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.

TM1 & BI Integration issues

One point to be kept in mind while integrating TM1 and BI 10.1.1 is that it is best to stay away from special characters in the member names/aliases.

Another huge point that IBM hasn't confirmed yet but something that I am suspecting is that when you have the same members rolling up to different parent members TM1 makes each of those members unique by concatenating the entire path to the member with "^" character in the MUN. And this character causes the drill up/down feature to be disabled on 10.1.1 (not observed on 10.1).

Special characters like "&" in the member aliases not just in the MUN cause the screen to freeze when drill through links are clicked.

Cognos BI and TM1 Integration

Before people start wondering if I am working on TM1, the answer is no. But I am working on using TM1 as a data source and hope to pick up on TM1 in due course.

Here are a couple of points that I think people who are planning on using TM1 as a datasource should consider:

• TM1 cubes require an explicilty declared Measure dimension for the cubes to get imported into Cognos.



• The cubes need to have named levels enabled on them for the levels to show up in Cognos.



• Description attribute needs to be named as Description for the rolevalue of memberDescription to work in Cognos.



• Cube based aggregation functions do not work on cells in TM1 that have rules defined on them.

Another point that I am still banging my head about is with security. With transformer cubes we have the cloak feature but that doesn't seem to be the case with TM1. Example, if a user has access to Products 1,2,3 belonging to Product Line 1 but does not have access to Products 4,5,6 belonging to the same Product Line, with a transformer cube when the user accesses Product Line 1 he will see the total specific to Products that he has access to but with Transformer he will see the total value of all the products belonging to the product line rather than the products that he has access to which accroding to me is a huge disadvantage. Still trying to work through this. Hope someone out there can shed more light on this.