Cognos: Never Gonna Give You Up

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Tim Aston 
Senior Product Manager  
IBM Cognos Analytics

Todd Schuman 
Cognos Practice Lead  
Senturus, Inc.

Steve Reed-Pittman 
Director of Etneprise Architecture and Engineering  
Senturus, Inc.

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0:13
Hello everyone, and welcome today’s Senturus webinar on Cognos.

0:18
Never going to give you a quick overview of today’s agenda.

0:22
We’re going to do some introductions for our presenters, a quick poll.

0:27
Then Todd Schumann is going to be covering some features you know and can’t give up in Cognos, features you might not know about yet.

0:35
Then we’re going to switch over to Tim Aston and Tim will go over some features in Cognos 12.0.4 and the future road map for Cognos.

0:45
We’ll cover some additional resources and information about Senturus.

0:48
And as I said, we’ll have a dedicated Q&A session at the end of today’s webinar.

0:53
So some quick introductions.

0:55
We’re joined today by Tim Aston.

0:57
Tim is a Senior Product Manager at IBM.

1:01
And as I said, Tim will be talking about the Cognos Road Map today.

1:04
One important thing for everybody to know is that Tim’s portion of the webinar will not be included in the recording.

1:11
And the slides that he’s going to present about the future Cognos road map will not be in our slide deck.

1:17
So make sure you stick around for the whole webinar today so you can catch Tim’s piece because that won’t be available after the fact.

1:24
We’re also joined by Todd Schumann, who is our Cognos Practice lead here at Senturus.

1:29
Many of you know and have worked with Todd over the years.

1:33
So Todd, Tim, very happy to have both of you here today.

1:37
I’m Steve Reed Pitman, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Engineering here at Senturus.

1:41
And I’ll just be doing the beginning and end pieces here, but Tim and Todd will be running most of the show.

1:49
So with that, we’re going to go into a quick poll and the poll is where do you host your current Cognos environments?

1:56
And so do you host them on premise?

1:58
Are they in the IBM cloud?

2:00
Are they in another cloud, Azure, AWS GCP or are you on premise today but planning to migrate to the cloud?

2:08
And we do see a lot of customers who are doing that, who are looking to move their Cognos environments off to the cloud.

2:16
So I’m just going to let these answers come in for a little bit.

2:20
Looks like the majority of you so far are on Prem.

2:25
We’ve got a few IBM Cloud, some on other clouds and a few who are on Prem but planning a move.

2:34
And I’ll go ahead and close that up, share the results so everybody can see here.

2:43
So as I said, most of you on Prem, looks like we’ve got 72% of you on Prem, about 10% using the IBM cloud, a little under 20% using other clouds, and just a few of you who are on Prem but planning a move.

2:58
So with that, I’m going to go ahead and close out the pool and I’m going to hand it over todd to talk to us about some of the cool features in Cognos.

3:09
All right, thank you, Steve, and welcome everybody.

3:11
We’ve got a pretty full plate, pretty full plate today.

3:14
So let’s get this party started.

3:16
I had originally wanted to have this YouTube video running in here, but I think it got edited out by marketing.

3:23
So I was going to try to rick roll everyone right from the get go.

3:26
But we’re just have to settle for this beautiful picture of Rick Astley.

3:30
And that’s what today’s webinar is all about.

3:32
You may be hearing a lot about, oh, it’s time to move on from Cognos, but I am here to tell you why that’s not the case.

3:39
You shouldn’t and maybe can’t give up Cognos.

3:43
Oh it is.

3:44
Oh, it is working.

3:48
OK, I won’t torture anybody yet.

3:50
But Cognos functionality.

3:51
Let’s talk about the functionality that you are most likely using today that is not going to be comparable with other tools and the first one today being paginated reports.

4:01
So in keeping with our 80s music theme here, going to pivot to Tina Turner and Cognos reporting and maybe you’ve used some other tools.

4:11
But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve worked with these other analytic tools and I strongly believe and agree with Tina Turner that Cognos is simply the best when it comes to just straight up reporting.

4:19
Other tools may do some of these, but for the power and the control you get in Cognos I feel it’s just not as good.

4:26
Lists and crosstabs have been around forever and are part of the reason that Cognos is on the map today.

4:30
These structures are available and other tools, but once you get into some of the more advanced options such as singletons and repeater tables, page breaks and sets, excel PDF outputs, you quickly find that there’s just missing features and functionalities.

