IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

Review the Cognos Business Intelligence products, and the many important new features and capabilities for version 10.2. Before you install Cognos BI V10.2, consider your IT environment and your users and their business intelligence requirements. Careful planning facilitates performance, the best use of your resources, and helps you to avoid potential problems.

• Product overview

  Learn how Cognos BI provides reports, analysis, dashboards, and scoreboards to help support the way people think and work when they are trying to understand business performance.

• New features

  Explore an organized view of the new Cognos BI V10.2 features by functional area and audience role.

• IBM Redbooks

  Examine the features and capabilities in Cognos BI. For example, a new redbook for Cognos BI V10.2 explains the core features of the Dynamic Cubes capabilities.

• Software environments

  Consult this list of environments that Cognos BI V10.2 supports, such as operating systems, patches, browsers, web servers, directory servers, database servers, and application servers.

• Release notes

  Review the release notes before you install Cognos so that you are aware of all issues that can affect your installation strategy.

• Architecture and deployment guide

  Read a description of the architecture from the perspectives of structure, communications, workflow, and security. Find information to help you plan an installation, improve performance, and secure a deployment.

• Distribution options

  Decide how you to install Cognos BI V10.2 in your environment. This document describes the distribution options for Cognos BI components and what to do to prepare for the installation.

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After carefully planning your system, you can begin installing the various prerequisites and components. These documents provide step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring components of Cognos BI V10.2.

• Cognos BI V10.2 installation and configuration

  Get instructions for installing, upgrading, configuring, and testing Cognos BI V10.2. Find information about changing application servers, and setting up samples.

• Cognos Statistics installation and configuration

  Use Cognos Statistics with Cognos BI V10.2 to provide business users, analysts, and programmers with the ability to analyze, view, and present complex data. Learn what tasks are required for installation, configuration, and administration.

• Cognos Virtual View Manager installation and configuration

  Use Virtual View Manager, a server product to help business users query different and distributed information sources and create a unified view of their business information. Find instructions for installing and configuring Cognos Virtual View Manager with Cognos BI server and Cognos Framework Manager.

• Cognos PowerPlay installation and configuration

  Get instructions about installing, configuring, and testing Cognos PowerPlay.

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New versions provide enhancements that can affect many components, such as product features and functions, performance and scalability, and usability. Find information that you can use when you upgrade your existing Cognos BI environment to version 10.2.

• How to access content from previous a Cognos release from within the Cognos 10 portal

  Learn how you can enable multi-version co-existence to view content from an earlier release of Cognos software in the Cognos BI V10 portal.

• Cognos Lifecycle Manager user guide

  Take advantage of this proven practice upgrade process, from project planning and status reporting to upgrade verification and identification of compatibility issues between releases.

• Upgrade IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

  Learn how to upgrade to Cognos BI V10.2.

• Cognos Series 7 to Cognos BI migration

  If you have Cognos Series 7 and want to move to the latest version Cognos BI, access planning and technical documents, professional migration service assistance, and education.

• Planning a migration from Cognos Series 7 to Cognos BI

  Find information to help you plan to move metadata and applications from Cognos Series 7 to Cognos BI.

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After you install and configure, administrators can consult these documents for server administration, data management, security and content administration, activities management, customization, and portal services administration.

• IBM Cognos Connection

  Use Cognos Connection to administer servers, optimize performance, set access permissions, and schedule and distribute reports, agents, and metrics.

• Proven practice for using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse with Cognos 10

  Learn techniques for using SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP BW) as a data source in Cognos BI.

• Control access to Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced tools in the Cognos 10 portal

  Learn how to restrict access to Cognos Business Insight and Cognos Business Insight Advanced.

• Security model

  Gain a better understanding of the Cognos security environment in various situations, from a proof of concept application where security is rarely enabled to a large-scale enterprise deployment.

• Securing the deployment

  Understand the configuration strategies to use to secure your Cognos installation.

• Configure Cognos components to use an authentication provider

  Find out how to configure Cognos BI to use an existing authentication provider.

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Learn how to create data models that enforce design standards.

