What’s New in Cognos Analytics 11.1.4

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Rachel Su
Cognos Analytics Offering Management Leader
IBM

Rachel has over 10 years of experience in different areas of Cognos. Her current area of focus is Cognos Analytics reporting. She is passionate about analyzing the market landscape, as well as transforming and modernizing business intelligence. She also has proven track record of delivering advanced product features.

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Q: Can we change the name of a field on a dashboard in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: For table/crosstab or a list, Planning Analytics allows you to change fields such as visualization title, label, etc. However, you may not change the name of data fields.

Q: Does forecasting still get the interactivity between the different graphs and (no value) cells in crosstab in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes, you can still interact with other visualizations on the dashboard when forecasting is enabled.

Q: I have Cognos 11.1.4 installed in a DEV environment, and I don’t see the forecast option—is there something I need to do to enable this? Or is the function dependent on data source type at all?
A: You need to plan time on x-axis. In some cases, we do not display forecasting option if the data is too scattered and there’s no pattern to be detected.

Q: Does the crosstab feature support conditional formatting in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes.

Q: Are there any plans to introduce gauges into the dashboard tool in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: You can bring it in as a custom visualization.

Q: Will explorations be available in languages other than English in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: It’s on our roadmap to support other languages.

Q: Are features available in reporting as well as dashboard in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Not yet, but it’s on our roadmap.

Q: In data modules in Cognos 11.1.4, are there object/data security available that is similar to Framework Manager?
A: This is on the roadmap. We support row-level security in data module when connected to a data warehouse.

Q: Are there any new properties added to summary visualization in Cognos 11.1.4? I’d like to be able to rank the properties, it that possible?
A: There are new properties added to the new KPI widget. Rank isn’t one of yet.

Q: Can we use session parameters in data modules in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes.

Q: Are there any updates to Framework Manager in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: No updates. Framework Manager is a mature product and we continue to maintain it, but no new features are planned for it.

Q: Is Weather Company data a separate purchase in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes it is.

Q: How can we customize the homepage in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: You can customize the homepage through extensions.

Q: Are there any improvements to export to Excel from a dashboard since Cognos 11.0.10?
A: We do not support export to Excel from a dashboard right now.

Q: What are the improvements to the KPI widget in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Compare actual vs. target, spark line over time and custom coloring.

Q: Does the explore feature work with relationally modeled data in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes.

Q: What are the issues converting Report Studio and Query Studio reports to Cognos 11x?
A: The same limitation exists in Cognos 10.

Q: Are there any changes or enhancements in report interface in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: We have not made any changes to the reporting interface in Cognos 11.1.4 release. However, the Cognos 11.1 reporting interface was changed from Cognos 11.0.

Q: With forecasting, can I specify or edit the settings used for each series in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: You can not make changes for each series, but you can make changes to how the forecasting is calculated for all series at the same time.

Q: How easy is to upgrade to Cognos 11.1.4 from 11.0.13?
A: It is as easy as upgrading from 11.0.12 to 11.0.13. Although we’ve made more changes in 11.1 stream, the upgrading process has not changed. It is a lot easier than upgrading from Cognos 10 to Cognos Analytics 11.

Q: What are the performance improvements made to Cognos 11.1.4?
A: We’ve made many small performance improvements in components through new features and APARs.

Q: Is it possible to link the glossary and InfoSphere from the dashboard in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Not in 11.1.4 release, but integration with Watson Knowledge Catalog is on our roadmap.

Q: How well do the new features in Cognos 11.1.4, like forecasting, scale up to a very large set of data (1 billion records) in Oracle or SQL Server databases?
A: This depends on your database performance.

Q: Is there any developer training available for the custom visualization SDK for Cognos 11.1.4?
A: We have step-by-step documentation on this and plan to release more how-to videos on our community.

Q: Is the SDK module still available in Cognos 11.1.4? And if so, where is it located?
A: Yes, SDK stays unchanged in 11.1.4.

Q: Will an analytics viewer be able to initiate a refresh to the data in a dashboard to see up to the minute results in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes.

Q: When will we be able to connect to ReST services for getting data into a report in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: This remains as a roadmap item.

Q: Are there any updates to Active Reports in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: No. We do not invest in Active Reports. Active Reports uses MHT file format to store data separately from the Cognos server. Unfortunately, MHT format has many limitations, for example, Firefox Quantum has dropped the support of MHT plugin. As a result, you will not be able to open an offline Active Report using Firefox Quantum. This leaves Internet Explorer as the only browser to support MHT format. This format also does not scale. It’s unable to handle the data volume you need to accomplish your analysis in a performant way.

Due to the above reasons, MHT is not our investment focus going forward, and this is also why we haven’t put any new features in Active Reports in Cognos Analytics 11. However, we have no plans on deprecating Active Reports technology that’s currently available in Cognos 10 and Cognos Analytics 11. We will continue to support it without future enhancements. We are working on bringing more interactive features that are popular in Active Reports into standard reports which will reduce the need for Active Reports. We also continue to investigate technologies available to handle offline use cases. This is on our long-term roadmap.

Q: Are the exploration capabilities only available to the Analytics Explorer user in Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes.

Q: Is it possible to share output in SharePoint from Cognos 11.1.4?
A: Yes, through iFrame.

Q: Does Cognos 11.1.4 require more hardware power to run equally fast as 11.0.x?
A: It does require additional 4G of memory as a minimum due to additional services have been added to the product.

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Welcome to the latest installment of these Senturus Knowledge series. Today, we’re excited to be presenting what’s new in Cognos Analytics 11.1.4 with demos and QA with an IBM offering manager. First some housekeeping items. Please feel free to use the go to webinar control panel to make the session interactive.