4:44
The other tools I personally love page breaks and page set functionalities.

4:50
You can do really cool things like create large PDF files that have links to detail within the same PDF.

4:55
So it just jumps to page 25 and then that goes to another page later in the deck for the PDF.

5:01
So just really powerful stuff.

5:03
Also, you know, the pixel perfect reporting kind of has taken a back seat lately, which I don’t understand.

5:09
I’m constantly am building reports that need to be pixel perfect.

5:13
If you’ve ever had to create, you know, large invoice style reports where you need to have everything, you know, in the right place, you know, signature line headers and footers, it’s just so much easier and so much better in Cognos than any other tool.

5:26
So as far as reporting, you know, I just find that no other tool really compares.

5:30
And if you’re, you know, looking at the tools and you’re very dependent on these, it’s going to be hard to let this go.

5:37
Another area of, you know, unmatched features in Cognos is the scheduling and bursting.

5:46
So you know, another thing that I think that is just completely unmatched is the scheduling.

5:51
I mean the options around scheduling are almost limitless.

5:55
You know, besides the ability to send outputs in multiple format, you know, Excel, PDF, XMLCSV, you can also burst outputs in various ways.

6:04
You know, the most common option in bursting is an example where, you know, you might e-mail a distributional list of users who need to see Asia Pacific data and another group that needs to see Europe data.

6:16
And you can have that all happen in a single report just by enabling bursting.

6:20
So you don’t have to create, you know, individual copies or views of a report.

6:24
You can have it all in one report, you said with the bursting and it just sends that right, the right slice of data to that that user group.

6:30
So it’s very powerful, very friendly, user friendly.

6:33
Once you kind of get it set up, bursting can actually be taken to a whole other level.

6:38
You can actually use file bursting so you can create individual files and it’s been available for a local, local file system for a while.

6:47
I’ve touched on it in other webinars, but they do have some newer options around it.

6:52
You can now save to local file systems in the cloud.

6:55
So Amazon S3 and IBM Cloud storage objects can be connected to and written to directly.

7:01
So then users can actually, you know, with the permissions, go out to a specific URL and pick up, you know, PDFs that are, you know, needed or useful for them.

7:11
So just a really nice feature that other tools don’t have, especially when you take advantage of bursting and the ability to schedule these things out to users and have them generate local files.

7:22
You can even take it another level above, which I can cover in here, but Event Studio is still available.

7:27
It’s still there.

7:28
And you can even use that to generate, you know, files based on events and have more specific, you know, emails and descriptions and your body and the message type.

7:37
So it’s just a lot of really powerful stuff that you can do that I find is missing in other tools today.

7:45
Data modeling, another best in class feature here.

7:48
So framework manager has been there for, I want to say almost 20 years.

7:52
It’s close to it.

7:53
It’s, you know, the it’s not going anywhere.

7:56
It’s still there today.

7:57
It’s extremely powerful.

7:58
I mean, if you’re using it, you know, it hasn’t had a facelift in a long time.

8:02
So it does look a bit dated compared to some of the other things out there, but it still works great.

8:07
It’s very powerful.

8:08
The ability to have the multiple layers is also missing other tools.

8:12
And if you’ve done any kind of modeling in the tool, you’ve hopefully, you know, separated your layers, a database layer, your transformation layer, business layers, things like that.

8:22
It makes it very easy to update tables, add new tables without having to redo the whole thing by kind of hiding a lot of complexity, then lower levels and then exposing it at the top level.

8:33
It’s also very nice for reusability.

8:35
You can have one model where you kind of define all your tables and do all the clean up and then just expose specific tables to the users.

8:42
You don’t have to have, you know, everything in its own files.

8:45
You have one master file, you’re just exposing multiple packages.

8:48
That seems to be missing in a lot of other tools.

8:51
Macros is another big one.

8:52
If you’ve got, you know, international users, you can grab their locales from their browser session and have it show, you know, product names based on that.

9:02
These are all just things that I’ve, you know, been missing and just not seeing in these newer tools today.

9:07
So ferric managers and then even data modules, which is the newer tool, very useful for blending data, you know, uploading files, grabbing an existing package, connecting to a database directly.

9:18
It’s very easy to kind of blend and mix and match data sources now.

9:21
So between the two of these, there’s not really anything I’m seeing that you couldn’t do today with your requirements and then security and governance and then another feature here that just unmatched, unparalleled.