• Modeling metadata

  Explore fundamental Cognos modeling concepts that help you understand how to model metadata for use in business reporting and analysis, and guidelines for building the relational model.

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These documents provide the business report author information and step-by-step procedures and background information to help explore and analyze data, build ad hoc, standard, and complex reports, integrate with Microsoft® Office, and manage business performance.

• Cognos BI query and reporting: Gain insight and outperform

  Download the "Gain insight and outperform" document to learn about some of the Cognos BI query and reporting capabilities, such as built-in collaboration and social networking, and Cognos Active Report that enables users to access and interact with report and dashboard content whether they are connected to or disconnected from the network.

• Cognos Report Studio user guide

  Find step-by-step procedures and background information to help you create standard and complex reports.

• Cognos Workspace user guide

  Get step-by-step procedures and background information to help you create workspaces. Cognos Workspace is a web product for creating interactive workspaces by using Cognos content and external data sources, according to your specific information needs.

• The IBM Cognos 10 Dynamic Query Cookbook

  Learn techniques for using dynamic query mode in Cognos BI V10.2. The information also describes product behavior, query optimization, configuring data source connections for Oracle Essbase, SAP BW, and TM1, and how Framework Manager uses dynamic query mode.

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When a problem occurs in your Cognos BI installation or application, you must determine the scope of the problem, which components are involved, and how to solve the issue. Find information about troubleshooting problems, and links to accessing support and services from IBM.

• Cognos BI V10.2 troubleshooting guide

  Access general troubleshooting information to help resolve problems with Cognos software. Find troubleshooting resources that can help you resolve problems. Learn the common issues by functional area and what steps to take to resolve problems.

• Cognos Enterprise BI forum

  Exchange ideas and share solutions with your peers in the Cognos community. Active participation in the forum allows all participants to get the maximum return. All information is for community discussion and not considered IBM support.

• IBM Cognos SDK solutions and diagnostic tools

  Use these diagnostic tools to help verify your environment, troubleshoot issues, and automate the collection of detailed systems information when you need it. Diagnostic results can be attached to cases logged with IBM Cognos Support, significantly reducing time spend during data collection.

• Cognos utility for checking the knowledge base (technotes) for help to resolve errors in the cogserver log file

  Download and install this utility to show the Cognos technotes that are associated with an error code from the cogserver.log file. Solutions that you can try are included.

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Cognos BI offers technical training and education services that are designed to suit your application, role, timeline, and preferred learning format. Check out some of the available courses by job role.

• Professional Author

  Find training courses for the professional author. The professional author builds sophisticated reports and dashboards for a wide range of heterogeneous consumers by gathering report requirements and creating the reports for distribution. These authors are Involved in setting up business events management activities.

• Business Author

  Find training courses for the business author. The business author builds simple queries to focus on variances, sifts through large amounts of data, and investigates different areas of the business through ad hoc reports and interactive analyses.

• Developer

  Find training courses for the developer. The developer is responsible for building databases, models, or applications for users. These responsibilities can include data mart development, metadata and OLAP models, build and deployment of scorecards, and development of SDK applications.

• Project Manager

  Find training courses for the project manager. The project manager is responsible for managing the development, maintenance, and deployment of BI solutions (manages budgets, objectives, risks, people, and time-lines associated with fulfilling a defined scope of requirements for a Cognos BI implementation or migration.

• Administrator

  Find training courses for the administrator. The administrator manages the deployment of Cognos BI, including installation, configuration, maintenance, content management, security, and system optimization.

• Consumer Role

  Find training courses for the consumer. The consumer uses the Cognos Connection portal to view reports; customizes personal portal experience; and manages personal content and view scorecards.

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To help you learn the features and capabilities in Cognos 10 BI, use the samples to guide you through the process of building an application. The samples are an introduction to key concepts about how to model your data, create, query, and analyze reports.

• Samples overview and installation

  Learn how to install and set them up. Before you can use the samples, Cognos BI must be installed, configured, and running.

• Cognos BI getting started

  Learn more about the Cognos BI architecture from this tutorial that includes examples to illustrate key functions.

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