Jaspersoft, maker of the world’s most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today announced Self-Service Express, a new subscription service available to open source community members that want premium, professional-grade BI documentation and knowledge base articles. Requested by over 80 percent of the JasperForge community in a 2011 annual survey, Self-Service Express provides access to Jaspersoft’s entire commercial customer portal and will make tens of thousands of Jaspersoft community members more productive as they create reports and dashboards and do analysis using Jaspersoft open source BI products.

Matt Geise, Senior Director of Community Development at Jaspersoft said, “We at Jaspersoft pride ourselves on the ability to listen and respond to our open source community. Our goal continues to be to provide the BI Builders of the world with the best open source tools and services we can offer. The launch of Self-Service Express contributes to this goal by providing our community users with advanced technical information including tips and tricks, code samples and best practices that are easily accessible from a single search box.”

With Self-Service Express, Jaspersoft community members gain access to all documentation and the Jaspersoft customer knowledge base. Community members can also utilize Jaspersoft’s powerful enterprise search service that allows search across all Jaspersoft sources of technical information including information in the documentation, knowledge base, Jaspersoft.com and JasperForge.org.

“By catering more broadly to its community users, which include large enterprises and divisions that mostly support themselves, Jaspersoft may be able to tap new and unique commercial opportunities from open source,’ said Jay Lyman, senior analyst with The 451 Group. ‘Open source users have indicated a demand and willingness to pay for these types of commercial offerings, which include documentation, knowledge base access and search in the case of Jaspersoft’s Self-Service Express.”

Ben Uphoff, a Jaspersoft community user, said “Self-Service express will help me and my team become more productive as we build reports and dashboards for our users. The enterprise search capability means we can quickly find what we are looking for and the rich documentation and customer knowledge base provide us with a lot of useful and practical how-to information.”

Self Service Express is available starting at $99 per month or $399 per year for a single user. In addition to offering Self-Service Express, Jaspersoft will continue providing free, peer-created and Jaspersoft-created support content on JasperForge.org.