0:32
We do have the mics muted but we encourage you to enter questions via the in via the questions pane here or generally able to answer the questions live in the webinar. And we do try our best to accomplish that if however, we don’t reply immediately. We will cover it will cover it via written response document that we post on senturus.com along with the slide deck. You can also minimize and restore the control panel via that orange arrow and the first question we generally get and repeatedly throughout the presentation is can I get a copy of the presentation?

1:06
Absolutely it will be available on its interest.com at the URL. You see their senturus.com resources. You can select the resources Tab and resources Library alternatively you can click the URL link that was just posted or should have been just posted in the go to webinar control panel.

1:23
Be sure to bookmark our resource Library as it is tons of valuable content addressing a wide variety of business analytics topics our agenda today after some brief introductions will cover what’s new in 11:1 for including New welcome section waterfall visualizations forecasting KPI widget zero suppression custom visualizations and updated crosstab compact Legends jupyter notebooks and weather company data source. So we got a lot of great new features and love and one for to cover after we do that. We’ll do a brief Senturus overview, but please stick around because we have some great additional almost entirely free resources at the end and generally a lot of great questions come out of these presentations.

2:07
So stick around until the end of the presentation for that our presenters today. We’re I’m pleased to be joined by Rachel Sue who is a senior offering manager for IBM Cognos analytics. She has over a decade of experience in different areas of Cognos for current area of focus is Cognos analytics reporting. She is passionate about analyzing the market landscape as well as transforming and modernizing business intelligence.

2:34
She has a proven track record of delivering Advanced product features my name Like wine our I had a tableau practice training and I’m a product manager for our analytics connector software product and I host are Senturus webinars. So I’m thrilled to be here with our presenter today on this exciting topic as usual. We try to get a finger on the pulse of our audience and our pull today is going to ask you simply what version of Cognos are you currently running? And I’m going to post the pull up there.

3:04
Just select the one that applies to you and will give you about 30 45 seconds to answer that.

3:14
And we’ve got about three-quarters of a good sized audience here today get those votes in. I’m going to close this out and share back the responses with y’all. All right. So behalf of you running some version of 11 one another little more than a third on 11 and then a good fifteen percent. There’s some stragglers out there still hanging out on version 8, right? Well, thank you for those valuable insights.

3:42
We appreciate you being Interactive and with that I’m going to hand the microphone on the floor over to Rachel for your presentation. Go ahead Rachel floors yours.

3:53
Thank you very much, Michael.

3:59
Alright, so today the webinar is going to focus on all the new features. We just released in the 11.1 for version. However, before I jump right into that presentation, I want to give you one high-level slide about Cognos analytics 11 in general because we still have customers were users are on our older version of Cognos such as condos a torque on Windows 10.

4:26
So Carlos 11 It’s not another product. It is the new version of the Cognos that you’re used to your familiar with. It is still built on a proven bi platform with Rich managed reporting but it also has added a lot of smart self-service capabilities.

4:44
We’ve got reliable data and analytics governments governance and that is essential for any organizations to run their business a Cognos analytics 11 is powered by a i With natural language dialogue capabilities that help you to tell more compelling data stories now Data Insights are also accessible to business users through contextual highlights predictive capabilities that review details about their data in natural everyday language that makes it easy to understand and explain what’s happening the natural language dialogue.

5:22
I just mentioned it’s available via the AI assistant that gives business users the ability to have a lock to have an intelligent exchange with the system to get contextual answers to their questions. So if you’re not already familiar with cone has 11, we have many other materials online. You can definitely get resources online to understand. What are the capabilities available today? I’m going to focus on the 11.1 for version which was released earlier this month. So this is fresh out of the press.

5:59
This is an overview page. The presentation is going to be available after the webinar. I would like to go ahead and start doing live product demo for some features. I’m going to show some slides for some features and make sure a little quick video and most of the features I would like to demo live. So let me go ahead and show you my browser here. So here let me go ahead and start with dash boarding.

6:29
The dash boarding features can be used on any of the data sources that we support. The first one we’re going to use is a data module to create a dashboard.

6:43
Select any templates and the templates are unchanged We Still Supply number of templates available for dashboard authors to quickly lay out their objects and let me minimize the filter Dock at the top the First new feature. I want to mention is a new KPI widget. We had a KPI widget in the past that will show you aggregated number right here.

7:11
It’s the Keep UI widget now we’ve done we’ve added a lot more here. So now this KPI widget is going to help authors to visually compare their actual versus Target. Let’s pick something. Let’s do Revenue as the base value and I can compare that with a Target value which is plant Revenue. So by default we’re going to show you the comparison in percentage.

7:41
We’re going to give you some conditional coloring as well. And let’s go ahead and format these numbers. I always tell this to customers that a spider’s especially for KPIs for dashboards. People are going to step spend at most one second on this numbers. You don’t want them to have to read through all the digits. All they want to know is my number is 1.1 4 billion and it did not meet Target and how far what’s the threshold?

8:12
That were missed by so by default we gave you all these nice Styles and more than that. If you’re plotting this over time, I say if I add ear to the time slot. We’re going to show you a Sparkline to help you understand how your data is plotted over time. I can Nest year with let’s say cougar. This is just giving you more context.

8:37
And this is the default style. You may be happy with this default style. However, we know customers like to do some customizations. So on the right hand side through the properties you can do a lot more with it.

8:50
For example by default or giving you 2 steps count for the conditional colors. You can decide to have three maybe four you if you’re only missing by 5% it’s not the worst you this is a percentage based skill. You can switch to numeric and defined a specific number and have it conditionally show you can change the colors by default. We’re doing red meaning bad real.

9:19
Ellos middle greenness good. Generally, that is the color palette. You should follow the worst thing is you’re trying to cut to come up with something so different and special and that gives people the wrong impression people naturally associate red with missing Target Green Miss exceeding it’s good are you don’t want to reverse that logic play people’s mind. You can define what a start value is and you can even change the indicator shape.

