Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Black and white; day and night, etc... 

When it comes to using Gantt charts (i.e. MS Project) as a management tool, there likely are two distinct camps.  If I’m any indication, the two sides are quite wary of each other, to say the least – “I don’t care what it says, there are more than 8 hours in a day!” 

Google “love” + “gantt” and you will see that there is a [eerie...] yin to my yang.

This 2-sided paradigm seems to extend to Cognos BI deployments: those that care about Gantt charts; and those that don’t. For those that care, they really care, to the point where some crazy attempts have been made to satisfy their Gantt-love desires.  Life just isn’t the same without those horizontal bars being there for help manage complex projects.

Outside of the “interesting” crosstab technique referenced above, Gantting (I just made that word up) has not been supported within Cognos BI.  However last month, SpotOn engineer Mark Mallany wrote (read: prematurely announced, but what the heck) about the introduction of Gantt charts in a Cognos 8 environment through SpotOn Vantage.  Since then, we have whipped up prototype Gantt charts for Fortune-type clients and others – with the interactive Gantt visual inside the Cognos 8 Viewer, driven by the report queries.  They now have a manageable and effective way of distributing their critical Gantt charts to thousands of users throughout their worldwide Cognos deployment.

On top of all this, the charts are functional.  That means:

• Data driven styles where specific styles and colors appear for “critical” tasks.
• Interactive task tree on the left side of the chart.
• Display of other tabular data in a list on the left of the chart.
• Drill up and down on timelines.
• Zoom in and out of various elements of the chart.
• Task rollups.
• And much more...

Are Gantt charts in your Cognos 8 environment important to you?  We are definitely looking to understand this space (Gantt charts in BI reports) better. Let's you and I have a chat!

CO

Say you want to change your Cognos security environment from one provider to another, Series 7 LDAP to Active Directory as an example.  Or how about migrating from two namespaces to one?  How about the other way around, from one to two?  Impossible, right?  Well, not so fast.

We have heard from a number of mid to large sized organizations that were close to throwing in the towel when it came to changing security applications and migrating their Cognos namespaces.  The task of migrating individual user policies, memberships, schedules, ownerships, folders, and more from one environment to another seems simple at first, then customers discover the complexities of the Cognos Content Store, and simple quickly turns to impossible.

Here are a handful of the technical roadblocks they ran into moving from existing to new namespace:

• Moving and accessing users My Folder content
• Migrating Schedule recipients information
• Maintaining integrity of Schedule owner and executer information
• Preserving user preference settings
• Migrating policies on content
• etc

We have a technology-enabled service that simplifies the auditing and reassigning of objects in the Content Store to the new authentication provider.  When we show folks how we approach the task, they initially look on with sceptical curiosity, and then they see it work. The scepticism turns into relief.

In our experience, helping customers get through this usually takes inside of a week or two.  One customer, prior to “finding us”, was planning on 6 to 9 months for their migration.  In two weeks we made some folks heroes in their company.

The way we see it, you have 3 options when looking to migrate your namespace:

1. Come to the conclusion that it is impossible and simply don’t change security providers.  This may not be an option for you.
2. Manually move every user and their policies from one environment to another – including copying My Folder content to a Public Folder, and then back to the new My Folder....  Hmmm, no thanks.  Too time consuming and too mistake riddled.
3. See if the SpotOn namespace migration service will work for you. 

Bottom line – you have to see it to believe it!

How are you planning your Cognos namespace migration?

We keep getting into these BI-GIS conversations, and it is sometime hard to know if we are acting as a "GBI translator", or just annoying people.  I suspect it's quite often the latter, but at least people remember us, right..?

A while back we were kindly asked to participate in a Proof of Technology session with a large insurance company.  Our topic was the technical integration of Cognos BI and Esri ArqGIS.  I kicked off the discussion with the suggestion that upon presentation of their geospatial reporting requirements, the BI vendor would propose a company dashboard targeted to 10,000 users that happened to include a map.  The GIS perspective would be an insanely rich and powerful location-based risk analysis application that would could be leveraged by a handful of GIS  analysts.

Two radically different solutions from the same set of requirements, and the right answer is likely between the two.  This got head nods and chuckles from the client, fairly  muted responses from the other vendors.

The crux of the issue is the hammer and nail analogy, your going to see the world through the perspective and strength of your solution. If you boil both BI and GIS solutions down to their essence, they are both simply information systems presenting business insight to users. 

Time to add the handsaw to the toolbox and start giving organizations the information they want and need.

PS; we haven't been invited back to another Proof of Technology since…

Hello all,

We’re going to shake this blog thing up a bit.  We had some good reasoning behind the decision to launch multiple topic-related blogs.  However, when you boil it all down to its essence, SpotOn exists to help organizations make their Cognos BI “fit”.  Lately the most prominent “fitting” that has been taking place is the inclusion of the spatial perspective (GBI) through the integration of ESRI GIS solutions with the Cognos BI foundation.  At other times its about integration with environments, authentication providers, performance tuning, or just helping clients to understand “how the damn stuff actually works under the covers!” 

