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Cognos 12.0.1 has been released and it has a bunch of really nice upgrades. Our in-house Cognos expert Todd Schuman reveals his favorite new features.
1. Favorites
One of my favorite enhancements is Favorites, get it? The ability to manually sort and float specific reports to the top of the list has been missing since Cognos 10 transitioned to Cognos 11/12. While Favorites doesn’t do exactly the same thing, clicking the heart icon allows you to quickly identify which reports you want to call out. You can even sort by favorites to have them display at the top of the list or create a content tab that includes only your favorites.
2. Date type sorting
It’s late 2023, why are we still manually sorting months and days in our BI tools? Upgrade to CA 12.0.1 and stop wasting your time. it gives you automatic sorting for Months, Days, and Seasons.
Custom is now a display option that knows the correct way to handle the order, so your reports and visualizations make sense.
3. Improved labels for stacked bars and repeaters
Detailed properties and settings for visualizations still have a long way to go to keep up with the competition, but it’s good to see improvements like these. Having more control over labels and repeaters makes it easier to visualize your data the way you want.
4. Event Studio (AKA Event Agent)!
Did you know Event Studio has been available in Cognos 11 since it was released? It’s been living in the shadows for years, buried with the other legacy tools and only available using IE or IE mode. They should make a movie about the rise and fall of Event Studio someday. The good news is that now it’s right in the forefront and has a fancy new name: Event Agent!
If you haven’t used this tool before, it’s worth checking out. It can do many useful things, such as sending emails when “events” occur, like low product inventory or achievement of a sales target. Event Agent runs in the current generation of browsers (Edge, Chrome, etc.). The UI \ reverts back to the Cognos 10 UI, but hopefully we will get a more modern refresh soon.
5. Administration Activities page
The Activities page has been a big fail for me since Cognos 11 was released back in late 2015. It was sluggish and missing a lot of the controls and usability that the Cognos 10 Admin Console featured. The sluggishness was fixed a while back, but filters and other options were still missing in the Cognos 11 UI. 12.0.1 fixes this and we now have a fully functional Activities page. Filter to toggle between background and interactive, by user, status, priority, you name it. The whole gang is here, so it’s time to celebrate.
6. More control on data sets and uploaded files
Previously, admin control over external data and data sets of imported data saved to the content store has been severely lacking. We now have more options to control these areas. With 12.0.1, we can control things like the number of rows, columns, and overall size.
7. Extension JSON Documentation
Finally! A good deal of the customizations used in Cognos Analytics rely on JSON code. While it’s not a difficult language to read, you are often reviewing and reverse engineering something found in the IBM samples or created by someone on a Cognos forum page. Before 12.0.1, there wasn’t documentation that described what tags and properties were available and what they did. IBM has now released an official document that covers all the structures and content of the JSON code needed to make custom extensions. I’m hoping this leads to some exciting new ways to customize your Cognos experience.
spec.json description – IBM Documentation
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About the author
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This blog was contributed by Todd Schuman, Senturus lead for our Cognos Install, Upgrade and Performance Tuning Practice. Todd regularly connects with the IBM product development team and has been in the forefront of the Cognos Analytics admin since it debuted. |