9:49
Now the arrows are the very common ones to use or in this case. I could do a neutral face or a sad face. So instead of that I can do because now we get got three steps. I can change that to a neutral face and what you can do is to bring another new. It’s actually this is not a new widget. Let me go ahead and use a line chart.

10:21
You’re going to ask what’s so special about this line chart.

10:26
Lion column and bar charts can be used to demonstrate this feature. I’m about to show next. Let’s use month as x axis maybe revenue for the measure and I can color this by retailer type.

10:46
So this is your line chart that you’re probably already familiar with change the size to give us a bit more room to analyze to look at this and what’s new here is that we have enabled forecasting not just lying but also bar and column charts.

11:10
So you can’t simply enable this as a dashboard author or as a dashboard consumer. So this is not an author only feature when you’re consuming a dashboard. You have the ability to toggle these smart features as well. And then you have the ability to change confidence levels.

11:28
And here this is the forecasting information generated.

11:34
Why is this so exciting first of all and I like to call this out is that sure many vendors have forecasting built-in. We didn’t just bring forecasting. We did it more than what other when there’s can do other vendors can do first of all other vendors cannot show forecasting when you have multiple series you have to just plug one category when Siri which we support multiple series here as you can see.

12:01
Another thing is we also Show you what is the statistic model that’s being used?

12:10
To give you this information whenever business users get statistical information predictive capabilities. A lot of times. It’s being challenged by data scientist. We all know that if you have data scientist in your organization, they can use Python. Where are to achieve the same results and they often question. How did you get your result? We’re not hiding anything. We’re showing you everything that’s being used. What?

12:40
Although we’re parameters are being used everything here. So this is not just magic. It looks like its magic. But all the facts are presented here as well. We even had a comparison a performance comparison against a data scientist who would use Python where are to achieve the same exact result. We were able to display the results with 20 to 40 percent faster. So we’re able to get this information faster.

13:10
Compared to if you’re using python where art and like I mentioned earlier that this is not just available on line chart. A lot of vendors would only provide it online or only provide a only have it available on column. Where’s we have this available on all of that so column line and our chart? So here is your forecasting by default. We do three periods, and you can change that to 5 to 2, whatever you want.

13:41
And you may also have noticed so I’m moving onto another feature now. It’s like I said, it’s jam packed with new features. You’re going to have to really focus on what I’m about to do. So next the legend you may have noticed it looks a little different in the past. The Legends are on the right hand side.

14:03
Sometimes we’re on the top where the bottom depending on the size on your visualization and the Legends were quite Enlarge the font size for these entries the color icon. These are those are bigger.

14:17
So sometimes if you have let’s say if you have a point visualization bubble chart, you could have a lot of data items on your on your dashboard or on your report and then the legend could get really large that leaves not enough space for your actual visualization body to show Data, so what we’ve done is we came out with a more compact view of the legend where it’s going to save a lot of space for you.

14:51
And as an author were a consumer you have the ability to move the legend size. So you can decide if let’s say you have 50 items and you want to see more you want this Flame or you want to hide some of the legend and when you make the space, very small you will get a scroll bar right in this case because I don’t have a lot of Legend entry it the scroll bar is a very long but you have the ability to control that.

15:21
You next let’s take a look at another new. I wouldn’t say new again. It’s improved visualization. A lot of customers have complained that our crosstab. Well, yeah our crosstab. It’s not does not provide enough customization. We’re styling capabilities. It’s not as robust. So we came out with the newly improved one.

15:49
So it’s still the cross tab icon that you would find under the He’s right stations gallery and crosstab. But when you have this cross tap on the dashboard a lot of things that are going to be different when I fill it in with some data may be Province or stays as row. Hmm something more. Let’s say product type on the column and give it the default measure.

16:26
And you can see this crosstab. It’s a lot more compact. Now we can handle a lot more data display a lot more data and you will get the scroll bar still with column and row heading freeze at the top and if you’re scrolling horizontally, you can get the column heading row headings to stay at the left-hand side summary, sir edit.

16:57
And more than just that you have the ability to customize an entire column.

17:05
Let’s say I want to change this column to be a different color. Let’s choose something that will stand out.

17:14
And I can customize an entire row for a different style. I can also change the size of my rows and columns Now by using the gripper and just drag to resize and then you can also drag and drop data items directly on this to replace where nest on the on the crosstab. So a lot of customization things are being.

17:44
Added to this crosstab to satisfy. What customers want to use it for going forward? We’re going to continue adding more and more customization features capabilities such as maybe expand and collapse such as to be able to customize condition. We are we still have conditional formatting to help you to change colors conditionally. We want to enhance that so a lot of other features are currently being worked out on this.

18:14
It’s crosstab in are for this is the default crosstab in you’re getting now.

18:21
Alright, so let’s go back to the presentation slide just want making sure that I covered all the dash boarding features. So I talked about the KPI visualization. I talked about the cross having hansman. Do you waterfall visualization has always been in reporting now – boarding and exploration have the waterfall visualizations as well. Now as one of the out-of-the-box visualization, I talked about time series forecasting.

18:51
Seeing where users can easily get time series forecasting information by using the top right forecasting option just in couple clicks.

19:02
Next I’m going to move on to explore. So for people who are not familiar with explore. It is our data Discovery tool. In fact, you can use a visualization and then launch it into Explorer from the menu here just as an example. You can launch a visualization from a dashboard into an exploration.

19:26
You can add it to a new one or an existing one so story here is that there are A lot of smarts added to dash boarding to all these visualizations behind the scene I can get forecasting I can get hidden automated insights. But sometimes there are more things that I want to do. I want to understand data more behind this visualization or in association with some other data. So I could as a dashboard user a launch my dashboard and my visualization in to explore.

