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"Philosopher's Clock"
Consider this :
One absentminded ancient philosopher forgot to wind up his only clock in the house. He had no radio, TV, telephone, internet, or any other means for telling time. So he traveled on foot to his friend's place few miles down the straight desert road. He stayed at his friend's house for the night and when he came back home, he knew how to set his clock.
How did he know?
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Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache anywhere in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache's existence and location online. For more, click here. 
BSP's NJ office has sent a Geocache to our HQ in Chicago, and you can help get it there!
To Track Progress click Here! |
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Join COGNOiSe.com, the largest independent, worldwide FREE IBM Cognos Support Community.
Access our
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| Greetings!
Welcome to this month's BSP Newsletter. We have a lot of educational content this month, along with some great tips and tricks and other IBM Cognos related information as always! And remember, we enjoy hearing your suggestions regarding the content you'd like to see. Please e-mail us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com if you have a topic you'd like to see discussed in future newsletters. |
BRIGHTSTAR PARTNERS IMPLEMENTS FIRST COGNOS EXPRESS CUSTOMER | |
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IBM Cognos last month released Cognos Express, the first purpose-built Performance Management solution targeted at mid-sized companies. BrightStar Partners worked closely with the Cognos Express team to implement the first Express customer, Wood Ranch BBQ and Grill. Over a five week implementation cycle, BSP consultants worked closely with a team from Wood Ranch to deliver:
- Point of Sales reporting across all 13 restaurants, providing access to analysis around product sales trending, mix, and quality
- Company-wide financial reporting, providing full access from summary to detailed levels for all restaurants and for corporate
- Key metrics reporting called Vital Factors, which is a combination of POS, Financial, and user-entered data that provides visibility to key business metrics.
Cognos Express' ability to combine disparate data sources and to allow user write-back was critical in making this solution successful. To learn more about this implementation or how Cognos Express may help your organization, please contact Neil Morgan at nmorgan@brightstarpartners.com or 847.439.0308 x113.
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| MetaManager™ SAVES RTI INTERNATIONAL FROM COMPLETE REWRITE |
 Featuring Andrew Weiss, Director of Product Development
Katherine Swain from RTI International, a BSP Software MetaManager® & Integrated Version Control® customer, contacted our support desk recently with an unusual problem that was wreaking havoc in their IBM Cognos environment. Many of the Query Studio reports were no longer working, and she was hoping that MetaManager could help. Or if nothing else, maybe a fresh set of eyes could make some progress.
When certain Query Studio reports were opened, an error message was displayed indicating the Report Server was no longer responding. On the server side, a dangerous new issue was arising. Each time this error occurred, the IBM Cognos stack created a Memory Dump file over 100MB in size. This new problem wasn't discovered until disk space on the machine ran out. Katherine was starting to accept the fact that all of these reports were going to need to be recreated from scratch. Click here to see how BSP helped to resolve the issue. |
| MONITOR SYSTEM USAGE AND BROADCAST ALERTS | |
New Features and Capabilities Within IVC Allow System Usage Monitoring and Broadcast Messaging!
During the course of administering a Cognos environment, we often need to be aware of current system usage. This would include who's currently active in any given Studio and what content they are accessing.
We may also have the need to know historical usage of the system. If content has been modified, we need to be aware of the various users that have touched the content over time.
To see how IVC allows for the constant monitoring of system activity and enables broadcast messaging across the environment, watch Podcast Episode 16 here.
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| EXPRESS AUTHORING MODE vs. PROFESSIONAL AUTHORING MODE |
 By Mark Karas, Senior Consultant
Since Express Authoring mode has been around, I have asked many of my fellow colleagues if they have used the Express Authoring Mode for creating a Report Studio report yet, which is a functionality addition in 8.3, and I believe all answers were "no." Seems there is little experience out in the field, so here is a brief summary of some high-level information on Express Authoring mode and some comparison to the more familiar and popular Professional Authoring mode:
Some facts about, and prerequisites for, using the Express Authoring mode:
- Its main purpose is to provide non-Cognos report professionals the ability to create Financial reports
- Express Authoring Mode works best with a package that contains a multi-dimensional data source (DMR, Cube) but will still work with standard, relational source.
