Super Helpful Features in Cognos 12 You May Not Know About

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Todd Schuman
Practice Lead – Installations, Upgrades and Performance Tuning
Senturus, Inc.

Todd is a dyed-in-the-wool data nerd with 17+ years of analytics experience across multiple industries. BI tool tri-lingual, Todd has applied his Cognos, Tableau and Power BI expertise in many industries. His diverse subject matter expertise means he wears many hats at Senturus. Todd takes turns running the Install, Upgrade and Performance practice for Senturus, developing BI reports and dashboards, mentoring clients on BI best practices, and training the next generation of BI users.  

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0:11
Hello everybody.

0:12
Welcome to another Senturus webinar.

0:15
Welcome everybody, to another webinar from Senturus.

0:19
Today we’re going to be doing super helpful features in Cognos 12 you may not know about.

0:28
Here’s our agenda.

0:30
We are looking at first some introductions and then we are going to talk about local file bursting, multiple gateway configurations, parameters.

0:41
This a cool one, replacements for query and analysis studio and then we’ll come on back with about Senturus and some Q&A before we get things started.

0:51
We have a couple polls for you today, right?

0:54
We got a couple polls.

0:56
We’re going to go ahead.

0:57
The first one here is what version of Cognos Analytics are you running?

1:01
I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to start that first one.

1:04
Going to let it run for about a minute.

1:06
All right.

1:07
I’m going to go ahead and stop this first poll.

1:09
Let’s take a look, see what we got here.

1:12
Soon as I can find the right window.

1:14
There it is.

1:16
So as expected, the majority of you are on 11/1 or 11/2, which leads us of course to our next poll and our next question.

1:25
So here you go, you can all see this, take a look at that.

1:29
Why?

1:30
What’s preventing you from upgrading?

1:33
So let’s go ahead and let’s see what your answer is here.

1:39
What’s stopping you from upgrading?

1:43
It is the net Alex.

1:44
So Alex asked a question, is 12 the next version after 11/2 it is the yes, 1124 I believe was the last 11 version and then it went to 12.

1:56
I’m going to go ahead and end the poll.

1:58
Everybody take a look at this.

2:00
So very interestingly a lot of you are unable to upgrade due to IE that’s a that’s interesting, that’s fair Varun.

2:19
We should have had an option for upgrade plan for later and Sailor Men don’t have first name there.

2:27
Yeah, I can see how the Query Studio and analysis studio issue can be an issue for some folks.

2:33
So we’re going to go ahead and then we are going to talk about that today.

2:37
So Speaking of who we are, All right, Political Mario, we can’t help you with that.

2:43
We can help you with a lot of stuff, but we can’t help you with that.

2:48
All right.

2:48
So who are we talking today?

2:50
Well, First off, over on the right there.

2:52
That’s me.

2:54
Looking good.

2:55
Looking sharp.

2:56
Looking clean.

3:01
That’s me.

3:02
Pat Powers, BI trainer, consultant.

3:04
You may have heard me before on some of these webinars, but over on the left there’s our, our main speaker of the hour here, Todd Schumann, our practice lead for installations, upgrades and tuning.

3:18
10 years, 10 years Todd has been with us doing all these upgrades and doing all these things.

3:27
So Todd is going to take you through the demos, take you through all the stuff.

3:31
I’m going to sit here and just look good.

3:33
I’m going to stare at you with those eyes.

3:35
All right.

3:37
So with that, I’m going to turn this over Todd and I’m going to shush up for a while.

3:42
Todd, it’s all yours.

3:44
All right.

3:44
Thanks, Pat, for that great intro.

3:46
I’m going to jump right into it today.

3:48
I got a lot to cover, so I want to make sure we have enough time.

3:50
So I’m going to go over a couple of the newer, I say new features.

3:54
I mean, some of these features have been around in previous versions of Cognos.

3:58
Some of them like, especially this one bursting local file system has been around.

4:01
But I haven’t really done anything about it in any my webinars and I know just working with different customers, a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of this.

4:08
So I wanted to kind of just highlight this functionality in Cognos.

4:11
So with Cognos Analytics, assuming you’re on premise, this going to be just for on premise customers only.

4:18
This restricted and not available in the cloud because they don’t want you messing around on their file system.

4:23
So if you’ve got an on premise instance of Cognos, you can turn this on.

4:27
So again, listed, not just Cognos 12 available since Cognos 10, it’s just a couple steps involved in how you set this up.

4:33
The first thing is to define a local root folder that’s Cognos going to write to, and you can either do it a drive or a folder on your Cognos server, or you can map it to a network drive.

4:46
Once you’ve got that connection established, you’re going to let Cognos define some subfolders and you can create as many of these as you need.

4:52
So you can have one for all the different departments in your company.

4:55
You know, AP, Payroll, HR, whatever you have, you know you can create these and they can all have their own security.

5:01
And then once you’ve got the folders defined, you can go ahead and schedule your reports to actually write down Excel, PDFCSVS, whatever you need directly to that file system.

5:11
And people can go and get reports without having to log into Cognos.

5:14
They’ve already been generated on a schedule, they’ve already created the correct output and it can be secured just through Windows folder security.

5:22
One of the nice thing you can do if you want to take the next level is you can also add scripts to do some additional functions like move these files elsewhere as people have, you know, FTP copy to SharePoint, you know, all kinds of things you can do once you’ve kind of generated these local files.

5:37
So the first step I mentioned is to define that root folder.

5:40
It’s a bit buried, so if you’re familiar with Cognos configuration, the tool it’s in the actual action bar.

5:46
There’s a thing under there called Edit Global Configuration and you’re going to go in there and it’s going to open up a little window and you need to define the location file system root and it’s a little bit cryptic here as well.

5:58
You have to kind of follow the format as to how you define your drive and there’s a little tech note below it in the properties that kind of can help you.

6:07
But essentially if you use the screenshot I have here for a local file so it’s file: 2 forward slashes and then the drive.

6:14
So in my case it’s an E in a report called Cognos Reports I created.

6:18
If you’re going to use a network drive, it’s that same beginning of that file: 2 forward slashes, and you use the backward slash and kind of map out the network server and folder.

6:27
A couple things to note, If you’re going to use a network drive, you need to make sure that Windows service account that’s running Cognos also has rewrite capabilities to that folder.

6:39
So Cognos needs to be able to obviously access it and also be able to write and create content in that folder.

6:46
And then finally the last step to do is you know once you’ve got that in and it’s connected, restart Cognos for that to actually take place.