19:57
So that’s one way of using exploration now another way of using Exploration is just directly launching your exploration on the data sets that you have access to for example, let’s use time usage data module that I have access to but I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. I want to I want I need help to help me understand data so I can create explore directly on these on this visualization. So on the state of module.

20:32
And this is the new screen that you will see that’s different in 11.1 that for a lot of users have come to us said we want a simpler starting point. So prior to 11. 1.4.

20:45
When you launch exploration on a data module, you will get a relationship diagram that we generate to show you the interesting field some users say I know exactly which field that want to start my exploration now, can you please set skip showing me the Relationship diagram I want to pick one. So now we’re giving you the way of picking one. Let’s say weekly and when you start typing we’re going to give you a type of head suggestion telling you what some of the fields are that matches with that your keyword. We also when you’re typing we also can display if there’s ambiguity.

21:25
So if I’m looking for a weekly earning in this case, it only appears in one place, but if Using a data source that has multiple tables then I am looking at I want to understand which table I want this data to come out of so here. Let me select weekly earnings. Of course, like you saw earlier at the bottom. You still have the option to have us suggest an inch interesting starting point for you. You have the option to skip that it’s just a lot of flexibility.

22:01
Now up front. So this is the relationship diagram that’s going to show you the influencers the correlations between the data fields that you entered weekly earnings versus some other fields. By the way. This data is a survey data for Americans how they use their time ho how they spent their time.

22:23
It is one of the simple data we have that’s approved by legal and it’s actually interesting data set if you haven’t to plate with it, I actually the lot more information out of it by using the exploration company capability component. Then I would have gotten otherwise so here by default. We’re show you the direct relationships. So these are other fields that directly having a relationship with weekly earnings or drives it you have the ability to show secondary relationships.

22:57
This is a fairly simple small data set and in real life in real world. Your data would be much more complex. That’s why we want to give you the flexibilities of showing just direct relationship or if you want to know more about it, and we can also change this influencer level. So a lot of other fields that does not have really correlated where influence this field. We may not right away show.

23:26
By default, but you have the option to play around with this slider to really focus on how strong the relationships are and how much you want to see in this relationship diagram. Now another thing that’s changed is on the right hand side.

23:46
These are visualizations automatically created for you by using the interesting field that’s already selected. Where’s prior? You will have to select a note and then we’ll generate visualization. Now, we’re up front right away generates the visualization for you. Let’s go ahead and select into it. So by the way on the left hand side, these are called cards. So every time you’re doing something in explore.

24:16
Exploration, we’re going to remember everything that you’ve done and I have them saved capped on the left hand side on the right hand side just for the information. This is your statistical information generated using natural language.

24:32
We are not just describing the visualization but showing you something that’s hidden inside of the visualization something that’s not obvious such as what drives what at what percentage what Bucket groups of data makes up what percentage of the total things like that?

24:53
And this is new properties. So we have always said exploration is a tool that’s focused on data Discovery data exploration. It is not meant for formatting presentation, which is what dash boarding reporting’s are for however at times there are properties that might be useful in important to help you understand the visualization.

25:18
We will selectively pick some properties to show and Based on based on the visualization type you’re using in explore in this case. For example showing value labels would be one that we think would be useful and helpful for you to understand help you to understand the visualization and we brought that one in.

25:40
Now another Improvement continue to improve our AI assistant the ability to understand more complex questions for example being 11.1 doubt for you can ask questions such as weekly learning.

26:03
For age greater than 30 Let me just do a show source.

26:23
I could pick a data source to use.

26:28
I’ve got weekly earning so weekly earnings for age greater than 30. Let’s try that again.

26:42
Now a visualization can be generated automatically and we’re adding a filter we’re going to show you what filter has been generated based on the question that you asked I can ask something like female caring for children.

27:03
Bye and you can see we have type ahead to help me to pick to help me to formulate the question female caring for children by age range and we’re able to generate a visualization for you and we can do when you get an answer from AI assistant is that you can bring this visualization into the main focus area and then do more analysis with it. So here I can see that.

27:32
Based on the data. I gathered female between the ages of 30 to 39 would spend the most time taking care of children. That’s pretty scary because this is the age range that most people also have to spend a lot of time focusing on their career as well. And it’s a very tiring age range and I can speak that for my only experience.

27:59
Now, I’m curious. What about men? What are men doing in this age range comparing two women? Right? So what I can do in this is new and 11.1 felt for is I can easily create a comparison prior to this release you would duplicate this visualization and increase the compare card. Whereas now it’s a single button here compare and that you have the ability to say I want to duplicate the start and then start comparing.

28:28
During the two so I’ll to matically we’re going to create you a compare card with to visualizations side by side. You still have the compare table at the bottom to show you the details. I can minimize that to just focus on the bar and now both have the same filter condition. What I would do in this case as to change my filter condition here instead of both filtering Young.

28:58
Male, I would use this to focus on mail. Wow right away. I can see that comparing two women men are spending a lot less time caring for children.

29:14
Now another thing we made improvements on is the compare line in the past. As soon as you hover over a part of the body the chart body, you will get a compare line and some customers are saying from usability perspective. It’s not always easy to have it stop or start at certain point. So we make them to be explicit action that you can drag.

29:43
And you can move it up and down by clicking on the scraper and a move and you can see at the top.

29:51
You got those boxes. This will help you to understand what exactly the number is when you’re moving and when you’re moving your compare line and here’s the interesting fact from comparing this as we get older both genders spent starting to spend equal amount of time caring for children.

30:16
I think because as we are retiring male-female when we’re retired were spending time together looking after grandchildren. That’s what this is implying. But well, it is quite interesting that men spend a lot less time looking after children between that earlier younger ages.

