Have a look at our Professional Services offerings here.
View our Implementation-Based Product offerings here.
Join COGNOiSe.com, the largest independent, worldwide FREE IBM Cognos Support Community by clicking here.
Cognos, an IBM Company, becomes a BSP Customer. See here for more information. |
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| Greetings!
Welcome to this month's BSP Newsletter. We appreciate all of the great feedback we've received on the newsletters, and this month in addition to our discussions on IBM Cognos FPM ( IBM Cognos Planning / IBM Cognos TM1) and IBM Cognos PM ( IBM Cognos BI), we have included a few additional tips and tricks per your requests.
As always, we enjoy hearing your suggestions regarding the content you'd like to see. Please e-mail us if you have a topic you'd like to see discussed in future newsletters. |
Innovate, Optimize and Perform at the IOD in Las Vegas!
The IBM Information On Demand conference is the premier information management event for business and IT professionals.
During this exclusive event, you can:
- Participate in the PREMIER discussion on the future of Information Management
- Hear how your peers are realizing ROI
- Understand the roadmap to long term strategic advantage
- Learn best practices in your industry
- Obtain Free IBM certification testing: take up to three tests
- Gain extensive opportunities for networking with both your peers and industry experts
- Learn about all of IBM's newest software products, tips, tricks and more
- Register to win an Apple iPod Touch at Cognos Partner Pavilion booth 6!
That's right; BSP will be sponsoring the event and will be located in the Cognos Partner Pavilion. Stop by and say hello; learn more about our professional services, training, implementation-based software and the COGNOiSe worldwide support community; and register to win an Apple iPod Touch!
Ready to register. You can find out more and register here. |
SDK Users Upgrading to IBM Cognos 8 BI, This is a Must Read.
For users that are upgrading from CRN through IBM Cognos 8 BI, you will notice many new features and improvements, as well as a few challenges. As discussed in our August 2008 Newsletter and September 2008 Newsletter, IBM Cognos has released an Upgrade / Migration roadmap for Customers to follow when making the move to 8.3 forward. Having worked with many of our customers in the past few months on these upgrades / migrations, we have identified and resolved a few "challenges" incurred in the process. In August we highlighted the JavaScript issues experienced when moving to 8.3 from a previous release, and this month we want to raise awareness of a more subtle issue relating to the differences in the way report / query specifications are created with ReportNet versus IBM Cognos 8 BI (all versions). In IBM Cognos 8, there is a new metadataModel property in Query Studio specifications that gets populated upon saving the report. This property did not exist in CRN, so Query Studio reports created in ReportNet and upgraded to Cognos 8 will have a blank value in this metadataModel property after migrating. By opening and saving each Query Studio report once in the C8 environment, this property will get populated. Unfortunately this is not done during the migration from CRN to C8, so users must open and save each Query Studio report to populate this property. This becomes problematic for SDK users, as unfortunately any validation or modification of Query Studio reports done through the SDK will fail and the metadataModelPackage property will be cleared. This leaves the query in a bad state. MetaManager's Report Validator module can easily resolve this issue, as it will automatically populate this new property when validating CRN Query Studio reports that have been migrated to C8. In addition, Report Validator is a tremendous way to validate an entire environment pre-migration and post-migration so that you know the status of your content store objects before the move and after, allowing you to resolve or eliminate problematic reports pre-migration and know which reports broke as a result of the move post-migration. If you are using SDK and are interested in the "fix" for this issue, please contact us. | |
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Utilizing IBM Cognos Logviewer V2 to debug and read log files
- Contributed by Mike Vilhauer, Senior Consultant -
Cognos 8 - 8.3 is equipped with a little known utility that enables a user to read, filter, sort and search log files in a manner much easier than using a notepad application. In Cognos 8.3 the utility is known as Cognos Logviewer V2. To effectively utilize Logviewer you will need access to the server you are trying to debug. The following steps outline how to access Cognos Logviewer V2. (The following is for Windows installations only. Unix will be similar and the file name will have a .sh extension instead of .bat).
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Log on to the server. If remote, use remote desktop connection to connect to the server.
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Once you are logged into the server, navigate to the Cognos install bin directory (ex. C:\Program Files\cognos\c8\bin)
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Launch runlvV2.bat. This will start Cognos Logviewer V2
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Select Load Cognos Log Files by clicking on the icon in the upper left corner or selecting the option from the file menu.
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Navigate to the file you want to open (ex. cogserver.log).
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The file will open in a tab found in the lower left corner of the screen.
This is a full graphical interface for the log viewer utility that makes it very easy to read the logs. It even allows you to set filters to easily sift through log files which can become very large.
