Using Pentaho for displaying Data

Question

my company maybe wants to use Pentaho for displaying Data from Navision with multiple clients on a Dashboard. Would it be more work to do this with Pentaho instead of .net and Navision web services? We will need to configure AD on the Dashboard, too.

Is this possible and faster than with .net and web services. Could Pentaho get the data via webservices or only via the mssql db?

Thanks alot

PS:I know that this is a vague question, but I can't find any valued information.

Answer 1

Pentaho can get data via webservice but only via the ETL tool. So you'd still want to have it stored in a DB that pentaho can access somewhere. Although; If you really wanted to you can actually have a transformation that feeds directly into a report/dashboard. ( And results can be cached too if you want )

The pentaho dashboarding framework is very good, google around for "Ctools" from Webdetails it's got some great demo's to help you get started.