9:35
You can literally get down to almost every single level of, of anything that’s available in Cognos today and secure it.

9:41
So obviously, you know, package and module level, you can secure those.

9:45
You can hide the folder that they’re in.

9:47
You know, within the folder, you can hide the individual objects, the reports, the dashboards, you can set it so that when I run the report, I only see the rows that I need to see.

9:55
And I see, you know, I’m in Europe, I see my European data.

9:57
If I’m in Asia Pacific, I see that the capabilities, you know, I wanted to give you access to reports, but not dashboards and this and that.

10:04
And I can take it, you know, on this package you can do dashboard or on this package, you can’t.

10:08
It’s very granular to kind of limit and control all of these.

10:12
They’ve even introduced in Cognos 11 early on 11.0 somewhere I have to go back and check my notes, what version, but to customize the user interfaces.

10:19
So you can have different groups, you can scale back and customize.

10:22
You know, when you come in, you don’t see my folders, you do see my folders.

10:25
You can have different landing pages.

10:28
Just really, really flexible, especially with, you know, some of the features that keep adding like extensions, user profiles, you know, lots of different ways to kind of mix and match and secure your environment and make sure you’re completely secure and that users are only seeing what they see and you’re not having to, you know, duplicate lots of different things.

10:47
And then scalability, very easy, especially for on premise users out there to, you know, scale up and scale out.

10:54
So, you know, first step is usually, you know, if you’re on AVM, which just about everyone is these days, I don’t really see too many, you know, actual bare metal dispatchers or servers these days.

11:04
But VMS, you know, if you, if you not tied to a PVU license, you can just, you know, add additional CPU and RAM pretty easily to kind of give yourself some more power, especially if you know, they’re, you’re hitting, you know, month end reporting or things that are really tying up your, your environment.

11:20
It’s also very easy to add additional dispatchers load balancing, you know, basic install, just, you know, making the other servers aware that’s in their dispatchers in the mix, fairly simple and easy to do.

11:32
Load balancing can also be done in various ways.

11:35
You know, routing rules is another powerful one.

11:37
I’ve seen environments where, you know, they had more hardware on a specific server and they wanted executive and managers to be able to do their analysis on that.

11:47
So they kind of had a beefier machine to work on, which gave them better performance.

11:50
Whereas they had just some basic sales reports that are being sent to different store locations that didn’t really need a lot of processing power.

11:57
Those are all being dispatched and routed to a smaller, you know, CPU with less RAM and things like that.

12:02
So again, unlimited ways to configure and distribute components.

12:06
Setting up routing rules is as far as administration and architecture, you know, unmatched on my, my opinion on, you know, just the, the architecture and the servers themselves.

12:18
So those are things that you probably know or I’ve heard of in Cognos.

12:23
They’ve been around for a long time.

12:24
I do want touch on some of the newer things that you may or may not know about and starting with schematics.

12:31
This something that I haven’t seen too many people using, but it’s actually a pretty cool feature.

12:35
And depending on your industry and maybe something that you could take advantage of.

12:39
And what are schematics?

12:40
They’re basically custom visualizations that you can use to sort of heat map or adjust your data to kind of show, you know, where things are aligning.

12:51
And common uses of these I’ve seen are like airplane seating charts, warehouse plans, you could show, you know, where there’s been accidents or areas that haven’t had accidents, four plans or stadium seating, things like that.

13:03
So it’s very easy.

13:04
Once you kind of have the graphic, you can load it into Cognos and then you can define the drop zones and say, OK, this going to be, you know, the show that show it red if it’s empty or green if it’s full.

13:14
So again, this just something that’s that was introduced probably a couple years ago and I haven’t really seen too many people using it, but it is a really nice feature.

13:22
Obviously industry specific, you know, if you don’t really have anything that you know, uses schematics, maybe you don’t care.

13:27
But I think there’s a lot of need and a lot of, you know, use case for something like this and want to just make it aware to everyone out there that it is something that you can take advantage of today.

13:38
As well as the D3 visualizations.

13:41
So a lot of these other tools are very heavy.

13:43
You know, they have these fancy graphics that is actually all supported with Cognos analytics.

13:49
Again, I’m going to say 11.2 this came out, but maybe even earlier that.

13:53
So D3, if not familiar with it, is an open source visualization library.