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IBM Cognos Articles of Interest
IBM Cognos 8.4
With the upcoming release of IBM Cognos 8.4, users can be more Informed, Engaged and Aligned. Find out more about this exciting new release by clicking here.
SUPPORTLINK
Interesting Supportlink articles:
OTHER ARTICLES
Cognos Unveils New Version of TM1 for Financial Performance Management: Article Link |
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The Path to Successful Strategic Planning
- Contributed by Courtney Kurtz, FPM Practice Lead -
70% of all strategies fail to meet their objectives. Lack of clarity related to business direction, ownership, communication and definitions of success are a few reasons why strategies fail. This is why key initiatives also tend to fail. A task without vision can be drudgery, while providing a vision with a task creates a source of power.
Most organizations have defined where they want to be in the future, yet daily tactical management activities tend to overshadow long term strategic action planning. Key initiatives are often put on hold or remain in the proposal stage. There are challenges gaining consensus or agreement within the Leadership Team on implementing the overall strategy.
There are a few key steps that earmark successful strategic planning:
Vision definition: provide a clear, easily understood visual of the future that energizes stakeholders around where the organization is going and what sets the organization apart from their competition.
Strategy Validation: Ensure that the organization vision is fully aligned with its goals and objectives. This will help build consensus and commitment to action within the Leadership Team.
Strategic Action Planning: Define the specific actions that will be undertaken to achieve organizational goals and implement key initiatives. Identify key drivers that will enable the organization to achieve the strategic direction they have set.
Performance Planning and Evaluation: Regularly monitor and measure the progress on achievement of defined goals, revise action strategy in response to environmental changes, and learn and adjust from experience.
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Did You Know...
In SQL Server 2005...
- You get can a quick sample of records by using TABLESAMPLE?
- Add it to the end of your select statement.
- If you want to return the same sample set, add the REPEATABLE()
SELECT col1,col2,col3 FROM tablename TABLESAMPLE (10 PERCENT)
About Most Memorable US Presidential Elections...
- 2000
- Winner : George W. Bush
- Popular Vote : 50,996,582 (Gore) to 50, 465,062 (Bush)
- Electoral : 271 (Bush) to 266 (Gore)
- The 2000 election was one of four elections in U.S. history in which the winner of the electoral votes did not carry the popular vote.
- Gore conceded on election night, but retracted his concession when he learned that the vote in Florida was too close to call.
1960
- Winner: John F. Kennedy
- Popular Vote: 34,226,731 (Kennedy) to 34,108,157 (Nixon)
- Electoral College: 303 (Kennedy) to 219 (Nixon)
- With his victory by a scant 120,000 votes, the 43-year-old Kennedy became the youngest-ever U.S. president. Nixon was 47--only four years older.
- Voters feared that Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, might be controlled by the Catholic Church. He was the nation's first--and only--Catholic U.S. president. (If elected in 2008, Joe Biden would become the country's first Catholic vice president.)
1948
- Winner: Harry S Truman
- Popular Vote: 24,179,345 (Truman) to 21,991,291 (Dewey)
- Electoral College: 303 (Truman) to 189 (Dewey)
- Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, had run for president once before, against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, and lost in a close race.
- Truman, FDR's vice president, became president on April 12, 1945, after Roosevelt's death.
- Truman was seen as an underdog going into the 1948 election--so much so that the Chicago Tribune printed newspapers with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." A picture of the victorious Truman holding the newspaper is one of the most famous photos in U.S. history.
1888
- Winner: Benjamin Harrison
- Popular Vote: 5,534,488 (Cleveland) to 5,443,892 (Harrison)
- Electoral College: 233 (Harrison) to 168 (Cleveland)
- Harrison lost the popular vote by about 90,000, but was able to win the Electoral College, thanks largely to victories in two swing states: New York and Indiana.
- Although Grover Cleveland, the 22nd president, lost his re-election campaign in 1888 against Harrison, he returned to the White House in 1893 as the 24th president.
- Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in 1841, just one month after taking office.
1876
- Winner: Rutherford B. Hayes
- Popular Vote: 4,286,808 (Tilden) to 4,034,142 (Hayes)
- Electoral College: 184 (Tilden) to 165 (Hayes) - with 20 votes disputed 185 (Hayes) to 184 (Tilden) - final tally
- After a series of delaying tactics by democrats, Congress confirmed his election on March 2, 1877.
- Angered by the results of the election, some Northern Democrats referred to Hayes as "his Fraudulency."
- After becoming president, Hayes announced he would serve just one term, and was true to his word.
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BrightStar Partners is committed to bringing you quality content month after month. If you have ideas for topics or if there is something you'd like to learn more about, please contact us and we'll do our best to address your request! We hope you enjoy this newsletter as much as we enjoy bringing it to you. |
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