New Year's Resolution #4 

1. Eat healthy
2. Lose weight
3. Join a gym
4. Refine my annual planning and forecasting process

• Your previous planning cycles - what pain did you and your staff experience?
• Were there inefficiencies in timeliness, accuracy, or key performance indicators? 

Whatever the reason, it is important to maintain focus throughout your planning cycle to ensure that the "right" product is delivered on time and on track. 

• MetaManager 3.0 - a.k.a. PowerTools for IBM Cognos.   This amazing new release adds hundreds of new features and functionalities to an entirely new user interface.  MetaManager is a modular application that enables users to perform many administrative, development, support and maintenance capabilities with power and ease within your IBM Cognos BI environment.
• CPM Explorer 2.0 - A Windows Explorer extension for IBM Cognos Connection, providing full navigation of the portal in the familiar Windows Explorer user interface. 
• CF Expansion Pack 2.0 - Designed to substantially improve the integration of and reporting experience with IBM Cognos Finance and Microsoft Excel.
• Validator for Series 7 PowerPlay - Designed by BSP for Cognos, an IBM Company, as part of the PowerPlay 7.4 to IBM Cognos 8 Migration Utility. 
• Scheduled Email Extractor - The Scheduled Email Extractor enables users to extract vital information on all scheduled reports run with an output set to email.  The content is saved in a spreadsheet.
• Content Extractor - Enables users to extract archived content from scheduled reports that is stored in the Content Store database out to a specified file system location. 

... and a groundbreaking new release many of you have been asking for...  Well, you'll have to wait until our February 2009 Newsletter to find out ;) 

Join us at Cognos Forum 2009

• Start with a new cross tab report in Report Studio.
• Drag Product Line into the rows, Order Year into the columns and Revenue as the fact.
• Highlight the fact cells and enable the drill-through to the target report
• With the report locked, drag in a query calculation below the Product Lines and name it 'Total for Year' with the expression total([gosales_goretailers].[Orders].[Revenue] for [gosales_goretailers].[Orders].[Order year])
• Drag in a query calculation after the year columns, name it 'Total for Product Line' and give it the following expression total([gosales_goretailers].[Orders].[Revenue] for [gosales_goretailers].[Products].[Product line])
• Highlight each summary cell and set the Define Contents property to Yes (the data will disappear from the cell)
• Unlock the report and go to the data items tab and drag the Total for Year into the column footer and drag the Total for Product Line into the row totals
  

Additional Information

IBM Cognos Articles of Interest

• How to Hide the Export Options and Headers Using Scripts
• Using Prompts to Dynamically Change Report Items

Did You Know...

• Rule-based cube population will deactivate the sparsity algorithm.
• Skipping the sparsity algorithm will slow down the cube calculation. 
• You can alleviate the effect of this by adding skipcheck and feeders caluses to the rules.

About Animal Loudmouths...

10. Alligator
Technically, alligators don't even have vocal cords, but surprisingly enough, this doesn't prevent them from making a racket. Alligators hiss, grunt, cough, growl and, most famously, bellow -- the latter of which is preceded by an infrasonic signal that actually rolls along the water, causing it to vibrate or "dance." While the frequency is too low for humans to hear, it can travel great distances to reach potential mates. Finally -- a long-distance calling plan that works!

9. Kakapo
This large, flightless parrot is native to New Zealand and puts on a loud performance during breeding season. The male kakapo will carve out his own Hollywood Bowl of sorts, creating an amphitheater for belting out his big love song. For the finale, the kakapo clears his throat, inflates an air sac in his chest, then releases a resonating boom that can be heard up to three miles away! He continues the ritual every night over the next four months, pumping out up to 10,000 calls. That's a lot of effort for picking up just one groupie!