6:55
Once you’ve got that, next step is to define your subfolders.

6:59
So you’re going to go into the admin console, which again still has the old Cognos 10 look and feel here and under the configuration main tab and then the Dispatchers and Services sort of sub tab there on the left you can go and there’s a little icon top right corner.

7:15
It’s got like a folder and two little like subfolders, directories kind of coming under it.

7:19
That’s going to be the link you want and that’ll open up a screen for you to define the system locations.

7:25
And here you’re just going to go ahead and create as many of these as you need.

7:29
I just did to you an example here, one for finance, one for payroll, and you’re going to also give it a location field and that’s going to generate what the folder is going to be called on the server as well.

7:39
So no limit to many of these as you want.

7:42
And once you kind of have these set up, you’ll then be able to see additional options when you’re running things in the background or creating schedules.

7:50
So again, these are only available in the batch mode.

7:52
You know, if you don’t use, if you don’t flip that switch to run in the background or use the schedule, you’re not going to see this option.

7:59
But once you kind of go into the run options of a report and you turn that on you’ll see an option that says save report as external file if you had this set up correctly so far and that gives you a drop down here I kind of highlighted in red where it’s set to finance.

8:11
You can go ahead and pick the folder you want it to go to and then run that report.

8:15
So do a quick demo here and just kind of show you how all that works.

8:20
So I have got where is my remote desktop?

8:23
Here it is.

8:24
So this the server I’m running Cognos on.

8:26
I got an E drive, my Cognos reports folder and that finance reports folder here.

8:32
I’m going to just wipe this out just so we can see it get created.

8:37
One of the things to note too is I’ve only have finance listed here, but in my deck you could see I’ve got a payroll folder here as well.

8:45
These get these photos get generated on demand.

8:48
So until I actually run something that’s going to write there, these won’t get created.

8:51
So if you get concerned, hey, I created all these folders.

8:53
I don’t see them here yet.

8:55
It’s most likely because you haven’t run anything yet.

8:58
So let me run my burst demo.

9:00
And this just a really basic report and you don’t have to use bursting.

9:03
You can just be, you know, a file that you run every single day.

9:05
But I like the burst aspect, because you can kind of create specific versions of a single report.

9:10
So again, I’m going to go ahead, use the Run as run in the background.

9:15
I’m going to create PDFs and I want to turn on bursting.

9:20
And then for my delivery, because I’ve got that external file set up going on, I can click that and I can go now and define where I want it to go and I’m going to put it in the finance folder.

9:34
And you got some other options.

9:35
You know, do you want to replace existing versions, keep existing files?

9:38
You can add a timestamp or a sequence number like the timestamp kind of tells me when it was built, when it was run.

9:44
And I’m just going to go ahead and hit run, gets pretty quick.

9:51
And this just runs, you know, a sample output from the Great Outdoors sample database from Cognos and hopefully that should populate.

10:02
Starting to run now.

10:03
So I’m getting all these files generated and each one of these is unique for a country.

10:07
I had a page break and burst on country.

10:10
So if I’m a sales Rep from Belgium, I can come in here, look at my Belgium version.

10:21
Hopefully I had Adobe.

10:22
OK, and here’s just my country and here’s my, you know, camping equipment, golf equipment numbers for the year.

10:28
So this could be run daily, weekly, monthly, you know, as needed.

10:31
When you’re in this sample, your sales Rep needs that information.

10:35
And I have now eliminated that person to even have to come into Cognos, you know, login, take up a concurrent user spot.

10:42
In my environment, they don’t have to go and click through the reports to find the report, run the report, wait for it to come back, generate the PDF.

10:49
It’s all just here waiting for them.

10:50
So this a huge time saver.

10:52
And if you’ve got, you know, a Cognos environment that’s just slammed all the day, if you have the opportunity that people don’t necessarily need to, they’re just running the same report every day, you can generate that ahead of time before people start getting online, put into a folder, especially if you have like map network drives, you know, create folders that have these Cognos reports and people just go and get them right there.

11:11
You don’t have to go and get it in Cognos and it’s going to make your Cognos environment that much more available for other types of tasks and reporting that may be taking up a lot of your resources.

11:19
It’s again really easy to set these up, really powerful feature.

11:22
If you’re not using these I would definitely recommend looking into them and exploring this capability.

11:27
Just a couple of the next steps too.

11:30
Guy mentioned you know you can take it even beyond this.

11:32
You can set up scripts to move them to SharePoint, you can SFTP them to other locations.

11:37
You know pretty much anything you could think of.

11:39
With just some batch commands or some scripting tools you can you can move these reports and do different things with them.

11:45
There is also in some of the later versions of Cognos, I don’t remember which one is specifically.

11:50
I think 11/1.

11:51
Somewhere they introduced some of the cloud storage options.

11:53
I’ve only used the Amazon S3 if you’re not familiar with sort of like an online storage folder that Amazon AWS hosts.

12:01
But if you have one of those, you can set it up and write directly to there.

12:05
And again, if you got people who are outside of your network, you can expose that that Amazon S3 storage location and they can go and get things externally.

12:14
So if you have external customers you know who you don’t want them running, logging into your system and trying to get these local files, you can go and use an Amazon S3 bucket and have it written right there directly.

12:24
So kind of lots of different options.

12:25
I haven’t used the objects IBM Cloud Object Storage or this other but yet, but I think they’re continuing to add these different features here.

12:33
So just another way to kind of expand on the bursting to local files.

12:39
Next feature is multiple gateways.

12:41
Again, nothing unique to Cognos 12 here either, but another thing that I noticed a lot of people don’t take advantage of that I think is a useful tool.

12:48
Essentially what this does is allows you to create a landing page for each namespace, so if you only have one name space you know everyone in your organization just logs in Active Directory.

12:58
This probably isn’t super irrelevant or important to you, but if you’ve got multiple types of users, external users, or there’s different companies that have been merged into one and you have all different namespaces, it’s the default Cognos interface is going to have a single gateway and you’re going to go and log in and it’s going to ask you to pick which one you want to log into and then you have to then log in from that screen.

13:19
This going to default it to a specific namespace.

13:21
It’s already been pre populated with that drop down and it just hides the existence of other users, all the other groups to users.

13:28
And you can also continue to keep that this sort of standard one for an administrator.

13:33
So if you’re an administrator and you have to kind of go into different namespaces and control users and groups and access and things like that, you probably do want to keep this, but it’s a little bit more of an elegant solution to kind of have individual gateways installed that are mapped to specific namespaces.

