Cognos Insight

To add on to what has been mentioned in the previous article, this new component from IBM allows users to pull in data from a number of sources and not just TM1 as I had wrongly assumed.

From a licensing perspective this requires Advanced Business Author role or above for BI and TM1 contributor role or above for TM1. The tool integrates with Cognos 10.1.1 and TM1 10.1.

Here's what else I could find on IBM site:

You have all the capabilities of the Insight Standard Edition plus:
• Import data from existing Cognos reports
• Share files using the Cognos Connection portal
• Publish and distribute content to the server for managed deployment
• Extend content created with Insight to other Cognos tools and interfaces like mobile and Web
• Use Insight as the interface to contribute to a managed planning process

Since this is a stand-alone desktop tool, I am curious as to how it fits architecturally with other Cognos components and how requests are executed. Since it supports in-memory analysis is this in-memory analysis handled on BI server or on the client machine? And if it uses a TM1 engine behind the scenes, how do requests flow when reports are used as sources?

If anyone has any inputs, questions, concerns as always please let us know.

All New IBM Cognos Insight

IBM recently released a new component IBM Cognos Insight bundled with TM1 10. This is not related to Business Insight and is a separate Dashboarding component. I am yet to read up and evaluate this so expect more on this from me in later articles. The demos look cool though.

The tool seems to be more inclined to supporting TM1 10 and has an in-memory analytic engine with write-back capabilities. Visually too this looks so much better than our Business Insight.

But as always with any new release there are bound to be disappointments so the wish list here too is huge.

More to follow.

Multi Tab Portlets cause CPS PAG Error

When using Multi Tabs portlet as the first tab in Cognos Connection, users might run into CPS-PAG-4801 error. The error is not consistent and refreshing the page renders the multi-tab portlet without error. THis does not happen when the multi tab portlet is placed after any of the other tabs.

This has been logged as a defect and is due to authentication information not being passed on to the portlet when used as the first tab.

The only work around is to use a HTML Viewer and have the URL for the Multi Tab portlet included in the HTML Viewer.