Scheduled reports are a staple at most companies. Some companies have thousands that run each night and others may have just a few. If you’re new to Cognos and want to schedule and monitor your jobs, how do you keep up with all of the report runs and failures? And what are the options for a failure when you find one? Let’s break it down.
Read MoreThe Planning Analytics Modeling Workbench is a new modeling tool for developers in Planning Analytics Workspace. It is a dedicated modeling area that has tabs and sections for organizing your modeling tasks and is optimized for all types of modeling activities in PA.
Read MoreAn 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.
Read MoreWe’ve put together our list of the top 7 Cognos tips for June! Check it out and share your thoughts (or tips!) in the comments section.
Read MoreImproving 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.
Read MoreAmazon (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.
Read MoreDeploying Cognos on AWS immediately raises questions around the Cognos databases. What database type should we use? What service should we use to host them? Let’s dive in and hopefully, I can help you get a much clearer sense of what is best for your organization.
Read MoreDo 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.
Read MoreAt 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!
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreIn a prior issue, my colleague Brian Moore introduced us to the Forecasting feature now available in Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW). Today we take an in-depth look at the steps to set up a Preview forecast and to apply a forecast to your model.
Read MoreIncorta’s Direct Data Platform significantly altered customers’ IT teams’ culture, encouraging employees to make more intelligent decisions and to become more curious about their data. End users no longer have to wait weeks or even days for answers, they can gather insights in a matter of minutes with Incorta.
Read MoreSo, 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!
Read MoreThose 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.
Read MoreIf 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?”
Read MoreBusiness 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!
Read MorePMsquare 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.
Read MoreHave 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).
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreFew 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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