30:38
All right. Let’s take a look at my slide deck again to see what I’ve covered so far so compare card. I’ve gone through the relationship diagram has improved with a simpler starting point. We can also show properties depending on the visualization type. You will get more or less properties.

31:01
We can clarify ambiguity ambiguous feels when you’re doing a type of head and in smarts and I talked about having it to understand more complex questions before I go into reporting. There’s one thing I did not show is that when you’re asking the question we have this thing some something really simple and cool with a very simple command called create dashboard. You can create a dashboard. The dashboard will be generated for you picking out a few inches.

31:37
In fields based on the data. However, what we’ve done is we still have it. We improved it by saying now, I’m focusing on caring for children. I got this visualization, but I can also create and I can also create a dashboard from this visualization specifically. So if I just click on that, which means it’s this dashboard is automatically generated for me.

32:04
It’s going to use caring for children as the main interesting Focus data set and a show me interesting insights around it like rebuilding this dashboard for me. If you just say create dashboard. Usually you would get multiple tabs at the top. But in this case, I’m only getting one tab because I want to focus on just data array insights around time spent caring for children.

32:34
So here there are interesting course, there are Strong correlations between caring for children with weekly earnings for example age range is the one that I actually discovered at myself because I thought that would be interesting one smart engine. Also a great there’s also weekly hours worked comparing to caring for children and what drives caring for children as one of the driver analysis.

33:05
All right, so, that’s all good and let me go ahead close some of these and go back to continue with my reporting module.

33:18
So for Carlos and Alex reporting, I want to mention that it is still a very important investment area for us. It is our bread and butter of the product. We continue to looking at a few areas to improve. So first of all, yeah.

33:38
We have many visualization engines maybe too many definitely too many, but the latest visualization engine 11.1 is the one that we continue to invest going forward. It is a modern visualization engine that solves a lot of modern use cases. One thing we’ve added. Of course, we’re waving at continue to add more properties and types. We added more server side support such as the ability to Output in PDF for a lot of visualizations.

34:13
One thing though is that it doesn’t matter how many properties are different types that we add customers will always have requests for even more custom or a different type. That’s just specific to their field to their business area to their industry that may not be very common for other customers in other Industries and it’s unrealistic for us to just keep adding very industry-specific.

34:42
One of visualizations as one of the out-of-the-box visualization. So the way to satisfy that use case to solve that problem is as having this new feature to support custom visualizations where you can bring a JavaScript-based visualization such as D3 high charts into the product and here I’ve got a quick little video here and the way to use it is very similar to a out-of-the-box visualization.

35:10
So right now this user has Capability to upload a custom visualization and as a report all sir the way that you have to alter this visualization is to just drag it drop from the custom visualization part and you can’t leverage the properties that’s already built in this example is using a dashboard canvas, but the same exact experience user experience workflow applies to reporting as well. So that’s one in reporting have the same?

35:42
Exact user workflow here. And if you are the love the developer, you might be wondering how do I like what does it take to bring these custom visualizations in so we have this custom visualization SDK framework built for you to be able to connect to a custom visualization and we can create generate a lot of the definition files automatically.

36:12
The ones that Cognos will understand and as a developer, what’s good about this is we also added a developer widget. So it’s called test visualization what this means is before you import it into Cognos for everyone to use it. You may be constantly changing the code. You have to be a D3 developer with JavaScript developer really to understand how to change the code and that’s the part. I can’t teach you unfortunately.

36:42
But if you are a developer understand the code you may be making changes in the JavaScript code. You want to know how that change influences the outcome. So with this developer test widget thing you’ll be able to test your changes live to see how that outcome is. Once you’re happy with this then you can zip it up into a zip file and import we have this community that we’re building up Community.

37:08
We want to put more content on the community and this is a very good Opportunity to use case for us to leverage our current Community have more samples uploaded there. So right now in the community, we have four simple custom visualizations. You can download them zip them up and import and use it as it and they all have some properties built.

37:32
We created already for example changing pallets changing shapes or indexes or you can use them as a starting point as simple to understand how Different files may work between what kind of file that you need. What kind of changes you need to make we have very detailed information on our website to tell you what needs to be done. When needs to be installed in order to make this to work. So customizations are available in both reporting and Bash boarding and exploration.

38:03
One thing one catch thing is this is not going to be available when you output to PDF because these are all JavaScript-based visualizations, which means it requires A browser to render we continue to look for look for a PDF Excel server side of rendering technology to handle when something is JavaScript-based. I know there’s headless Chrome browser as one of the possible technology to use but that has this done false as well. We want to make sure whatever solution would choose.

38:38
It’s going to satisfy most of the customer’s environment and set up.

38:45
Be compact legendary talked about and that is I showed it in dash boarding. But that also is available in reporting in reporting as a report officer can set the space of the legend or as a report consumer on the report output. You can directly configure how much the legend space you want to see and Jupiter notebook integration.

39:12
We have this in the product since 11. 1.0 11.1 the one and it was available with dash boarding. We finally finished the work to have it support reporting as well.

39:28
This means as a jupyter notebook user data scientist, mostly likely can use Python to augment data that’s stored in Cognos or Edith so it is an integration that directly with in Cognos analytics environment where you can work with the notebook IDE that you’re familiar with using python connecting to data that’s stored within Cognos augment the data and have it post back directly into Cognos and from there users can use these augmented data as one of the data source that they’re familiar with be a data set.

40:12
Set or data module and if you created any output cells like this one showing the screenshot. You can also bring these into a report as part of the presentation. This is again available for HTML output only because we use the browser to actively render and querying the notebook sales, but it is available for safety report output.

40:39
So if you are in the company who does a lot of schedule Report to run the night before so when user comes in the next morning, they can just sit there and click on the link of a report does not have to wait for the report to finish executing. They get the report output right away. It’s for performance reasons. They will also get the notebook output. That’s part of the report The Notebook output will have a little clock icon on the top right to indicate. What is the last refreshed?