13:46
So I’m going to show you how to do that and it’s pretty simple again if you’re just going to install the Cognos server software, so go ahead and run the installer.

13:55
If you’ve done an install, you’ve probably seen these screens, but we’re going to create a new directory.

13:59
So I’ve already got sort of in my E program files, IBM kind of say Analytics.

14:03
I’ve got that analytics directory is already in use.

14:05
That’s my main server which also includes all three tiers.

14:08
It’s got a content tier, application tier, gateway tier.

14:11
I’m going to spin up another installation directory and just call it gateway one, which I picked for this.

14:17
But if you’ve got you know, specific namespaces, it’s going to be probably more helpful to name it that.

14:22
So if you’ve got Active Directory or LDAP or you know, external users, kind of give it a more friendly name here so you know which one is which.

14:30
And then when you’re also creating it, give it a new shortcut folder name as well so it doesn’t get mixed up with the current one you have.

14:35
Then you’re going to have two Cognos configurations.

14:37
You’re not going to know which one’s which, so give these unique names in the install location in the shortcut folder and make sure again you’re just installing only the gateway.

14:44
You don’t need the app tier or the content tier, so it should be a pretty small lightweight installation.

14:50
Next step is to run that IIS alias script and if you haven’t attended my webinars or you’re not aware of this, this probably the greatest thing to happen to Cognos in the history of Cognos.

15:00
Especially since Cognos 11 came out and the IIS rules got a lot more complicated.

15:05
You know in the Cognos 10 days it would just took a couple seconds to create some virtual directories.

15:09
But early days of Cognos 11.0 there was like a 10 page IIS setup strip where you had to manually type in all these different patterns.

15:19
Now you just kind of open up this this text file, it’s in your I believe it’s in the installation directory, CGI, bin, templates, IIS.

15:29
And once you’re there you just open this file and you kind of need to edit two places.

15:32
One is your new alias, what’s what are users going to log into, what’s the URL they’re going to use when they want to hit this new gateway.

15:40
It’s going to just kind of map it to the existing directory.

15:42
But I would recommend something more user friendly that users are going to make sense to them.

15:47
So I just did IBM Calicos_G1 and then make sure that the path that this script is pointing to is also tied to that GW one folder.

15:55
Go ahead and run it.

15:55
It’s going to validate everything and everything looks good.

15:58
But yes, it’ll create all those directories for you which saves you a ton of time and avoids any kind of fat finger errors.

16:05
And then next step is you’re going to have a new Cognos configuration available for this gateway.

16:10
And the gateway alone is much simpler, much more simplistic than the full, you know server configuration where I’ve got you know 2530 different subtabs here on the left in a standard server, the gateway I’ve only got about four or five and out of those I only need to worry about environment and basically just setting the dispatcher Uri here.

16:31
And the most important step is to map this gateway namespace.

16:34
So every instance of Cognos you can define a gateway namespace.

16:39
So if you do leave this blank it’s just going to prompt you to pick a namespace.

16:42
So we’re going to hard code it in here.

16:44
So I’ve got an Open DJ LDAP instance set up here.

16:48
I’m going to define this new GW1TO map directly to Open DJ.

16:52
So I’m going to put that value right in here and it is case sensitive and very, you know, specific.

16:58
So if you typo A typo or something, that’s not going to work.

17:00
So make sure you’re copying exactly as it’s typed in the main content manager configuration where you define the namespace.

17:08
Go ahead and then save that and generate your cryptographic keys.

17:11
And then the last step is to make one tweak to IIS and IIS again, it’s going to have all those URL rewrite rules which get really messy.

17:19
It’s all been done for you.

17:20
So this going to do 99% of that for you but you still need to go in and edit under your BI the URL rewrite rules.

17:27
Your header variable needs to have a HTTP CAM_namespace value variable and set that value to open DJ here as well.

17:37
So if you have this set and this set here then you are able to get this sort of custom landing page.

17:44
So again this my sort of sample here.

17:47
Let me log out.

17:48
I got a default here so I’ve got multiple namespaces I have to pick and sometimes you know these are cryptic users don’t know what to pick, especially if you know you’re using like something like I’ve got azure AD, I’ve got two different ones, Open DJ, you know, if I didn’t know Cognos or what I was logging into I would be confused as a user.

18:06
So I want to have it so it defaults as Open DJ.

18:08
So I’m going to remove this URL and switch it now to GW1 and now it’s going to just automatically ask me for my open DJ ID.

18:22
So again, really easy to set this up and if you’ve got multiple namespaces it’s just I think a more elegant solution and makes it a little nicer.

18:32
You can customize the landing page a little bit too and give people a different look and feel if you’re into that.

18:38
But super easy thing to set up and I’d recommend if you’ve got multiple namespaces, definitely something that you know is worth the small amount of time to set up.

18:49
Next feature is default parameters.

18:51
So this one is brand new Cognos 12 only.

18:53
So if you don’t have Cognos 12 this something you can look forward to.

18:57
If you do have it you can start taking advantage of this.

18:59
Now this something I have wanted in Cognos for probably 20 years since I started working with it or so I’ve had requirements where, you know, a customer said, hey, I want you to, you know, put a date prompt on this report and I wanted to show the first always show the 1st of the month to the last of the month.

19:17
And obviously different, different months that you’re in have different start and end dates.

19:22
You know, someone’s had 31 days, 30 days, 28 days, things like that.

19:25
And you know when you move to a new month, how do you know what to do?

19:29
And I’ve always had to kind of use a bunch of JavaScript hacks and put HTML items in there and try to make these things work.

19:35
And they were never very, very useful and maybe they could make it work.

19:38
But there was new versions of Cognos with break it or this or that.

19:41
So this something they finally added which is amazing.

19:44
You can now use a lot of the Cognos functionality like those date functions and query items and things like that to actually set default parameters in Cognos.

19:53
So I’m going to do 2 examples.

19:55
The first one is just some date logic, we can use functions like the 1st of the month, last of the month, yesterday, relative time functions.

20:01
And the other example is going to be you know I’ve got a just a pick list, but I always wanted to default to the top customer and obviously if I hard code that.

20:09
That top customer might not be the top customer next month or after the next sales report, something like that.

20:13
So we’re going to have it use a dynamic top customer field to kind of pick that.

20:20
So the first thing to note is that, you know, Cognos 12 now gives you a whole new sort of window explorer and they were called explorers.

