Deploying IBM Cognos with an AWS Application Load Balancer

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) may seem unnecessary when thinking about architecting Cognos on AWS. ALBs are most often used in serverless patterns or containerized applications. Those architectures obviously don’t apply to Cognos. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow design patterns from other architectures to benefit a Cognos deployment. Two reasons we recommend leveraging an ALB when deploying Cognos are simplified administration and improving your security posture.

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RCM Now - A Digital Daily Management System for Healthcare

Improving payer financial operations and revenue cycle management are vital to the sustainability of hospitals and healthcare organizations. These organizations have already grown accustomed to looming financial challenges: wide-sweeping federal regulations, industry consolidation, and emerging reimbursement models have threatened to destabilize business as usual for years; then COVID-19 happened.

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Amazon QuickSight Complete Guide: Benefits and Pricing

Amazon (AWS) QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service. This means it is a cloud-based service that is globally available, has built-in redundancy, and enterprise-grade security. This allows your business to deliver easy-to-understand insights to users, regardless of their location. Because QuickSight is a relatively new BI tool, most people may be unfamiliar with its features and benefits. So, let us take a look at what differentiates QuickSight from other BI tools and then get into editions and pricing.

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Cognos Security - Best Role Structure & Capability Settings

Do you have a brand-new install of Cognos? What is the first thing you do after your install is done and you have configured Cognos? Start creating reports? Start building dashboards? No! You need to make sure you have security properly configured. Security is one of those things that often gets pushed off until the end of a project but it should be the first thing we do.

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Deploying IBM Cognos on AWS

At PMsquare, we see more and more companies moving Cognos workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The reasons for this move vary from company to company. There may be a desire to reduce architecture and administration costs, improve the reliability of the Cognos infrastructure, dissatisfaction with IBM’s SaaS offering, or the move to the cloud is being mandated by a larger company initiative. Whatever the reason, if you need to migrate Cognos to a public cloud you will likely have many questions and this blog series will answer them!

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Securing Cognos Folders & Objects

When someone talks about security in Cognos Analytics, there are several things that they could be referring to. "Security" could mean making sure web traffic is encrypted with SSL or which capabilities a particular user has access to. It could also refer to what data a person is able to see. However, today I want to talk about the best practices around Cognos object security.

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Getting Started: Authoring Your First Cognos Analytics Report

So, you have been granted access to your company’s Cognos Analytics application, and you are eager to create your first report, but not really sure where to start, or how to get to the point that your report is answering the questions you are hoping to answer. Hopefully, this article will help you achieve your desired results, or at least get you a good start towards that goal. Let’s get started!

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Trifacta Flow Examples: A Little Help to Start Wrangling

Those who have used the Trifacta platform wouldn’t just tell you that it works—they’d also tell you that we’ve actually made data preparation fun. What was once considered a tedious, often dreaded activity has now become quite addictive with the Trifacta platform. Still, getting started with a new technology isn’t easy. Here are a few tips to get you feeling confident and comfortable with the Trifacta data preparation platform.

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Dispatches from the Seventh Circle of Scrum: Episode Ⅱ

If you have an active Scrum practice, make a plan to implement one of these tips. Change doesn’t have to be daunting, nor does it have to be forced in all at once. It never hurts to be agile about Agile. In their book Fixing Your Scrum, Ripley and Miller offer an approach to effectively identifying and applying changes within an organization, by asking the simple question: “What’s within my control that I can change to get our organization 15% closer to where it needs to be?”

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Analytics Showdown: IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau vs. MicroStrategy vs. Qlik vs. ThoughtSpot

Business Intelligence tools have changed rapidly over the last few years with many vendors pushing out multiple updates each year – some even quarterly.  It has become difficult to keep track of the myriad changes to the tools as each release brings them functionally closer to each other. So, we’ve created a matrix to help!

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Introducing Cloud Data Delivery

PMsquare is proud to announce the formation of our new Cloud Data Delivery business unit. Cloud Data Delivery brings together decades of experience solving data pipeline, data warehousing, and business intelligence challenges from across the organization into a single entity focused on delivering cloud-first data solutions and migrating existing on-prem data warehouse and BI workloads to the cloud.

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Adding Writeback Capabilities to Your Cognos Analytics Dashboard Using the IBM TM1 REST API

Have you ever thought it would be nice to be able to add or update some piece of data and have it reflected in your Cognos Analytics Dashboard and/or Reports? Well, now you can, with the IBM TM1 REST API and some Cognos Analytics Custom Controls! The IBM TM1 REST API allows you to create, read, update, and delete TM1 data, as well as interact with your TM1 Server in other ways (that’s a different article).

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New Features for Managing Workflow within Planning Analytics (Applications and Plans)

The applications and plans feature is a new feature as of the 2.0.58 (October 2020) release of Planning Analytics. It represents a brand-new approach to managing the budgeting process. Applications and plans let you organize logically related Planning Analytics Workspace assets such as books, views, and websheets in containers called assets. How the assets are organized is completely up to the administrator. Books or views can be organized to match your management structure or based on the flow of specific tasks.

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Dispatches from the Seventh Circle of Scrum: Episode Ⅰ

Few ideologies or concepts have been as transformative in the realm of project delivery over the past couple of decades as Scrum. Now celebrating 25 years in existence and deeply embedded at tech startups and tech giants alike, Scrum has practically become a household name ( – though not quite, as evidenced by recurring questions from my wife: “What exactly are you a master of?” and “What’s a… scrum?”).

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