8. Wolf
If your camping trip in the Minnesota wilderness is interrupted by the cry of a wolf, don't panic; though it may sound like it's right outside your tent, the wolf could actually be up to 10 miles away. This creature has no clue what it means to use an "indoor voice," but with a territory to protect that can extend hundreds of miles, it's vital that its call be heard loud and clear. A wolf's howl not only carries but is complex as well; fellow pack members can identify each other from a distance just by their call alone. When they act in chorus, potential predators have a hard time telling just how many wolves they're actually dealing with -- one or 100? Would you want to roll the dice?

7. Howler monkey
Hands down, the howler monkey has the loudest security system in the South and Central American jungles. However, it's actually less of a howl and more along the lines of a loud, barking whoop or roar that can be heard clearly from over three miles away. The secret behind the projection is the howler monkey's swollen throat, which contains a special pouch on the voice box that amplifies its calls to scare others off its territory and away from its precious fruit trees. Now that's a monkey that really likes its fruit trees!

6. Elephant
It makes sense that the world's largest land animal not only weighs a ton, but makes a ton of noise as well. The elephant uses over 25 different calls. Its trunk acts as a resonating chamber of sorts, amplifying the sound blown out of its massive lungs. Elephants can also communicate over long distances with the aid of infrasound -- a low-frequency, subsonic rumble that can actually be felt through the elephant's sensitive skin on its feet and trunk. There goes any chance of tuning each other out.

5. Cicada
The cicada may be only 1 or 2 inches long, but with a "song" that can hit 120 decibels, it's also easily the loudest insect in the world. This bug deserves a flurry of tickets for disturbing the peace, which comes as a result of squeezing loud noisemakers, called timbals, located at the base of its abdomen. Not cymbals, timbals -- and contracting them creates super-speedy sit-ups with a sound that is reminiscent of chainsaws at full throttle. The noise does have meaning: It's the male's mating call, and the 250-plus species of cicadas each play their own tune. So if you've been looking for the perfect ditty to download to your MP3 player, here are 250 ideas!

4. Bat
When a bat screams its head off, it's not just doing its best Naomi Campbell impersonation, but engaging its internal GPS system as well. The high-pitched noise acts as sonar to help the bat find its way in the dark, and it makes for a pretty good map. Its sonar is so precise, a bat can differentiate between objects that are only as far apart as the width of a human hair, regardless of the lighting. Note to self: Never play Pin the Tail on the Donkey with a bat.

3. Herring
Talk about a mob scene! Herrings usually travel with over 4 million others at any given time, creating one of the densest schools in the world, which stretches over a mile long. The noise factor comes into play with their preferred method of communication: fast repetitive ticks, or FRTs, which is a fancy scientific way of saying "breaking fish wind." Yes, the herrings emit gas from their bottoms to talk with each other as well as scare off predators, but it's at a frequency too low for humans to ever hear. If it were audible to us, it would sound like a jet taking off -- kind of hard to pretend like that was just your shoe, huh!

2. Whale
Whales can shout across oceans -- literally. Well, at least the blue whale can, with a sneeze that can be heard on the other side of the world. The humpback wins "most chatty," with songs lasting up to a half an hour and carrying over 100 miles. The sperm whale even uses sound to hunt in the dark depths of the ocean floor, diving and navigating like a bat with sonar signals that can be shot with the force of a cannon to immobilize a squid. That's some stun gun!

1. Pistol shrimp
A shrimp that breaks glass with just a snap certainly deserves the No. 1 spot on the "loudmouths" list. Found in tropical reefs around the world, the pistol shrimp is equipped with, well, a pistol, in the form of a large claw that shoots out jets of water. The water stream moves with such velocity that it creates an air bubble. Once this little grenade implodes, it packs a mighty punch, creating a massive shock wave louder than a whale's call that can kill other shrimp and fish up to 6 feet away. The sonic snap also emits tiny flashes of light, which momentarily causes temperature inside the bubble to soar over 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit -- that is one hot stove you do not want to touch!

 Source : encarta.msn.com