20:28
In the old day, you had a report, query, prompt, explorer, things like that.

20:32
There’s something called parameters now that you can use these bread crumbs and jump right to parameters and in that screen the first page that it defaults to is also very useful.

20:41
It kind of shows you all the parameters that it found in your report.

20:44
So for my one example here, I found three different parameters, Country, order, method, product line.

20:49
It tells you what the type is.

20:50
Are they required?

20:51
Is it a multi select?

20:52
You can actually click the button.

20:54
This hyperlink here will take you right to the location where it is.

20:58
And this nice on its own.

20:59
Just because I’ve had massive reports with huge prompt pages.

21:02
Some of them are hidden, sometimes they’re buried in conditional blocks.

21:06
They can be a pain to find.

21:07
So this makes it really easy to kind of get a full inventory of what you have as far as parameters and get right to it.

21:12
But we’re actually going to want to focus more on this default values and setting those.

21:17
So in here I’ve got the ability to do different things.

21:21
I can use report expression logic.

21:22
So I’m going to do 1 here where I kind of use things like first of the month adding years and things like that you probably used if you had to manipulate some dates and I’m going to be able to just pull a value from a query and use that to drive the default value.

21:34
These are things that are new that you couldn’t do in the past.

21:37
So let me jump to the live demo now and log in here and I’ve got a couple samples here.

21:53
So parameter demo.

21:57
So let me do the date one first.

21:59
Let me edit this about parameters.

22:13
Click to take them out and show you what it looks like before I do this.

22:16
So again, parameters is new here.

22:17
I can go into here.

22:18
I’m going to remove these and then just kind of show you what happens.

22:23
So if I run this right now it’s let me clear the parameters it should you know the standard sort of prompt functionality is what’s going to show us today’s date.

22:43
So it just puts April 11th in there and I had to you just have to go in and set this and set this.

22:50
Which again, not the end of the world, but you have lots of problems.

22:52
It becomes very cumbersome.

22:54
Also if you’re developing and testing on reports, you’re having to change this every single time you make a change or want to test something.

23:00
It just drives me nuts sometimes.

23:01
So without having to manually hard code these in, we’re able to use some of these new parameter mappings.

23:07
So in here I can go in and I can create different types of string parameters, date parameters.

23:14
So I’ve got a date parameter here and you can define you know which one you want it to be.

23:19
You can also click here and say you know a new date parameter, pick the parameter that it finds on the page and set it up here.

23:25
So I’ve got a start and an end date parameter and I can go and create some default values.

23:32
So I wanted to not actually pull this from a query, just use just time in general.

23:36
So I’m reading, I’m creating a report expression and this really, really old.

23:42
The great outdoors are go sales warehouse data.

23:44
So the last record in there I think is from like 13 years ago, you know sometime in like 2010 or 11.

23:50
So I had to do an add years -13 to kind of go back 13 years.

23:55
But then I wanted to grab the 1st of the month.

23:56
So essentially you should take the 1st of the month from 2011 of the current month we’re in.

24:03
So it should be 4/1/2011.

24:06
And I basically did the same thing with the last of the month on the on today’s report date.

24:13
So again, I should get that that first and last date.

24:15
So again, I’m going to run this now the new version with the default parameters and now it’s defaulting to the values I want.

24:25
So obviously you know, this just sort of scratching the surface what you do.

24:28
You can build crazy complex report expressions in there to do whatever you need.

24:33
I’m just doing some dates here, but if you wanted to do, you know, first, you know, first Sunday or the 3rd Sunday of the month, you can, you can now actually build things like that.

24:41
If you’ve got the requirements or requests to do that, you know, the Sky’s the limit.

24:45
You can kind of do whatever you want.

24:47
And I can run this report and it’s going to go ahead and run it from April through the 30th.

24:51
It’s like this.

24:52
So I personally, you know, really like these.

24:55
I’m excited to kind of build out more complicated things with them.

24:59
But this I think is a really nice feature, long overdue, so awesome to have here.

25:05
And then the other topic was the top country.

25:09
So let me go in here and just show you what the default of this one looks like without the parameters.

25:15
So here I’ve got one called country.

25:17
I’m just going to take that out and OK, no parameters, OK.

25:26
And I’m going to run this.

25:29
And this just like a visualization and a pick list that shows like the product revenue by country.

25:37
So the first thing that does is it’s kind of annoying is if you have a required prompt before I even see the output.

25:41
I have to pick a country.

25:43
So I know nothing about the report.

25:44
I don’t know which one’s going to be the top country.

25:46
I’ll pick Germany and hit OK And I was close, but not quite.

25:53
So Germany is sort of a little above average, 118 million.

25:56
Switzerland was the top, the top country I guess in this report.

26:02
So you know, in default, you know, I would like this to always be set to the top when I come in.

26:07
And again this could be changing daily, weekly, monthly.

26:09
So how do I do this without hard coding Switzerland?

26:12
And again, you couldn’t really do it in the past unless you, you know, ranked your query that had these and then you put a JavaScript that would always pick the first list.

26:21
That’s sort of how I had to do it in the past which wasn’t a very elegant solution but it works sometimes.

26:26
But this going to be much more sophisticated.

26:27
I can do you know this based on the query itself.

26:31
So I’m going to go back to my report.

26:33
I’m going to undo and bring back my parameter, so this one.

26:37
And on my country parameter I’m going to bring in a query related one.

26:42
So I’ve got a query called country and I’ve got the revenue in there.

26:48
So I want to focus on revenue, bring back the top, top row and I want to have it driven on the country and I want to have it display the value, which is that prompt page.

26:59
It’s the concatenation of the country and the and the revenues combined.

27:03
So display that.

27:04
So now if I turn this on, make sure I don’t have anything saved in the parameters and go ahead and run it, the first thing it’s going to do is it’s going to bypass the initial prompting, which I don’t like anyway, and it’s going to default to Switzerland.

27:16
So now it knows to always use this and if I was to change the numbers here to something else, you know it would bubble up and say Singapore changes the quantity, you know and have it driven off that and Singapore was number one in quantity.

27:28
Singapore would now automatically be the number one pick on the list.

27:30
So again just sort of very basic example here, but hopefully you can sign us see the capabilities and the potential of what you could do.

27:38
And again this a really nice feature I think.

27:40
So if you have any questions or you know thoughts around this, definitely reach out and we can look a little bit deeper.

27:47
But I just wanted to share some of the capabilities and just highlight this as one of the nice nicest new features in in Cognos 12.