41:11
I’m so that the user will get that information to understand. What is the time frame the Notebook has rendered has refreshed.

41:21
So next data modules, we have improved joints. So when you’re creating table joins now you get a few more options. It’s a greater or so, basically none equal joints operators. You can use now when you’re trying to Define decide how you want the columns to match what kind of relationship when they’re matched when you’re creating joints. We’ve also simplified the data group creation.

41:51
This is mostly is for when you’re creating data group in data modules on the measure field. You can create all these bins of ranges right now. We’ve added the ability to create a data group individual groups using measures as well. So you can pick the first rain chance the last wrench into the same group. It’s a lot more flexibilities. I works now similar.

42:17
It’s almost like converting your numeric to measures to attributes kind of data group categorical data groups we have also released a special data module and a special can the data source connection to the weather company data. So now you have the ability if you have purchased weather company data, you can leverage this built-in out of the box data source connection and a built-in package this package. It has a lot of metadata logic already configured for you that will help you to understand tree.

42:58
Weather data as a special type of data. So it’s really all you need to do is get access to weather data connect to it. Click on the data module. If you want to combine it with something else your own data, you can do some modeling there and start using that as part of your report or dashboard.

43:22
We have a new home page. So this new home page and let me go back to here is I had it toggled off but then when you toggle it on it says show Welcome. I’ve got some futuristic images said the top right makes it more lively. You can take a quick tour.

43:41
We have SIMPLE links how to cut a lock catwalk This is to aim at helping users to quickly understand how to get started with You can toggle it on and off you can switch the tile view to list view. If you have lots of content, you want to have a detailed list view you can you can toggle them you can switch back and forth. So that’s the home page.

44:10
And pricing and licensing. We have an update. We have a new analytics viewer license. This is the existing information distribution license, which allows currently allows users to consume a already executed report so view saved outputs or see a PDF output. So these are the users who don’t run reports on execute report.

44:31
So we are now renaming the information distribution license good thing we’re renaming it was quite long to worried even Alex viewer and with this viewer license, you can also have the ability to run a dashboard without getting that pencil. So in a dashboard, it has been that anyone who has the capability to access dashboard will also be able to edit and to access that pencil now, we’ve changed it. You can’t have a type of user as part of your analytics viewer license the new license which used to be exact information distribution license.

45:09
And have those users to have the ability just run a dashboard without editing making any modification. However, like I mentioned earlier a few times that for example for testing a lot of the interactive features are still available for these users directly on the dashboard output. It’s not just a static image. It’s not just a pretty picture so they can do a lot.

45:36
Here are some useful links and that concludes my presentation.

45:43
We’ve got is Michael as it back to you to jump to do some finishing sites. Okay, thank you very much. You covered a lot of really great material in a very short period of time. So thank you very much everyone stick around though because there’s a ton of great questions Rachel.

45:59
Please go over to the question panel and peruse that they’ll that you know, they obviously kind of flow in the order of the reporting the exploration to dashboards Etc. that you covered so we’ll get to those the end of the presentation before we do though.

46:15
We always like to offer waste its interests might be able to help you these environments are complex and we offer bi expert help to give you access to our entire team of bi experts to fill in as needed whether it’s high level strategic guidance to Rolling your sleeves up boots-on-the-ground assistance and everything in between including training to either expand or augment your in-house expertise and or augment your staff you can Learn more about that at the link found in the document here, or you can always reach out to us ping us via the chat or email or call us and we’ll provide all that information again at the end of the presentation in the next slide. We offer some very specific packages that around helping with Cognos.

47:00
We can help you with a quick start upgrade, which is really just in your Dev environment and we document that for you through to a full upgrade implementation across all your different environments again with full Documentation and we can offer you a bi experts on demand as Illustrated in the slide prior. And then for those of you who don’t know about us here at Senturus. We are you can advance to the next slide. Actually you can go you can go ahead to slides if you want Rachel we do offer. We are a full-service full spectrum business intelligence analytics services company and what do we do? Our clients know us for providing Clarity from the chaos complex business?

47:42
Kermit’s Myriad and ever-expanding data sources and constantly moving and changing targets. We’ve made a name for ourselves because of our strength and bridging that Gap that exists between it and your business users. We deliver solutions that give you access to Reliable analysis ready data across your organization. So you can quickly and easily get answers at the point of impact the decisions you make and the actions you take and the next slide our Consultants are leading experts in the field of Anna.

48:12
X with years of pragmatic Real World Experience, including migrations and upgrades we’re so confident in our team and this interest methodology that we back our projects with a 100% money back guarantee that is unique in the industry the next slide cover NASCAR Slide here. We’ve been at this for a while and we’ve done this for a lot of people we’ve from The Fortune 500 to the mid-market 1300 plus clients over 2500 successful projects ranging across every line of Business from The Office of Finance to sales.

48:42
Marketing HR it and others. So we hope if you have a business intelligence project, you will turn to Senturus and let us leverage our expertise for you. And then we have a couple before we get into the Q&A again get those questions into the question panel. We have a couple excellent resources here for you leading our upcoming events. We got some really great ones coming up here. You can always find out the latest events. Its interest.com slash events the big one coming up here.

49:12
Is next week the Northern California Cognos user group meeting that will be to get back up one slide there Rachel. It’ll be November 5th in San Francisco. You can register for that at the again at the events page will be doing a couple of great webinars. One of them is featuring. Our Senturus has analytics connector, which allows you to leverage all the great Cognos Meta data and reports via mode to visualization tools, and we’ll be covering our favorite new features in tableau.