13:57
You can go out there today and just Google D3 visualizations, you know, take it to a web page that has, you know, 30 to 50 of these really cool animations from, you know, standard stuff you see here like bar charts to some really crazy, wacky stuff that I don’t even know what the value would be in showing data like that, but I’m sure there’s some reason for it.

14:16
But a lot of really cool stuff.

14:18
It’s all open source, as I mentioned.

14:20
So you can kind of just grab the code.

14:22
There’s a lot of good documentation and YouTube videos out there where it show you the steps you have to kind of install Node JS and have a little bit of coding knowledge.

14:30
And I wouldn’t say it’s for the fainted heart, but it’s not excessive.

14:34
You don’t have to do too much.

14:35
And again, just some of the documentation knowledge base out there, you can kind of look at it and see and kind of just figure it out on your own with a little bit of time.

14:42
So if you are using visualizations in Cognos and maybe you’re missing 1 like a Gatt chart or you know, something like this that has some animation.

14:51
I would suggest taking a look at the D3 libraries and seeing if there’s something out there today that you could leverage that.

14:58
I believe there even is some stuff on the, the, the Cognos I’m printing the name of it, the accelerator catalog.

15:08
I think it still called that.

15:11
There’s some samples out there that have already been built.

15:12
So ones that are custom visualizations that aren’t part of the out-of-the-box visualizations that you can just upload directly into your dashboards and reports and expose to your users.

15:22
And then they can take advantage of these, you know, sort of newer, fancier animated dashboards.

15:28
So there’s another feature that I feel like isn’t getting a lot of pickup and press, but it’s actually really cool and looks really sharp.

15:35
If you’re really into visualizations and dashboards and then data sets.

15:41
I have been a huge fan of these since they came out.

15:44
They’ve continued to add more and more features.

15:46
You don’t know what they are.

15:47
These are actually Apache Parquet files that are loaded into the application server memory at runtime and then they are brought down as an audited basis.

15:55
So they’re extremely fast snapshots of data.

15:58
So again, it’s not going to be live.

15:59
So if you’re, you know, relying on live data and transactional data reporting, maybe not the right set for you unless you’re refreshing frequently.

16:06
But if you’re like most companies where you’re doing data warehouse refreshes nightly and you’re looking at yesterday and Beyond’s data, you’re not looking at, you know, instantaneous data.

16:16
These are a great way to really speed things up.

16:19
They can be scheduled to refresh, so you can do them nightly, daily, you know, as often as you need to, depending on how much data you’re bringing back.

16:28
They can take a little while to refresh.

16:31
But once you have them refreshed, then the reports, the dashboards that are that are being driven off of those data sets are going to be extremely fast.

16:38
There’s no more meetings that run the sequel.

16:40
There’s no latency waiting for those sequel queries to come back and everything.

16:43
It’s all instantaneous.

16:45
So if you’ve ever used cubes, you know, minus the multi dimensional factor here, it’s just going to be, you know, very fast performance.

16:52
They can be aggregated at the level you need.

16:54
So again, if you’ve got a massive billion row fact table that has things at daily, you know, time multiple times per day, you can possibly summarize that and you maybe you only care about things at a monthly level or a yearly level.

17:06
You know, instead of having all that, that detailed granular level, you can convert that billion row fact table to maybe a couple of million records or maybe even less than a million if you’re, you know, granulating at a, if you’re getting at a higher level.

17:18
So lots of options and ability here to really speed up your performance if that’s one of your issues in Cognos.

17:26
And again, if you’ve used, you know, taboo hyper extracts or power BI imports, these are sort of the comparison tool that you’re going to use to kind of really get that really fast performance.

17:37
And to make it even better, you can now in data sets do some transformation.

17:42
So somewhat it looks a lot like the reporting tool.

17:45
So if you’ve ever had to do joins or unions or do some manipulation of the data to bring different things in, you can actually do all of that in the data sets.

17:53
Now it’s sort of using like the reporting front end.

17:56
So you’ve got multiple queries.

17:57
So if you’ve got two different things, you want to bring them in and that join in the report is very expensive.

18:02
It takes a long time to join the records.

18:04
You can do it one time loaded into a data set and now you’re, you know, bypassing that whole process of running the queries and all those joins, it’s already been done.

18:12
You can then, you know, put some calculations in there, summarize it at a level you need, and now you’ve got sort of a, a pre aggregated loaded data set that’s going to match, you know, the report output that you want and it’s going to be blazing fast.