27:54
I’m going to jump in there real quick.

27:56
If anybody does want to talk to us about any of these things, I’m going to put a calendar link into the chat window for you.

28:03
You can get on our calendar for a small brief meeting.

28:07
Also, there’s been about 10 questions coming through.

28:10
As soon as Todd gets through the demo, I’m going to have him take a look at these questions and we’ll try to get through as many of them as we can.

28:16
What we can’t get through will be on the website.

28:19
Thanks, Todd.

28:20
Sure.

28:20
All right, I’m going to jump back into the deck here.

28:25
Went through that.

28:27
OK.

28:27
We talk about the replacements for query and analysis.

28:30
I know this was a big one.

28:32
Seemed like from the polls there was a lot of people hesitant to move to Cognos 12 just because of the limitations of the removal of these tools.

28:42
And even more so even 1124, you know you were limited to IE was killed off at 1124.

28:48
So you now you have to use Firefox essentially to get to get to those tools.

28:53
So what is the best way to move forward if you’re reliant on Query and Analysis Studio?

28:58
So a couple different options.

29:00
Again, this not going to be an exact 1 to 1 replacement for the tool.

29:05
I mean they it was very custom made for just simplicity and ease of use.

29:12
So a lot of the things that are in the reporting tool are a bit overwhelming, especially the users who have been using these older Analysis Studio Query Studio tools for a while.

29:21
But the good news is you can you can kind of simplify it a bit.

29:24
So there’s a couple of default settings I would say that I usually recommend, you know for this type of user and you could just create like a basic one pager or you know send something out to the users when you do migrate to kind of have them make sure these settings are on.

29:38
So the first set is things to disable and there’s two here that I recommend that you disable.

29:42
One is the show new data container dialogue and the other is the guided report layout.

29:48
Let me kind of show you what those are if you’re not familiar with them.

29:50
So I’m going to do a new report.

29:58
I’ll just pick a blank template.

30:00
So if I click this and say I want a list since I have it turned off already.

30:05
So let me turn them on and show you so that new data, new data container and guided layout.

30:13
OK these are the ones I recommend you turn off.

30:15
So with these on if a user says I want to create, you know just the basic list, the first thing it’s going to do is say give it a name and pick a query and this, this alone may throw people off already.

30:26
They’re like I don’t queries.

30:27
I don’t know any what these queries are and why is it query one and maybe there’s another query in there and they get confused and they’re pointing things to the wrong thing.

30:34
So just remove all of this from the equation.

30:37
You can either check it here and it won’t go anymore or I recommend just kind of coming in here once and setting all these options at once.

30:43
Just turn this new data container dialogue off.

30:46
The other one is just the layout, the layout guided reference.

30:51
So I maybe just I’m old school as I’m used to just having dragging things on the screen and having kind of stack up and if I need to make things in a table I’ll use a table.

31:01
But if I wanted to have it across tab now I would normally just drag it here but now it’s creating a table over here and I’m like I don’t want it to go underneath.

31:10
I don’t want it to go under and it’s doing all these tables automatically for me and I’m much more of a manual hands on person when it comes to this kind of stuff.

31:19
So maybe a user’s like this.

31:20
I think it’s confusing.

31:22
So again, I recommend if I just undo these real quick.

31:25
If you turn that off under Options, Report Guided Report Layout, then you get back to sort of the.

31:33
The way I’m used to doing it is having things go like that and if I wanted a table then I can just drag a table over and do it this way.

31:42
Old fashioned.

31:43
So again, my personal preference, I think it’s easier to do it this way, but I think it’s just a more simple, less confusing way to do it.

31:54
So that’s personal preference.

31:56
And then more importantly, page preview.

31:59
So again, if you use those tools, you’re not going to understand.

32:02
Or maybe you’re like dragging things onto the screen, like why am I not seeing any of my data?

32:06
Like, I don’t know why it’s not working.

32:08
They don’t know there’s a play button up here or they don’t know about these.

32:11
So obviously you can change the page preview here, but you can also set the default as well here.

32:17
So by default, everyone who comes in and sets the set the page design have them set it to Page Preview.

32:23
If you’re a developer and you’re working, you know, with complicated complex reports, you probably don’t want it to default to Page Preview because I know like it takes forever to bring back a couple rows sometimes, and you need to make a bunch of changes before you want to see that data.

32:36
So you probably don’t want to set it for everybody, but if you have your, you know the users who are coming over from those tools like Query Student and Analysis Studio had them set this to the page preview, it’s going to give them more of that experience that they’re used to.

32:48
So let me just delete these and package selected, let’s just do go sales query.

33:09
So if you happen to used page Preview, it’s just going to be exactly like what you’re used to.

33:14
As soon as you drag it over and let go it’s going to actually run the query and this should look pretty similar to you know what you give what users have seen in the past with Query Studio just dragging things over and it instantly gives you results back.

33:30
So those are two things that I would recommend changing in the options and then for Analysis Studio since you’re working with multi dimensional data it the way it works with this out-of-the-box again is very confusing and not intuitive for users.

33:44
So there’s a couple settings here.

33:46
One is to make sure you have the box checked to show members only for dimensional packages, to make sure you have create sets when you insert and to insert the children under the member insert options.

33:56
So these are all underneath this sort of gear icon.

34:00
Let me bring in a cube.

34:01
Let me do a new report, new report.

34:10
And I know I’ve got a cube somewhere.

34:15
This a cube.

34:21
So I get this gear icon.

34:22
So the first thing you’ll see is, you know, if I try to, let’s just drop a cross tab on here.

34:28
If I would say, OK, let me see.

34:30
I want to see my products and they expand this they expect to see.

34:33
I have it on, turned on.

34:34
Let me disable it.

34:39
Yes, this I think the default is this with this not checked and this not turned on.

34:43
So if I came in and said they only see my products, they see oh what’s that?

34:47
And then product, product line, why are these not showing me the actual members?

34:51
It’s confusing.

34:52
So to make it look just like you would see in Analysis Studio, just turn that on And I recommend turning this on.

34:58
And now I see the actual members instead of those levels that are confusing to anyone outside of developers.

35:03
So I can also have it when I drag it in, it’s going to bring the children in.

35:07
So I drag products, I get my products underneath there.

35:12
If I drag in, my ears get that measures.

35:19
So again, this should be pretty similar to the experience in analysis to the again, not exactly.

35:25
You’ve also got these page layers and context filters here.

