On February 24th, Ironside hosted Select the Right Cognos 10.2.2 Tool for the Job: Real-Life Selection Process Leveraging Your use Case webinar, where Ironside’s Senior Consulant De Hsieh, presented an in-depth look into which of the many Cognos tools available are right for which jobs. During this webinar we reviewed some of the issues your organization are currently facing and present our thoughts about and proven practices for their delivery. Read more
Tag Archive for: Business Intelligence
Migrating Cognos is a highly involved process, especially when you’re moving across multiple versions. When one of our clients needed this kind of migration completed, our experts turned to Cognos SDK to streamline the process and adjust the system to meet the client’s needs exactly. Read more
In Cognos 10.2.1 and earlier versions, the phrase that most accurately described a multi-page report was “wrestling match.” Long list reports would flow on for page after page until somewhere along the way you ran into that chart you knew you added but were starting to forget about. Defining page breaks helped some, but following the flow of a multi-page report was often a tiresome process that left your mouse hand cramped from clicking Page Down. With the release of Cognos 10.2.2, IBM changed all that with tabbed reports. Read more
You might have missed it if you weren’t closely following the situation or already using the platform, but around the middle of last month IBM forever changed the concept of self-service analytics when they quietly moved Watson Analytics out of beta and into general availability. Watson Analytics is a new cloud-based application that enables an individual to work with their data at a level of ease and intuitiveness that we’ve not seen before. As a sibling of the IBM Watson family, it has inherited a powerful natural language processing capability and as such it enables an individual to query data not with a programming language like SQL, but in the form of a natural language dialogue. Read more
Synopsis:
Enable a user via a prompt to pre-select if a value will be filtered before or after aggregation.
Overview:
Normally, the report author hard codes filters placed on facts in the Properties pane as before or after aggregation. While this is adequate in most report scenarios, hard coding can be limiting if the executing end-user would like to dynamically choose which aggregation method to use on the fact value at run time. When creating typical reports, this option is not obvious or apparently possible. Read more
Nowadays, anyone from age two to ninety interacts with the internet in some form. Mobile devices have become an increasingly popular means of access. Technology innovations in the form of smartphones and tablets have dramatically changed the way we conduct our daily lives, both in business and personal settings. Because of this societal shift, tools like IBM Cognos Mobile, which delivers rich BI results in the office or on the go, are leading trends in IT. Research studies show that organizations that both prioritize mobile technology initiatives and implement a mobile strategy – not just for IT but across the entire company – are more likely to experience revenue growth and improve IT effectiveness . So with this in mind, what exactly is IBM Cognos Mobile, and what does it offer? Let’s take a quick look. Read more
Difficulty: Easy
Required Ingredients: Report Studio report
Scenario:
You have a highly formatted report in Report Studio and you need a better understanding of how the report is structured. Some of the items in the report maybe hidden and you can’t easily see how things are nested. Luckily, Page Structure view can help with that. Read more
Ironside, has become the first IBM Business Partner to achieve IBM Gold Software Accreditation in the three major pillars of IBM business analytics software: Business Intelligence (Cognos), Financial Performance Management (TM1), and Predictive Analytics (SPSS). Read more
Synopsis
This article covers how to allow access to a report with a password challenge prompt, creating a password protected report.
Overview
Security in Cognos is extremely robust, letting you permit or deny access to data elements on a package, data source, or even row level in a Database. Normally, standard group permissions conveniently control report execution access for most situations, but certain business applications may require a select subset of users to run a report who may not all be in the same group. In lieu of adding a separate group and assigning those users to it, a report can start with a prompt page with a password challenge response that allows only users with a valid password to run the report. Read more
Synopsis
How to create, implement and use conditional blocks in Cognos reports.
Overview
Conditional blocks show different display results based on user interaction or parameters read in when a report is run. They provide a creative method for presenting either the same report data in various formats or executing several completely different reports from one prompt page. Read more
Ironside helps companies translate business goals and challenges into technology solutions that enable insightful analysis, data-driven decision making and continued success. We help you structure, integrate and augment your data, while transforming your analytic environment and improving governance.