49:42
Oh 20 19.3 late in November approaching Thanksgiving. So again bookmark that sites interest.com slash events for all the latest and greatest events all free of charge the next slide there Rachel. If you want to advance the on the resources page senturus.com interest as resources. We have not only our upcoming events, but our fantastic resource Library which will contain all of our past webinars tips and tricks all kinds of great stuff including the presentation the recording and the questions Lon.

50:12
From webinars like today’s and of course our blog which is a great resource for bite-sized information regarding everything that’s top of mind at Senturus currently and then finally we’d be remiss if I left out training we offer comprehensive training for Cognos power bi and Tableau, you can find that at senturus.com training whether you need corporate training that encompasses all the different modes of in-person self-paced learning instructor.

50:42
Ed online courses we offer all of that as well as mentoring as we see that people oftentimes get into classroom learning or self-paced learning and then they need to get to very specific use cases and scenarios in their organization and their specific visualizations and we really help you kind of bridge the gap there and fill in those spaces with our excellent mentoring. All right, great. So the next slide there will come over to the QA. So Rachel hopefully you had a chance.

51:12
As to peruse the questions and let’s start banging them out.

51:18
All right.

51:21
So I’m just going to start to read the questions and I’ll answer two questions as well. The first question. Do you still get interactivity between different graphs with forecasting? Oh the answer is yes, all the interactivities that you’re familiar with selection filtering highlighting. These are still available. Even when you have to yell for casting on the next question about forecasting again. Someone said you have the 11. 1.40.

51:51
Art, but you don’t see the forecasting options or something you need to do to enable that so this function is going to be available. If you have time series plot it on your x axis. So we need that information for sure. And sometimes you don’t get any forecasting information. You can change the confidence level. So we run the statistic predictive algorithm behind the scene if the confidence level is too low, we’re not suggesting.

52:21
Seeing it you can understand that by playing around with a confidence level. And another thing is if your data is too scattered around if it’s too scattered, there is no pattern. There’s no seasonality. There’s nothing then we’re not going to be able to generate forecasting information. So right depend it does depend on the data. We do want to make sure that whatever that we can generate. It’s trustworthy. Right.

52:48
So if the data quality is not there we’re not going to The forecast information the next question does cross that feature supports conditional formatting. Yes. It does. It definition of formatting has not changed for crosstab. You get the default five buckets of different colors and going forward. We want to make it way more customizable to the tighter to a specific data. We’re on a specific sale. We want to do a lot more formatting option for you on the cross have conditional formatting.

53:21
Part will exploration be available in other languages than English? Yes that is on our plan to do it’s not just exploration. It’s more around our AI engine to be able to the natural language engine to be able to understand and respond in other languages right. Now. The highest priority is Spanish and French and that’s currently being hashed out. It is not easy, but it is something we know that we have to do.

53:49
Does this question asking feature available in regular reporting other than the dashboard it is not currently so this is regarding to AI assistant. If you can tell that reporting has an integrated with all the new AI smart features because it just due to the nature of reporting from a older code stream, but it is in our interest. We have been trying very hard to having braiding.

54:19
Reporting to the modern world. We want to continue to support the new features into reporting such as AI assistant forecasting all to insights any of these the new exciting features reporting is going to take a few more releases to catch up because the technology it’s not as compatible, but we’re working on it and we’re working towards it.

54:45
Here’s the question how and where do we get the custom visualizations framework? Is it part of the software? Where do we have to download it from IBM external site, so we have it in our documentation where and how you can download this. This is not part of the software. It’s a note that JS. It’s something that it would download from an external site, but it’s very small.

55:09
It’s not a big framework it just I think there are two things I You need to install your local machine and that’s it. You don’t have to install anything on Cognos server. It’s whoever the developer who would be modifying code is. You just have to install it on your machine and a lot of developers already have them as part of their other day-to-day regular developer tooth.

55:33
Alright, here’s the question. Can we use session parameters data module in data modules? Yes, that should already work. You could verify it. If it’s not just please let us know next question any updates in the release for framework manager site. The question is no and in this is a question is quite popular at like to address it here for sure is that framework manager is not going away. I want to use say that up front. It is something that we continue to support.

56:03
It framework manager is a very powerful modeling tool. I would say it’s still the pretty much the top modeling to on the market can handle so many different use cases.

56:15
We see it as a pretty mature tool our right now Focus area is continue to invest any new features into Data modules, which is the web based modeling to we continue to was support framework manager from release to release but no changes in there unless there’s something critical such as security concerns were conformance update if needed. It is a client.

56:42
It’s a desktop tool there so nervous Not a lot of things that need to be added.

56:48
Next question is whether company data a separate purchase. Yes. It is a separate purchase and then you cannot talk to your account person for more information on the licensing and price or send us a question or ask us on the corners community. So we have this community that offering managers actively monitor. You can also just Google it but it is a separate purchase next question. How can we customize the home page? You can customize it?

57:17
Home page in many different ways depending on what you want to do. You can set a report or dashboard as your homepage per user or you can use extensions. So I have this feature called extensions through extensions. You will be able to create something very different. In fact, yeah. I shut down my slack collaboration tool one thing.

57:41
That was really cool is we have someone on the development side have The Halloween thinned homepage for our internal site. It looks very cool and spooky. Happy Halloween Everyone. By the way. I know you’re probably rushing to get home to get the night started. But yeah, you can absolutely customize anything the buttons the icons the top bar the messaging everything that’s there is customizable.

58:14
Here’s the question any difference in report interface. No, we didn’t change the report interface in the latest release. We try not to change it too much because then people have to relearn where everything is we would only make changes when it’s absolutely necessary. For example between 11.0 version 2 11.1 stream. We have changed in navigation because the old navigation was really difficult to use.

58:41
And that’s why that’s why we have made modifications, but we tend not to change the user interface too much from release to release.