35:27
So again, if I want to see just the sales region in America, I can drag that up here.

35:32
This all you know, pretty darn close to what you had in Analysis Studio.

35:37
And these are, you know, interactive.

35:38
I can change it to Northern Europe and numbers instantly reflect because I’ve got page preview on, so this should be, you know, something that the majority users can at least start with.

35:50
It gets a little bit confusing with some of the buttons up here and there’s some bit of a learning curve.

35:55
But again, things like filtering, you’ve also got this button here called Explore and they kind of buried a lot of the capabilities like the drilling and the nesting and expanding are all in here.

36:06
So if I wanted to see, you know, camping equipment in Golf Club and the next level’s down, I can go and create the next level down and it’s going to bump it out like that.

36:15
Same thing for my years, you know, I just click on this explore button and using, getting familiar with what these do, excluding creating, replacing, next level down, I’m instantly able to do these.

36:26
These are also interactive links so they all drill things like that.

36:30
So for the most part you know pretty comparable.

36:37
What gets confusing is the you know the just all the extra distractions and things that they may not know how to use or want to know how to use.

36:46
So again like I’ve got multiple queries, prompt pages, variables.

36:51
These are all things that the most part you know queries to use or analysis studio would never use.

36:55
They I think Query Studio announced it over tied to you’re all could have one query and you didn’t have you know anything really complex in there like variables or things like that.

37:04
So you can strip down this UIA bit as well.

37:08
And this again nothing new to Cognos 12.

37:12
They introduced this, I want to say like 11:07-ish when they kind of created some extensions and some customizations.

37:20
But I would recommend if you’ve got a group of users that you want to, you know, start migrating into an environment that you know loss queries to in Loss Studio, create a new role in the Cognos namespace.

37:32
I just created one called QS/AS users and then put your users in that group and then you can go into this customization are/and the features.

37:41
There’s a million things in here and you can get pretty detailed.

37:45
It doesn’t have every single thing.

37:46
Unfortunately it says on demand toolbar is all or nothing.

37:50
So you can’t hide pieces of this.

37:53
So unfortunately if you said I don’t want them to be able to suppress or I don’t want them to, you know, use the style dropper or something like that, for some reason you can’t get down that level of granularity.

38:04
It’s either all or nothing with this.

38:05
So I’d recommend you leave it on because it does have a lot of useful features like sorting and filtering and cutting and pasting, but you can get into the report specifics so I can go in all those areas I was just talking about, you know, here.

38:17
Pages, prompt pages, queries, classes, variables, parameters.

38:21
I can take away or hide all of those so I can uncheck these boxes and really simplify the tool so they don’t get themselves into trouble or start going in places where they don’t need to go.

38:31
So for example, I created another user ID that has the same experience.

38:38
We log out, oops, and let’s hit the user top one.

39:02
OK, so this user is should be in.

39:09
Yeah, they’re in the QSAS user group.

39:13
So now if I go and create a new report, I click here.

39:23
I’ve only got page one and report.

39:25
I can’t get those other areas.

39:27
I’ve already kind of tweaked this so that it doesn’t prompt me.

39:31
I’ve got my model and it’s set to you know the way I want.

39:41
So again, all and page previews.

39:43
So this going to be, you know, pretty close and pretty well suited to you know handle the needs and the simplicity of what queries to analysis users had in the past.

39:54
I mean obviously there’s some minor features and functionality that aren’t there, especially with Query Studio.

40:00
Let me let me bring some relational package in.

40:04
The filtering is one that I know is a big one.

40:07
I really like the way that Query Studio would kind of have a hyperlink and show you.

40:11
Here’s what you picked.

40:12
Yeah, you picked fiscal year 2012 and 2013.

40:15
And if you want to click on that link, it opens up the prompt, the filter parameter page and lets you, you know, modify that.

40:23
That’s gone to a degree.

40:26
But again, you could still do a lot of that.

40:27
So let me just create something real quick.

40:30
Open this guy.

40:32
If I do let’s do product line and quantity order method.

40:49
So if I wanted to filter on this I can I can use this on demand toolbar which works great.

40:54
So I mean there’s just a little bit of a difference when just saying open the filter prompt.

40:58
Now like if it has something directly connected to like e-mail I selected I can say include or exclude e-mail or I can do create custom filter and that’s going to give the users sort of what they’re used to this sort of quick launch pop up window and I can pick I want only want to see you know faxes and hit OK so now you know here I can see fax was applied because I only see fax.

41:19
But if I didn’t have this in my query I wouldn’t know what was picked here.

41:23
So you can go and say insert filter text and now it’s going to show you what was picked here.

41:30
And if I had another field in here like let’s do retailer, country in here just do region, something like that create another filter include America’s.

41:49
They all start to pile up here so I can see exactly what’s being filtered whether or not it’s in the query itself.

41:53
So that was something that query student did automatically here you have to go and turn this insert filter text on and then they also you know hey I picked fax but I really wanted e-mail.

42:04
I can’t just click this, I have to go to click on the object, click on the filter, edit filters and then if I just double click this here it opens it up.

42:13
So again, not as intuitive, not as easy to use, does require a little bit of a learning curve, but you can get to these same screens and I can just quickly change that to e-mail hit OK, OK again, what is the e-mail dates this result?

42:27
So I know people are looking for like a perfect replacement.

42:31
It’s not necessarily perfect solution but I think with a little bit of training a little bit of you know time is spent just getting used to it.

42:39
It’s it is a good solution to kind of fill that gap and besides you know the, the missing, you know the simplicity of it.

42:47
You do get a lot more out of it.

42:49
You can do a lot more.

42:50
You can get you know newer visualizations, you can have access to all these properties, you know things that you couldn’t do in query studio.

42:57
So you you’re getting more and it’s just a little bit of a time investment on the user parts before they can get comfortable with it.

43:04
But I do believe you know for the most part any kind of use case you may have had that you know, people say, oh, I have to have this in Analysis Studio.

43:11
You can do it here.

43:12
It just be a little bit of a different way to do it.

43:16
Outside of that, one last slide was there is a bulk converter if you have the access to the installation directory.

43:25
It’s sort of buried here.

43:25
I always forget where it is.

43:26
It’s in the SDK folder and there’s a folder called Bulk Converter and it’s just a really small batch file that you run.

43:34
I think it pops up a little Java window and it asks you, you know, what’s the dispatcher in the gateway.

