Introduction

The Data and AI Forum was packed full of keynotes, hands-on labs, product road-maps, and much more. Several of PMsquare’s consultants attended the conference and have put their thoughts together on the top attention grabbers. Enjoy!

Craig Colangelo

• The Mobile app reboot is coming with much more modern capabilities! 

  • Alerts and notifications on the lock screen 

  • Create alerts based on thresholds (in desktop and mobile).

  • Receive OS native notifications.

  • Share alerts with other users across mobile and desktop.

• Share 

  • Using the OS native share panel, send an image and a link to other people.

  • Any app you can set up on your device can be a destination (email, text, Slack, WhatsApp, etc).

  • The new concept of Pinboards to put the data that matters most to you at your fingertips (in desktop and mobile).

  • Can curate sets of visualizations by giving other users access to your pinboards.

• Conversation assistant 

  • Same as assistant introduced in 11.1, but embedded in mobile and using natural language Q&A to interact.

Rory Cornelius

Custom Visualizations 

After years of asking for more functionality and more properties in Cognos visualizations, we finally have the ability to import D3, Google Charts, or a number of other JavaScript-based visualization engines. They're still not "easy" to import into Cognos, but with some coding and configuration, they can be added. Best of all, once they are imported, they behave just like the native visualizations in a Dashboard. You can click on a particular data item, and other visualizations are filtered dynamically whether they are custom D3 or native. The end-user doesn’t need to know the difference.  

 Overall Conference Takeaways 

• Much better than Think!

• Good size, not too big or overwhelming.

• It felt like the new features being talked about were pushing the product ahead in innovative ways, instead of just implementing overdue functionality.

• Good variety of sessions – something interesting in each time slot.

• IBM seems very open to customer feedback and trying to provide ways to engage the customers.

  • They're pushing the updated customer portal.

Sonya Fournier

• Prompts are finally being worked on for reporting and should be released in R6 or R7 (after the new year).  

• New schematics for reporting look really cool and should be a good solution for a lot of customers.  

• I found that the IBM offering managers and resources who were there for the conference were really forthcoming with what they were working on and what didn't work or they felt needed changes. I think because the product is finally back on solid ground and they aren't constantly defending themselves, they were more truthful (that might not be the right word – Less secretive? More open?) 

• Data modules are ready for prime-time except in a few situations. 

• I appreciated how much Cognos content there was and how I could always find sessions that were applicable to what I'm working on.  

• I loved talking to customers at the booth, most of whom started off with, "We are so far behind in versions..."  

Michael Hovar

The key takeaway for me from this year's conference is that the paradigm in enterprise reporting is shifting, and customization is king. The latest and upcoming developments in CA are geared toward empowering the user – both the developer and the end user – to have more interactivity with the application and to design what they want/need. This includes: 

• AI integration as a major ongoing investment, making sci-fi-esque intuitive design commonplace.

• Focus on building the developer community, to better equip and foster dialogue.

• Better and better data modeling in Data Modules allows IT to serve as data "librarians" and bring together nearly limitless data sources for the end user to explore.

  • Framework Manager likely to become obsolete (and quickly).

  • IBM community recognizes that end users are already demanding self-service, and if Cognos isn't their solution, they're finding another tool.

• Taking on the task of imparting good design practice on your user community places Cognos admins/developers in the role of educators as well.

Paul Mendelson

New prompts are finally catching up to modern HTML design. Inline prompts on dashboards, being able to select the orientation, most importantly, being able to search through the prompt values are all exciting new features. This searching will also include tree prompts, which is one of the more commonly requested features.  

The new prompts will allow users to filter locally rendered objects, including the new List object.   

Conclusion

We hope you found this post valuable. In case you missed it, we also presented a webinar featuring more critical highlights and developments from the conference, including Cognos 11.1.4 feature enhancements and whether it’s finally time to move away from Framework Manager. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more great content delivered directly to your inbox.