Also, we didn’t post enough to make it work…  

So we’re going to bring everything together under one blog cover. 

A couple of mandates:

• Showcase some of the wizbangery that we’re putting together for clients and prospects – and the “why it might matter to you” business value
• Delve into Reporting Excellence and advanced charting and visualization in Cognos reports
• Explore the value of GBI solutions while recounting the interesting GBIS conversations that we find ourselves in
• Discuss BI integration and custom solutions: the good, bad, and everything in between

Plus all the other interesting things (read: shiny objects) that grab our attention and are (arguably…) worth sharing

Most of all, we want to have a conversation.  In our capacity as a IBM Cognos ISV Partner with a specialty niche and a decent reputation, we are exposed to some interesting (cool, wild, sometimes amazingly stupid, etc) stuff.  We’re going to try sharing more. 

Feel free to let us know what you’d like to hear about.  Tell us if you like something we’ve said, and tell us if you don’t.

We hope you enjoy the journey!

Hi everyone,

 I have some exciting news!  We have recently prototyped Gantt chart functionality leveraging the FusionCharts Gantt Chart!

 The plan is for the new Gantt charts functionality would be another easily configurable visualization in the Vantage suite that can be embedded seamlessly into your cognos reports and dashboards.  Here is a little sample of what can be done with them:

SpotOn's Vantage solution was recently featured in the IBM thought leadership whitepaper:

Data governance for geographical information systems.

Check out page 17 (figure 5) and page 18.  Thanks to IBM for featuring SpotOn as thought leaders.  Our customers on the GBI journey agree as well!

co

Hello Everyone,

 I have recently been reading Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few. It looks at dashboard design, specifically how to present your data to optimized the dashboards usefullness. If you would like more information on Stephen Few or his writings you can find it here http://www.perceptualedge.com/

In  Information Dashboard Design, Stephen Few presents a interesting new graph that "achieves the communication objective without the problems that usually plague guages and meters".  The Bullet graph presents a lot of data in one compact visual display that is easily intrepeted.

 Luckily vCharts allows you to quickly configure Bullet Graphs in few short steps.

• Set your Target ( the dash)
• Set your Value ( the bar)
• Set your Color Ranges ( Background Colors) -these can be both dynamically based on your data set or set manually in Chart Studio.

 The only thing left to do is set up your colors and margins just as you want them.  In the following example you will see that you can get a lot of data in one Graph.

A quick description of the data in the Chart

• The Target (Vertical Dash) is projected Revenue 
• The Value (Horizontal Bar) is the actual Revenue
• Color Ranges
  • Darkest Blue indicates the Gross Profit
  • Middle Blue indicated the Production Cost
  • Lightest Blue just a background color.

If you want more info on Bullet Graphs or more information of Stephen Few and his methodolgies or writings, check out http://www.perceptualedge.com/

Hi everyone,

 Often in vCharts you will want to format your numbers. Personally, I have often found that limiting the # of decimals makes a big time change in the ease at which a chart or gauge is interpreted.

 Today I will give you a little run through on how to set up scaling in your charts. By default Fusion Charts does not include Billions 'B' (ex $100.0 B ) in their scaling, so lets add that in.

There are three properties that you need to modify:

• Change 'Number Scale Value' to 1000,1000,1000 ( Fusion Charts defaults this to 1000,1000)
• Change 'Number Scals Unit' to 'B,M,K' (Fusion Charts defaults this to M,K)

A quick demo :

And thats it folks, we are good to go. Now all of your Billion values can be nicely formatted.  

Hey everyone.

 Lets add a trend line to our standard column chart!

Currently trend lines are an advanced feature only configurable by using the "Advanced Configuration" area. In order to add these you need to specify the xml for the trend line.

Here is an example of a trend line xml configuration:

<trendLines> <line startValue='25000000' endValue='26000000' thickness="2" color='330099' displayvalue='Long Term Goal'></line> <line startValue='18000000' endValue='21000000' thickness="2" color='009933' displayvalue='Target' istrendzone="1"></line> </trendLines>

And here is the chart:

As you can see from the xml, the lines are very customizable. Besides the values you can specify, the color, thickness , and you can even configure them into a trend zone!

Hi all,

Do you ever make reports with a report-wide background image?

Here is how to configure your vCharts to have a transparent background so that hey will look good over your background image.

Here is a good demo of what I am going to show you how to do in the form of a Column2D chart:

The image itself was put behind the vChart in report studio using the normal means. All that was left to do was configure my chart (see Post "Our First Chart")

 Here is a list of the properties  in the format area in order to accomplish this effect:

• Show Values ,set False
• Show Labels, set False
• For Background and Canvas Background Color: 
  • Color ,set to Default ( checkbox)
  • Alpha set to 0
  • Ratio set to 100
• Alternate H-Grid Alpha, set 0
• Font Color, Set white.