Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

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?