18:25
So again, if you haven’t looked at data sets, I would highly recommend it, especially with some of the features they added.

18:31
I think this now for like 2-3 years now, sort of the, the query explorer aspect of it that lets you even, you know, do a bunch of manipulation.

18:40
You can even take and copy and paste, you know, if you’ve got a report that’s really slow and they just, you know, multiple steps, you’ve got these two queries that are joined to 1, then you have two more queries that get joined, then you join those, take that final step, just click on it, copy and paste it.

18:53
It’ll grab all the, the lower steps.

18:55
And then that report can then be sourced directly off of that data set and it’s going to be very fast.

18:59
So sort of a get out of jail free card.

19:02
If you’ve got a slow running report, just transform it to a data set and re point things and then you’ll have a very quick report and then the assistant dashboard creation.

19:12
And this something that has been constantly getting improvements.

19:15
A lot of these AI assistant technologies.

19:19
But if you haven’t tried this, I would definitely recommend it.

19:22
It’s got, you know, it’s called like a natural language abilities typed in so it understands, you know, keywords you don’t have to type, you know, really cryptic things.

19:32
You know someone to look at Chat GPT, you can just say you know something like you define what data source you want to use and it’s going to connect to that.

19:40
And then it’s going to know a little information about it.

19:42
It’s going to know keywords, it’s going to know some of the metadata.

19:46
So after collecting to, you know, the ghost sales query sample database, I just said, hey, create a dashboard with the top five products by profit.

19:54
And it thought about it for a minute and then created I think A1234 tabbed dashboard showing.

20:04
Profit by those products across different measures, time and date and things like that it thinks are relevant.

20:13
So I mean, is this going to be the final dashboard?

20:15
You probably go and show, you know everybody in the company?

20:18
Probably not, but it’s going to be a good start and it’s going to actually do a lot of this automatic before you give you a good head start.

20:25
So you can go in and maybe, you know, say this one chart out before I don’t like I’m going to delete that or I’m going to change the name.

20:31
I’m going to change the dimension from, you know, the ship date to the order date, something like that.

20:36
But the fact that it’s actually able to do this pretty impressive.

20:39
So I’d recommend, you know, just kind of playing around with this, seeing what you can do.

20:44
It has come a long way since it was sort of introduced a while ago.

20:46
They’ve continued to invest a lot of R&D into this product.

20:49
So I’m, you know, very impressed so far with what it’s been able to do.

20:56
And then Jupiter notebooks, another sort of feature that’s not getting a lot of press, but this a big one as well.

21:01
So if you don’t know what Jupiter notebooks are, it’s a sort of a, a coding tool that lets you interactively develop and present data science projects.

21:10
So if you have data scientists in your organization, you know, and maybe they’re would like to get access to the Cognos data, I’m not sure how they’re getting it today.

21:18
Maybe they’re dumping out Excel, but the Jupiter notebooks, they’re actually able to directly connect into your Cognos environment and they can then use code visualizations, things to create workflows, take advantage of those Python R language experience you might have in the, excuse me, in the organization.

21:36
And it’s the things you can do with it.

21:38
I don’t have a lot of screenshots, but you can, you know, actually like submit, connect to the data sources and read and write.

21:45
So you can obviously pull stuff out and look at the data, but you can also write back, you can do some lightweight ETL work, some transformation of the datand create new outputs.

21:56
You can, you know, similar to those D3 visualizations, it has its own visualization libraries as well.

22:00
So you can import additional libraries and really do a lot of those statistical type views.

22:06
If you’re doing predictive analysis, statistical analysis, AI with Numpy or machine learning, this going to be the tool for you.

22:14
So it’s another product that’s included with Cognos.

22:17
So there’s additional, it’s not baked into the, the actual base Cognos analytics tool, the server, but depending on whether you’re on Windows or Linux, you can install the Jupiter notebooks component.

22:32
And then you have the ability to launch notebooks strictly in the in the web portal.

22:36
So users can then, you know, you can grant them access to a specific group and they can get in here and start, you know, using these tools.

22:42
And again, not something that a lot of people know about are using currently, but it is a really powerful tool, especially with the, you know, big push on machine learning and AI these days.

22:50
So if you have people in the organizations who are, you know, begging for this information, get them the Jupiter notebooks and then they can kind of start really doing some impressive stuff.

22:59
A little bit of housekeeping here before we head into the Q&A.