43:40
And then you sign in with the administrator account and you’ll get access to the entire team content folder and you can scand say, you know, find and convert all query studio and analysis the reports and it’s going to go ahead and just bulk convert them for you.

43:55
It works pretty quick, pretty fast.

43:57
It does archive the old version, so it’ll create a folder with the think either the original version or it creates a new.

44:06
It creates a folder with a new version in it so it doesn’t delete anything.

44:09
You keep all the old query studios and it creates a new version in the report spec in a new folder and then you can go and make sure everything looks good and if it does then you can swap them out, delete the old ones, replace the new ones or however you want to however want to manage it.

44:22
But this this can get you converted really quickly so that need to have access to those old files is then removed.

44:28
Users are getting trained in how to use the new tool and how to simplify that UI.

44:33
And it should be, you know, a good, a good way to move forward.

44:37
So that’s all I had at the end of the demo.

44:39
And I’m going to turn it back to Pat for a minute and then we’ll do some Q&A at the end.

44:44
Yeah.

44:44
Thank you, Todd.

44:45
I’m going to make sure we have enough time for Q&A.

44:47
So Todd, if you want to start taking a look at that Q&A panel, start at the top.

44:51
Hey, you saw a lot here today.

44:54
We’re here to help you.

44:55
We’re here to get you upgraded, help you set these things up.

45:00
We’ve got support to fit your needs.

45:02
End to end implementation, quick start, mentoring.

45:06
Please go to Senturus.com/cognos-upgrade and we can help you get to take care of that.

45:11
We also have additional services if you’ve got performance issues, if you’ve got stability issues, you need to set up new data sources, new namespaces, new dispatchers, report development.

45:23
We’ve got it.

45:24
We’ve got over 20 years of doing this.

45:27
We’ve got you handled OK.

45:33
Upcoming events May 9th, Cognos Power BI May 22nd, that’s going to be with me.

45:40
I think Microsoft Power Automate, July 18th, drag and drop Cognos data into Power BI or Tableau and then always on demand.

45:49
We have Cognos Analytics performance tuning tips.

45:51
Now I’m going to stop there and I’m going to go ahead and let Todd start answering some of those questions and then we’ll finish up in a couple minutes.

45:58
So Todd, if you want to take like 5 minutes and go ahead and start answering some of those questions, sure.

46:04
Just going to kind of go through an order here.

46:07
Question from Goran regarding bursting reports to file system.

46:12
Is it possible to exclude generation of HTML files?

46:18
I’ll have to check and see.

46:19
I know it does create if I still have it open, just some extra stuff in there like these MHT files I think you’re talking about or the XML files.

46:29
The XML actually.

46:30
Goran had a second question about 6 down.

46:33
It looks like they were looking for the exclusion of the XML, not the HTML.

46:38
Yeah, I think I saw somewhere it’s been a while but I think there’s some kind of advanced setting you can play somewhere in the batch service to have it exclude that.

46:48
Outside of that, you know the easiest thing to do if you don’t do it in Cognos is just have that a batch script that just goes and does a bulk mass delete of anythingyouknow.xml or MHT.

47:00
But I believe I did see there’s a way to do it in Cognos.

47:03
If I can find it I’ll post it.

47:04
We’ll do this Q&A blog post up on the on the web once we’re done.

47:09
So I’ll if I can find that link.

47:12
Sometimes those advanced settings are hidden.

47:14
They’re difficult to track down, but they do exist, so I’ll try to share that if possible.

47:21
Let’s see, can you make use of Windows drives with the Linux, Linux, Cognos setup?

47:25
I believe you can.

47:26
I haven’t tried it, but I know.

47:31
I think.

47:31
I think you have the ability to do Windows to Linux and Linux to Windows.

47:35
Again, I’ll have to double check and confirm that.

47:38
Another question, can you remove the EN dot US from the file extension?

47:45
One of those things.

47:46
I know there’s an advanced setting somewhere that that lets you remove that.

47:50
I’ll have to double check and see where it is.

47:52
But again you know, worst case is again does batch files.

47:56
Very easy to do quick renaming as well.

48:00
Question on the licensing, what license needed to use?

48:02
Reports file system?

48:03
No extra license is used.

48:07
I don’t know that they still, I’m not a licensing expert, I don’t know if they still have that information distribution, license type and if that’s needed here.

48:13
I mean typically you’re generating a file and it’s not sending it directly to users, so it may be outside of that area.

48:20
I can check with Carson Bradshaw who’s our licensing expert and he can probably confirm that, but I’ll again put that that in the posting of these questions on the website.

48:30
Once we get them done, it’s possible to control access to the outputs.

48:36
If only Belgium port could be accessed to Belgium users, yes and no.

48:43
So again, like I just created a folder called finance.

48:48
If you’re going to burst it, it’s going to all the reports are going to go to that folder with different pieces of it.

48:52
This where it gets into that, you know, sort of a dance step.

48:55
Two things I mentioned in one of the slides, you know, batch scripting, things like that are going to be your friend here if you need to kind of lock those down.

49:02
So then you could create, you know, finance and subfolders for each country and have the script, once it gets written instantly move them into those folders and those folders are then secured with, you know, windows, Windows security or whatever it is you’re using.

49:16
But as far as the burst thing, I don’t believe it can go and create a like a unique secured version of each one automatically.

49:27
I know you can the PDFs can have a password, but I don’t think it’s going to be, you know, country specific.

49:32
So if you can, you can password protect your PDFs in Cognos with something I just recently discovered, which is kind of cool.

49:38
But yeah, it’s going to be sort of just one for all, not country specific.

49:45
Let’s see, what else do we got here?

49:48
Would this be usable to use one gateway for test and one for prod environments instead of two, one per environment?

49:56
No.

49:56
So there’s within the gateway setting, you have to point it to a dispatcher so that it’s going to be unique to that environment.

50:05
So one environment can have multiple gateways, but one gateway can’t have multiple environments if that makes sense.

50:10
So you couldn’t you couldn’t use it for multiples.

50:14
And you could use the same server, install two different gateways, and have each configuration pointing to a unique Cognos environment.

50:23
So you need to type in IBM Cognos Test and I being Cognos Prod and they’re different aliases that are configured to go to different dispatchers.

50:30
That would work, but you?

50:33
Yeah, you couldn’t have different environments with the same alias going to the same one.

50:41
Another question about the bursting files talked about that, so I’m going to ask what?

50:45
What is a namespace?

50:46
So a namespace is what you use to set up Cognos to open up Cognos config.

