We're looking at a couple of tools here: BIRT and Pentalho, both of which have free business visualisation software packages. We're hoping that they can offer us more than you can get from Excel pivot tables, and be easier to set up than a bespoke solution involving some PHP and graphing software.
This isn't as straightforward as you might imagine. Raad's been working on setting up a Pentalho instance for most of the last week, and hasn't yet managed to get a significant improvement on what Excel provides, though it's taken considerable effort to get this far. Pentalho requires various modules to be installed, but its documentation is rather incomplete, especially the documentation for creating aggregate tables. Aggregate tables are essential when dealing with large volumes of data - we have over 10m rows of Sakai event data, so without aggregate tables, every time we try to look at a large section of the dataset, we run out of resources. So thus far, our suggestion would be that if you want business information software, you may be better off paying for a commercial product.
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