23:05
Just quickly if you do need help optimizing your Cognos environment, here at Senturus, we have a variety of options help fit your needs.

23:12
We can help you with Cognos cloud implementations, overall administration.

23:16
We can also help your team with hands on mentoring.

23:19
That’s a really whatever level of support you need.

23:22
We’re in a position to assist with that.

23:24
We do help with optimization and upgrades, but we can help with extended support.

23:29
If you’re planning to stay on Cognos 11 for the long term.

23:32
We can also help you with mitigating some of the impacts of the deprecated functionality in V12.

23:39
So if you’re organization has been a long time user of Query Studio or Analysis Studio for example, there are some options for addressing the absence of those tools and the newer versions of Cognos.

23:51
So don’t hesitate to reach out to us for any and all helped in those areas.

23:58
Quick few events and resources coming up next week.

24:02
We’re going to be doing a post show wrap up from our October webinar, which was on Cognos.

24:06
Should I stay or should I go?

24:09
We’ll be revisiting that topic next week.

24:11
It’ll be me and Pedro and Ng and Devin Reddick, who were the presenters on last month’s webinar.

24:16
And we’ll just be doing kind of a round table Q&About the pros and cons of staying on Cognos or moving to another platform or maintaining multiple platforms.

24:27
You can also find super helpful features about Cognos on Demand.

24:30
That’s a Todd Schumann special.

24:33
You can get that on our website.

24:35
You can also learn about ways to use Cognos in conjunction with Power BI and Tableau and a wealth of other information at our Knowledge Center on Senturus.com.

24:47
Additional resources Again, just go to Senturus.com/resources.

24:50
You’ll find insider viewpoints, reviews, tech tips, Spectra of past webinars on every topic you could imagine.

25:00
So don’t hesitate to take advantage of all of our free resources out there.

25:06
Quick bit about what we do as a company, Senturus.

25:09
We cover the gamut of datand analytics.

25:11
Everything from high level analytics strategy where we can help you with Rd.

25:15
maps and governance, identity, data management, data engineering, helping you with architecture and integration of the bread and butter and insights and data helping you with actual report development and dashboards.

25:28
We also offer support and training in multiple platforms.

25:32
And we’ve been a Cognos shop for many years.

25:35
So we’ve got lots of Cognos training options, both in terms of self-paced computer based trainings and the live trainings with an instructor.

25:44
So if you need any training for your team, don’t hesitate to reach out for that.

25:48
We also offer a number of accelerator tools to help optimize and maximize the value of your Cognos environment.

25:58
We’ve been around for a long time, 23 years now, 1400 plus clients, over 3000 projects.

26:04
Some of you might be part of organizations you see on the screen here.

26:09
We’re small enough to really dedicate ourselves to your needs, but we’re big enough to cover the wide range of what you might be trying to accomplish as you modernize your data state.

26:20
And with that, we’re going to move into Q&A.

26:23
We’ve had a bunch of questions come in during the webinar.

26:27
A lot of you put your questions into the chat window rather than the Q&A panel.

26:32
So I’m going to turn it over todd here.

26:34
But Todd, just so you know, I made a little bulleted list of the chat questions.

26:39
So if you want to, you know, if you need any background support, just let me know.

26:44
I can feed you the collected questions.

26:47
And with that, over to you, Todd.

26:49
Ok, you said you put them in a I I’ve been keeping just a little note pad list here because there’s a lot going on in chat.

26:57
So I’ve made a list and I can just give you questions if needed.

27:01
My PC is scrolling through.

27:05
Yeah, if you want to just do that.

27:06
I’m trying to see what’s been answered and what hasn’t.

27:09
Yeah.

27:10
All right, so how about I’ll just, I’ll drive the questions and you guys can answer them.

27:14
That’s the best way to do this.

27:16
So Andre asked early on if there are any plans to be able to invoke dashboards from reports the way that you can do drill through from reports.

27:27
So that’s probably a Tim question or Tim and Greg question.

27:31
Yeah, I can handle that.

27:33
At this point in time there’s no plans for that.

27:41
I’m trying to remember if there is an API that I think there was talk about allowing filters in API calls to dashboards.

27:49
So that might be the way to do it.

27:53
But generally speaking, our what we’re looking to do is add more interactivity to reporting so that you would, you would usually just stay in a report.

28:09
Great, thanks.

28:10
Tim Andre also asked about in FMI, think I know the answer to this, but I’ll let you answer it.

