Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

The Key Factors that Separate Competitors

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 05:29:45 GMT

In this blog post, we will explore the NetVisn's key factors that set competitors apart in the IBM Cognos Analytics platform administration!!

FM Model Documentation in Cognos Analytics

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 12:00:00 GMT

June 30, 2021 - By Jeff White, Envisn, Inc.

Report and query documentation in Cognos Analytics is rare enough, but finding FM model documentation that a given report or a set of reports is based upon is virtually non-existent. Envisn’s NetVisn product has changed all that by including FM model documentation along with all report documentation and does this by providing easily accessible hyperlinks. The hyperlinks make it possible navigate from a report to its model or package and drill down into detail wherever and whenever needed. In Figure 1 we see the documentation of a report labeled Order Summary and below the general information about the report is a block showing the dependencies that this report is based on. This is both the package and the model itself.

Data Profile Your Cognos Content Store

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 20:30:00 GMT

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

One of the most frequently asked questions of Cognos administrators is, “What databases are we using, and where and how are we using them?” Virtually every manager wants to know about the data that’s being used for management reporting, financial reporting, government reporting, etc. And as important as that question is, it’s often difficult or impossible to answer that question with any accuracy unless you have the tools to respond to those questions.

Life Cycle Documentation for Cognos Analytics

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 18:42:55 GMT

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Documentation in Cognos, where it exists at all, is generally thought of as something that is nice to have but is often only an afterthought. And if it’s being done manually it is likely not complete, accurate or up to date.

Maximizing Uptime in Cognos Analytics

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 20:16:36 GMT

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

One of the biggest challenges for any Cognos Analytics administrator is maintaining operational uptime for all content in the Content Store. This can be a challenge since outside of a major system failure, the major problem is that of individual objects failing when a user attempts to access them and then hoping that it gets reported and fixed. This is frustrating not only to the user who doesn’t get what’s needed, but since the user may not always report this, it remains non-functional until someone actually reports it and it gets corrected.

What’s needed is a means of quickly and easily identifying those objects across the Cognos environment that are non-functional, and ideally be able identify the problem that needs to be fixed to make them operational. It turns out that Envisn’s NetVisn product has the capability to do both of these things and more.

Advanced Deployments in Cognos Analytics

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:00:00 GMT

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

With the expanded growth and broadening of Cognos Analytics has come the need for more flexibility and options in the area of deployments. This is particularly true in larger, complex environments where more content is being deployed and promoted to more Cognos instances. And while the standard deployments from Cognos do the job at a basic level, large enterprise environments need more options and granularity in deployment.

Managing Cognos Remotely

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 18:59:28 GMT

By Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

The first pandemic in our lifetime has resulted in more and more businesses and organizations requiring nearly everyone to work from home. For many this has been a real eye opener. Suddenly thrust into having to do virtually everything remotely, many found that they were lacking the high-speed bandwidth needed and the tools necessary to manage this successfully. And with the lockdown at different stages of its life cycle depending on where you live, many are finding that returning to work will be vastly different from what they were used to.

Documentation in Cognos Analytics – Maximizing What’s Possible

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 20:36:32 GMT

By Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

Documentation for Cognos Analytics is one of those things that doesn’t come with it. You have to create it yourself or look for a third-party product that might meet all or part of your needs for documentation. Creating it yourself can be difficult primarily because getting access to all of the Cognos metadata required to make it successful is not easy.

Self-Audit Cognos Security

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:45:00 GMT

By Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

It’s likely that most Cognos environments seldom, if ever, get a self-audit of their security when in reality it’s a great opportunity to determine if key parts of security are correctly applied. It does of course require the right tools to do this since many parts of Cognos are totally opaque within itself and security is the best example of this. But in most cases today it’s only an annual audit from outside the organization that tests the security model across the entire Cognos environment. And in many cases, it likely doesn’t happen at all. This is unfortunate since a security audit or review can often uncover major issues.

Managing Cognos Analytics New Data Sources

info@envisn.com (The Envisn Team) — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 20:45:00 GMT

By Gary Larsen, Envisn, Inc.

The new data sources in Cognos Analytics have actually been around for a while. They are, however, new to a lot of Cognos developers since many of them may not have had occasion to use them yet.