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?

Hi all,

Quick note to let you know that SpotOn will be conducting a public GBI webinar this Thursday at 2 PM Eastern.  We will be discussing and demonstrating how the geographic perspective can augment and enhance your core business intelligence.

We hope you can join us!

Chris

Hello again,

I've been working through a specific issue where I wanted to dynamically set the value of a Cognos 8.4 Text Box Prompt with Javascript. I immediately went to my previous blog posting to copy and paste the code! Unfortunately, this only got me half way.

Since the Cognos prompts aren't simply HTML form elements, it did not suffice to try searchPrompts("Address").value="HELLO!!!". What I REALLY needed to do was simulate the user typing the desired text. So, after spending some time trying to understand what is going on in the background, I'm pleased to announce that with just a few lines of Javascript, I can easily set the value!

<SCRIPT> function setTextBoxPromptValue(promptName, promptValue) { var SpotOnTargetControl = G_PM_THIS_.getControlByName(promptName); var SpotOnPCType=SpotOnTargetControl._type_; if(SpotOnPCType == "cognos.Prompt.Control.Text") { SpotOnTargetControl.bParse(promptValue,""); SpotOnTargetControl.setCurrentValue(); SpotOnTargetControl.checkData(); } } </SCRIPT> <A onclick='setTextBoxPromptValue("Address","520 Bronson Ave.")' href="#">Set Value for Address</A><BR>

For over two years, we've applied our expertise in the IBM Cognos architecture and SDK to solve the challenge of GIS/enterprise mapping integration within an IBM Cognos BI report.  Amidst the blood, sweat, and many tears, the development experience and successful implementations have opened our eyes to the incredible business impact of integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with IBM Cognos BI software. 

Originally we gravitated to the term "Location intelligence", but as we gained insight and experience in the possibilities of the IBM Cognos-GIS integration we came to the belief that Geospatial Business Intelligence (GBI) was a more appropriate term.
 
Business Intelligence (BI) is all about extracting high value information from data, and getting the right information in the right format to the right people within the organization.  Whereas, Geospatial Business Intelligence (GBI) is about bringing the power of GIS and spatial analysis to the information foundation provided by the IBM Cognos BI solution.
 
As a concept, GBI is certainly not new.  Rather what is new is the ability for IBM Cognos customers to implement and benefit from GBI without the need for custom coding.  With the release of our award-winning SpotOn Vantage software, you can now seamlessly integrate third-party visualizations, such as live, interactive maps from ESRI directly into your IBM Cognos system and reports. 
 
Today we are busy enabling GBI within a growing number of IBM Cognos customers - across a variety of industries.  In fact, on a regular basis we learn of yet another novel customer requirement for the integration of a map (both geographic and operational floorplans) into their IBM Cognos reports.  Never in a million years would we have been able to imagine all of these unique demands for GBI when we ventured into this area of expertise.

The declaration of our commitment to GBI does not represent a departure from our core business of providing IBM Cognos SDK services - far from it!  Assisting organizations that want to integrate, extend, and customize their IBM Cognos BI solutions will remain an integral part of our business. 
 
Rather we see our expertise in GBI as a natural extension to our IBM Cognos SDK professional services practice.  Thus, from a product and services perspective, our company will continue to take a leadership role in the enablement of GBI for IBM Cognos customers.  SpotOn Vantage is evidence of our commitment to GBI - as are the partnerships, the awards, and most importantly - the customers that we have earned as a result of our GBI expertise.  

Having released SpotOn Vantage, we won't be taking time to rest.  Rather we vow to continue to invest in R&D and product development to better our out-of-the-box and custom GIS integration solutions for our IBM Cognos customers.

Hi All,

During a recent client engagement, we came across an issue that some of you may have encountered: trying to access prompt controls at runtime.

In the past a Report Studio author could write something like this:

var x = getFormWarpRequest();
var y = x.elements["my control name"];

Of course, this is no longer the case in Cognos 8.4. Instead, the prompt control IDs are system-generated and obfuscated at runtime. In order to access the prompt controls now, you have to first obtain the obfuscated value, and then locate the control.

I've written a piece of code that seems to let me find the prompt control. I hope it helps your efforts!

