess what may happen. In sum, reporting is for the past, dashboard is present and business intelligence is the for future.
KoolReport can be your reporting tools, dashboard or a business intelligence tool.
KoolReport can be your reporting tool. By getting sale data in the past and perform aggregation, it will form a nice printing report with beautiful charts and graphs.
KoolReport can act like a dashboard tool because it allow you to gather data from various sources: MySQL, CSV, Excel and from Google Adwords, Analytics, Salesforce etc.. and let you know what is going on with your business.
KoolReport also can be business intelligence tool. In near future, we want to have packages to perform regression and prediction. Your past data will be used to train model and KoolReport will give you predicted data visualized in tables or charts. That will be amazing.
Thanks for reading. It is just a thought of us about what KoolReport is, what future it can be and will be.
Please try KoolReport and if you like it please share with others.
<3 koolreport team.