58:51
Next question. How easy is to upgrade from 11.0 that 13? So the upgrade from 11.0 to 11.1. It’s pretty much the same as upgrade from 11.0 doubt 12 to 11. 0.13. We didn’t make a huge changes. It’s not like kind of tend to kind of see 11 that type of upgrade.

59:16
I know some people have had issues upgrading from 10 to 11 because the product has changed quite a bit, but from 11.0 stream to 11.1 stream. It’s not too much change. The only thing is we’ve added the AI and smart into the product which is the one that’s driven behind a lot of the exploration capabilities and a lot of things that you see in dashboard, but there’s no additional configuration and settings that’s needed. You may need a little bit more machine power.

59:48
It depends on how you want to use the tool because does the smarts does require a little bit more resources on the server to process but it’s where I haven’t heard customer having a lot of issues moving between 11.0 stream to 11.1 stream.

1:00:10
Can you please advise any new features for administrators? So for an administrators, I’m not sure if you’re talking about the administration UI part. We have the old demonstration you I still a lot of fat. It’s not brought into the Cognos 11 interface. We continue to bring them in little by little so you will probably notice that’s not for.

1:00:39
Went out for me in particular, but throw the last couple releases you would know this under manage. There are more things that’s been added. We have a bunch of scheduling and excretion type of activities such as data source connection UI all these things lined up for the next couple releases to do. So, we do continue wanting to bring more administrative type of features into the modern world as well.

1:01:11
This the dashboard in condos 11.1 doubt for half the capability to have the glossary and Lynn lineage links to info sphere. Okay.

1:01:22
So this is about a lineage of calmness reporting has lineage support for igc where stash warding doesn’t and we don’t right now currently have a lineage support for data modules So the plan is we’re currently looking at integration with Western knowledge catalog as the first Step four lineage support and after that we’re going to look at expanding that integration type of work to have something more organic so that you don’t have to have another tube but Western knowledge catalog which is the next generation of IGC information governance catalog is the one that we’re going to look at first.

1:02:07
I think we’re over. Oh my goodness. I’m three minutes over.

1:02:12
Yeah, we can so we can if there’s some particularly key questions that you want to answer we can hang on a little bit people usually willing to go over a little bit. If not, what we do is we will download this question log and ask you to complete it and we posted along with the recording and the presentation slide deck. So there’s a ton of questions and they keep coming in. So I understand though we want to be respectful of everybody’s time here.

1:02:40
So did you have any other ones that you saw there that you really wanted to answer live or else we can we can wrap things up.

1:02:50
Why I can’t answer a couple more things. Sure.

1:02:54
Okay. So one of the questions asked twice it’s about performance improvements. So how much performance improvements do you notice in this version? I would say that in two minutes in terms of performance. We continue to look at which areas that we can do better. We are depending on the data source.

1:03:16
Sometimes you look at a query processing if there’s something we can improve or the rendering part from a Perspective if it’s something we can that improve for example, so it’s really there is no one answer to this question. For example, the new crosstab is built with the idea that it’s performing based on our testing as well. It’s performing faster than the old crosstab and handling larger data. We’re doing handling the rendering more efficient and for other things such as data set. We have been continuously improve.

1:03:53
Seeing how we would do the query engine querying against it and caching for DQM. We continue to look at how we improve cashing. There are many things that we continue to work through to make sure that we improve performance or doing performance testing to make sure there is no performance degradation from release to release. So it’s really hard to say depending on what type of reports were dashboard. What kind of visualization you use and what data source that you’re connecting to?

1:04:25
I would answer this active report question as my last question here is that the question is any updates on active reports? So active reports story as such as a uses MHT extension, which is only supported by IE right now and Microsoft is going away from IE. So we really need a solution for active report what you have been what we’ve been doing and what you’re seeing.

1:04:53
NG is we start adding a lot of popular active report features and functionalities into regular reports. I’ve always a believer that if you are using active report for the reason that you want to have an interactive report output for your report consumer, it’s not reasonable to have to let you create a different type of report. I really think that any report that you create you can just decide if you want interactivity.

1:05:23
We’re So I really want to bring the active report use case into the regular report and have you just use regular report way of altering to create something that’s very interactive the new type of visualizations. You’ve seen with JavaScript-based when you render that in a magician in HTML format, you get all these active report type of interactions interactivities without going back to the database. It talks to the Json data store that’s cashed with the browser.

1:05:51
It’s really performant and we’re working on is to have a similar style browser site rendered list object. And after that we’re going to have new prompt controls that’s using can leverage browser cache data. Some newer modern controls such as tabs and Sliders and buttons that allows you to customize. So when that’s all happening in the next couple of releases, we should be very close.

1:06:23
Active report when active report can generate now the offline scenario use case is the one that we still don’t have a solution for we need a new packaging mechanism that’s going to be supported on all browsers all operating systems. And for the last three years and a half. I’ve been searching haven’t seen the technology that’s mature enough that we can leverage. We may be we have been looking at if we need to invent something our own work written.

1:06:53
App or do a browser plug-in that is still being investigated. So we’re a little bit far from replacing the all flying at use case.

1:07:02
Great. Thank you Rachel. That is a lot of great information. And as I said, we’ll download the question log here as we wrap up, and we will we’ll give that to you Rachel for completion of the ones we didn’t answer online, and then we’ll post it along with the recording and the deck. So if you could just advance to the last slide we’d like to first and foremost. Thank you Rachel for a great presentation.

1:07:27
That was some exciting stuff and thank you to all of our Attendees today for taking time out of your day to join us. If you’d care to contact us. You can reach us at www.gross.com. You can email us or pick up the phone at our Triple Eight number and we encourage you to connect with us via our various social media platforms to keep up to date on all our great events and resources and offerings via LinkedIn Slide Share YouTube Twitter and or Facebook. So, thank you everyone for your time today and have a great rest of your day. Will see you on another event.

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