In brief:

var y = searchPrompts("My prompt name");

<SCRIPT> function searchPrompts(promptName) { var SpotOnTargetControl = G_PM_THIS_.getControlByName(promptName); var SpotOnPCType=SpotOnTargetControl._type_; var SpotOnPCID = SpotOnTargetControl._id_; var SpotOnPCPrefix = ""; switch(SpotOnPCType) { case "cognos.Prompt.Control.SelectValue": SpotOnPCPrefix="PRMT_SV_"; break; case "cognos.Prompt.Control.Text": SpotOnPCPrefix="PRMT_"; break; case "cognos.Prompt.Control.DateTime": SpotOnPCPrefix="PRMT_"; break; case "cognos.Prompt.Control.Date": SpotOnPCPrefix="PRMT_"; break; } var SpotOnFW = getFormWarpRequest(); var SpotOnEL = SpotOnPCPrefix+SpotOnPCID; var SpotOnTargetElement = document.getElementById(SpotOnEL); return SpotOnTargetElement; } </SCRIPT> <A onclick='searchPrompts("TEST_LIST")' href="#">Get List named:TEST_LIST</A><BR> <A onclick='searchPrompts("TEST_TEXT")' href="#">Get Text named:TEST_TEXT</A><BR> <A onclick='searchPrompts("TEST_CALENDAR")' href="#">Get CALENDAR named:TEST_CALENDAR</A>

Wow, two blogs in one night! I'm wrapping up an engagement where a client was effectively looking for Framework Manager functionality on the web. That is to say, the ability to augment a model without using the FM application.

THe solution? Its been around since the beginning of Report Net: Report Studio. That's right, we're using Report Studio to modify models. Here's the scenario the client was looking at:

• Dynamically publish a model based on an ever-changing database schema (no problem, we do Metadata Automation all the time)
• Client wanted to add new query items to specific query subjects frequently

We showed the client a project from our past where we performed similar actions using Report Studio. The end result for the client: A report author can create calculations and data items, and have them automatically added to the model!

Ingredients: a little Report Studio, a dash of SDK, a mouse click, and stand back for about 2 seconds while the process completes!

Next time they go into a studio, the new data items are there! Oh yeah, did I mention that we also allowed the client to implement security on those new items?

Would like to hear from anyone who thinks this might be useful for their Cognos deployments.

Kudos to Ling T. and Chris T. on this project!

- Darren

Last week we had one of our sharp young Solution Architects, Pierre Seguin, attend a discussion on virtualization.  At SpotOn we're actively thinking about the management of Cognos BI in virtual-type deployments.  Pierre has kindly shared his notes and thoughts from the discussion:  

Virtualization has been around for a long time but as of late it has absolutely exploded. With good hardware support, software support, and the need for organizations to consolidate their server assets, this wave of virtualization seems to be here to stay for a while. On this note I attended The Cutting Edge on Virtualization panel discussion hosted by The Ottawa Network on Wednesday. The panel consisted of Mike Kemp, CTO of Liquid Computing, Jean-Marc Seguin, Chief Architect of Embotics, and the founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay. I wasn't sure what to expect but it turned out that the talk was pretty interesting. Here's my take on the events of the day.

They started out by outlining the state of the art in virtualization. The consensus seemed to be that when it comes to individual virtual machines the tools and hardware are there to support them in the main stream (and in fact all large organizations are currently doing this). Xen, VMWare, Intel VT-x, Itanium based virtualization, Solaris virtualization stack, the list goes on. The basic virtualization hardware and software is there and mature. The big problem today is the management of large virtualized environments. Bringing machines up, putting them down, moving them to different hardware, monitoring them, etc. This is all done by either a restrictive framework (ex. Solaris virtualization stack) or in most cases a completely different hodgepodge of tools at each organization. At some point in the future a large corporation (cough IBM) will inevitably come in and introduce open standards to support virtualized environment management. In the mean time we make due. The consensus is that this is some years off. Current work in virtualization (of which Liquid Computing and Embotics are heavily involved in) is concentrated on making management tools that can be used to describe, deploy and monitor virtualized environments on the fly. This is to say nothing about doing the same for application tier components that exist in the virtualized space.

The other aspect that was talked about was how virtualization is used in the dev/QA environment. The founder of Thinknostic, Miro Adamay, was one of the panel members. His company does custom development for many different clients.  Sound familiar? Have you ever had a client come back 6 months after you've completed a project and ask for new features? You're thinking ‘Great!' so you start to get to work only to find out your development and testing environments for the project have been cannibalized by other, more current projects. So, you go back to square one and set up the test environment from scratch just to get to the work they want you to do. It's all very tedious. To solve this problem his company has leveraged virtualization. His virtualization system consists of 55 virtual machines of which any 15 can be running simultaneously. So when a customer needs a new feature or bug fix they simply load the virtual machine associated with the project and bang! They're off to the races. We have had some good talks internally and are unanimous that this is a great fit for us too. This has become pretty standard in the industry and it's time we get on board.

All in all a very interesting field where opportunities seem to exist around every corner. Either internally for dev/QA streamlining or externally for creating the plethora of tools that will be needed to bring virtualization to the next level within the enterprise. We'll have to see where it takes us.

Pierre