28:18
Are there any plans to add navigation paths to relational models in FM similar to what you can do in data modules?

28:26
Probably not FM is basically in maintenance mode.

28:31
FM is not going anywhere, by the way, we have thousands of customers that that rely on it.

28:39
So we’re we have no plans to get rid of FM, but also not really any plans to add new features there as well.

28:47
I just add, you know, there’s DMR functionality is, is possible in framework manager.

28:51
So if you want to create, you know, relationships and have that hierarchies, it’s not as flexible and you can’t kind of mix and match like you can in navigation paths.

28:59
But if you’re looking for, you know, hierarchies in framework manager, you can look at ADMR possibly.

29:09
Well, all right.

29:11
Any plans for Cognos for an on Prem containerized edition of Cognos?

29:17
So this an administrator question for sure.

29:19
Ease of deployment.

29:22
Any plans for that?

29:23
Tim and Greg, probably that’s a question for you.

29:30
Yeah, well, we have an on Prem solution today.

29:34
Containers are in cloud pack for data.

29:37
Cloud pack for data is not SAS and it can be deployed on premise or in any of the public clouds and coming out in November, later this month, Cognizant legs will now be out on something referred to called software hub again containerized cognizant legs.

30:00
So that continues to be our path forward for on premise deployment of containers today and all of that again today is deployed on Red Hat open Shift.

30:13
Great, thank you, Greg.

30:14
All right, we’ve only got a few minutes left here, so I’m going to kind of consolidate a few of the remaining questions.

30:21
So one quick question on mapping in version 12, this comes from David.

30:27
David’s asking are there any updates or upgrades regarding mapping that so David is part of a residential real estate firm.

30:35
They’d love to be able to integrate interactive St.

30:38
level mapping.

30:39
Are there any sort of upcoming enhancements on the mapping side and Cognos 12?

30:45
That’s a great question.

30:46
Unfortunately, it’s not one of the areas that I work in.

30:50
I don’t think Greg does either.

30:52
So I don’t think we again have an answer to that today.

30:55
So we’ll have to follow up on that one.

30:56
OK, I’m not sure what the need the need is there, but I know with the mapping capabilities and reporting, you know, you can use map box and upload custom shapes and areas.

31:07
And we’ve done projects where we’ve got, you know, custom maps that you can definitely take advantage of.

31:13
So I’d say maybe you have more questions, reach out.

31:16
We could look at it offline.

31:17
And we do have St.

31:18
level maps and we have things like the auto grouping that happens as well.

31:23
So when you’re zoomed out, you can see like a big circle, then you zoom in, it breaks down into mobile circles.

31:29
We have the heat mapping in there.

31:30
We have the hex binning in maps.

31:32
So there is a lot of stuff in maps.

31:40
Great.

31:41
Thanks guys.

31:42
So just a couple final questions here.

31:45
George asks, do we have column level security, column level security available?

31:55
I’m not sure what that means.

31:57
I mean, I know you can, obviously there’s row level, but column level, I think you’re talking about crosstab and it would basically work the same way.

32:07
I mean, if you have like a list of countries across the top and you only can see one, that would work.

32:13
If you’re talking about, you know, hiding or showing fields in the model, like the meta, the package that you can have security on that.

32:22
So if you’re having HR, I can hide, not in HR, I can hide, you know, salaries and personal information.

32:28
But I’m in the HR group.

32:29
I can see that field is available to me and I can use it in reports, something like that.

32:33
So hopefully that’s what you’re asking about.

32:36
Yes, actually, George, just put a note in chat here, he says he’s asking about things like hiding in SSN column.

32:43
Yeah, you can definitely do that.

32:44
Yeah.

32:47
Alright, so we are at the top of the hour here.

32:51
There were a couple questions about data sets, but I think I saw you answering them in Q&A moment ago, Greg.

32:57
So since we’re at the top of the yard, I’m going to go ahead and wrap it up.

33:00
If we didn’t get to your question here during the live Q&A, we will follow up with you after the webinar.

33:07
But I think we covered most of what everybody put out there.

33:12
So thank you everybody for attending today.

33:15
It’s always great to have you join us.

33:18
Todd, Tim, Greg, thank you for being here as presenters and helping with all the Q&A.

33:26
And with that, we’re going to wrap up.

33:27
So thanks again, everybody.

33:29
Have a great rest of the day and we hope to see you again on a future Senturus webinar.

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