50:53
Here IU authenticate your users.

50:55
So in when users log in, assuming you have some kind of security enabled, you have options to say Active Directory, LDAP, you can use custom Java.

51:05
Then there’s all the Open ID connect ones which are new, which use things like Salesforce, Okta, Azure, ADFS, things like that.

51:12
So you’re going to define you know how those authentication methods work and then when users log in, the default behaviour of Cognizant is to say OK, you have 5 different namespaces available.

51:23
Which one do you want to pick?

51:24
And unless you know it, it can be confusing the users.

51:28
They see all these cryptic things like Okta, AD, LDAP and you know unless you’re the one who set it up, it may not be obvious to user which one to pick.

51:36
So that’s where sort of having that custom gateway comes into play.

51:40
You just don’t need to know.

51:41
It just automatically defaults them because they’re using that URL that’s mapped to it.

51:45
So here, once this loads, why is it taking so long?

51:59
But you can go into authentication, right click and create a new name space.

52:03
And name space is just the terminology that Cognos uses to define new name space.

52:10
I’ve got all of these Active Directory Custom Java Cognos Series 7 which is still out there.

52:15
Amazingly different types of LDAP’s site Minder, SAP, and within Where’s Open ID?

52:25
This must be an old version.

52:29
I don’t know what this, this config is.

52:31
All right, let’s go ahead and thank you all for your questions.

52:35
We will post the answers to these questions on the website so that everybody can take a look at these.

52:42
Thank you all.

52:43
Hey, Speaking of the website, we want you to come on the Senturus.com/resources.

52:48
We’ve got insider viewpoints, we’ve got reviews, we’ve got technical tips.

52:53
We’ve got everything you could want on there, including more demos of this stuff.

52:59
As you can see here at Senturus.

53:00
We can help you handle everything modern, BI, accelerated and accessible, whether it’s content ownership, training, performance, data, culture.

53:09
You know, some of you mentioned early on that your issues with upgrading had to do with political, had to do with things along those lines.

53:16
We can help you with that.

53:17
We can help you figure out how to navigate those with things like governance and security and how to change the data culture in your organization.

53:27
As you can see 23 years, 1400 clients, 3000 projects, some of you even on.

53:33
Here are some of these logos.

53:34
We thank you all and as you can see here, we’ve got all sorts of different areas that we can specialize in, whether it’s retail, finance, no matter what, we can help you out.

53:48
Again, if your issue is bigger than what we’ve covered today, you can e-mail us at [email protected].

53:55
You can get on our calendar.

53:57
I will put that Calendly link in there one more time for you.

54:00
Set up a meeting, get on the calendar for 30 minutes and we can talk through and help you out with a free consultation.

54:07
We will also post all of the answers to the Q&A on our website within the next day or two.

54:17
Thank you.

54:18
Thank you everybody for attending here.

54:21
You’ve got our information, our phone number, our e-mail, our website, our LinkedIn.

54:25
Thank you Todd for a great presentation.

54:28
Thank you all for attending.

54:31
We appreciate all of you.

54:34
Anything you’d like to say on the end here, Todd?

54:36
No, thanks for the great questions and turn out today and I think you covered it.

54:40
Pat, reach out if you have any questions or need some help.

54:43
Thank you all.

54:44
Well, like I say, we will go ahead and we will have all of these questions available for answers in the next day or two.

54:52
Thank you all and have a wonderful rest of your day.

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Q: Is Cognos 12 the next version after 11.2?
A: Yes, Cognos Analytics 11.2.4 is the long-term support (LTS) release and the final version of Cognos Analytics 11.

Q: Can you make use of Windows drivers with a Linux Cognos Analytics setup?
A: I can’t find anything to confirm or deny this, but I would recommend just using post-processing scripts to move reports after they have been generated.

Q: Is there any way to remove the “en-us” from the filename?
A: There is no way to remove these directly. I would recommend running a post-processing script to clean up or to follow some of the steps from this IBM technote: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/description-options-save-cognos-bi-report-output-filesystem

Q: How is this related to Cognos licensing? What license is needed for users to get reports in a file system, without using the Cognos Analytics connection portal?
A: If users are not accessing Cognos Analytics at all and only picking up files locally, then no license is needed.

Q: Is it possible to control access to the outputs? For example, can we make Belgium reports only accessible to Belgium users?
A: This would require post processing and new folders or security to be applied at the Windows or Linux level.

Q: Is SSO available with this option?
A: Yes, SSO can be configured on Namespace defined gateways.

Q: Are the parameters you create global?
A: No. Global parameters are a different use case.

Q: Do the Smart Parameters work in batch mode as well as interactive mode? Meaning that the date will advance forward every night in batch?
A: Yes. Just be sure to not hard code prompt values when you setup the schedule. You may need to make your prompts optional.

Q: Can Cognos Analytics 12 be installed directly over version 11.1.7?
A: Yes, it can. Just make sure you are backing up in case there are any issues.

Q: If you want to use global parameters, can you do it outside of the Cognos Framework Manager?
A: Yes. Global Parameters can be set up in the Cognos Analytics portal. More info at: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/12.0.0?topic=parameters-using-global

Q: Can you turn off default parameters globally in Cognos?
A: There is a difference between default parameters, which are defined at the report level, and Global Parameters, which are set at the environment level.

Q: Is it possible to set Page Preview default settings for everybody and advanced users will adapt easier and change settings if needed?
A: I have not found a way to do this. Each user needs to make the change one time and it will stay that way going forward. I recommend sending users a one-pager that highlights all the initial settings and then they can “set it and forget it.”

Q: Can you disable more options in the Cognos toolbars as well? A kind of light version?
A: The Cognos toolbar is currently all or nothing. The individual components cannot be enabled/disabled.

Q: Our Cognos bulk converter won’t convert analysis any further reports once an error is encountered.
A: It should work. Please reach out to us if you need assistance.

Q: With Cognos 12 do you have to convert all old Cognos reports?
A: You don’t have to convert, but you will not be able to edit existing QS reports.

Q: Does the bulk converter convert all the old files to Cognos 12?
A: Bulk converter converts from the unsupported QS/AS format to the supported reporting format.

Q: Are active reports going away in Cognos Analytics 12?
A: Active reports are not going away, but the product has no current development or plans for future enhancements.

Q: Are your Cognos performance tips available on your website?
A: Yes, we have a lot of webinars on Cognos performance, you can access them here: https://senturus.com/topic/business-intelligence-cognos/

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