- Reports created in either authoring mode can be edited using the other mode.
- The mode that is set in Report Studio at the time of authoring a report is not tied to the report specification or vice-versa.
- There is no properties window for setting object properties in Express mode.
- The Express Authoring mode works only with Crosstabs. Lists and Charts are not available in the tool set, nor are there any prompting capabilities.
- Like Query and Analysis Studios, the default Express authoring environment works with live data.
- By default, the reports authored in Express mode are not Drill-Down enabled but drilling up and down is available.
- Levels are not part of the toolset, strictly entire hierarchies and the members, a la Analysis Studio.
There are some nifty little functions added to facilitate easy report authoring using members.
- To add all the children of an existing member in the report (Data menu, Insert Children, After | Before | Nest)
- Toggle between creating individual Members, or Member Sets when dragging a member onto the report
- Selection to insert a single member only, the member's children only or both with the drag in.
To get an understanding of the differences in the 2 modes, I used the GO Finance cube as a data source to create a Balance Sheet report in Report Studio using what is now known as the Professional Authoring mode. Professional mode utilizes the full-feature/function set of Report Studio, where the Express mode only has a small sub-set of those features. I then switched to the Express Authoring mode and re-created the same report. Here are my findings and in some cases opinions about Express Authoring Mode:
Findings of the Express Authoring mode
On the positive and/or neutral side:
- Formatting was pretty much the same from the toolbar aspect. You do not have a properties window like in Professional mode, so the toolbar is the place to change font, justification, add borders, indenting (padding), etc.
- Creating the Balance Sheet report in Express mode was indeed faster than using the Professional mode
- From the Financial Analyst's viewpoint, he or she will be working with the accounts and account roll-ups... things they are already very familiar with, as opposed to levels of a hierarchy which is often confusing to them.
- Changes in the underlying hierarchies of the source will probably break these member-only reports.
- Additions to the Chart of Accounts will not be picked up automatically, as they would if levels were used.
- Lack of flexibility in object usage and setting.
- No way to turn off the data preview
- Didn't find a way to change the Rows per page limit. My report went to 2 pages in HTML mode... very frustrating
In Summary:
I found Express Mode to be fairly easy to use for creating a quick financial report. It is not however, going to remotely replace a truly professionally authored and formatted report when it comes to the total end-user/consumer experience, given its "Ad Hoc" feel.
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| IBM COGNOS ARTICLES OF INTEREST |
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In the News...
Test Drive the Personalized IBM Support Portal
Cognos SupportLink Articles of Interest:
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 About Plants......
- 84% of a raw apple is water.
- A cucumber is 96% water.
- A pineapple is a berry.
- Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.
- Americans eat more bananas than any other fruit: a total of 11 billion a year.
- Until 1883, hemp was the world's largest agricultural crop, from which the majority of fabric, soap, paper, and medicines were produced.
- An apple tree is at its prime when it's about 50 years old. The United States produces about 100 million barrels of apples a year. That's a lot of old trees.
- An average ear of corn has 800 kernels, arranged in 16 rows.
- Arrowroot, an antidote for poisoned arrows, is used as a thickener in cooking.
- Avocados have the highest calories of any fruit at 167 calories per hundred grams.
- Banana oil never saw a banana; it's made from petroleum.
- Bananas are actually herbs. Bananas die after fruiting, like all herbs do.
- Cranberries are one of just 3 major fruits native to North America. Blueberries and Concord grapes are the other two.
- From the 1500's to the 1700's, tobacco was prescribed by doctors to treat a variety of ailments including headaches, toothaches, arthritis and bad breath.
- Ginger has been clinically demonstrated to work twice as well as Dramamine for fighting motion sickness, with no side effects.
- Hydroponics is the technique by which plants are grown in water without soil.
- In the Netherlands, in 1634, a collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed, and a suit of clothes for a single bulb of the Viceroy tulip.
- Morphine was given its name in 1803 by the discoverer, a 20 year old German pharmacist named Friedrich Saturner. He named it after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
- No species of wild plant produces a flower or blossom that is absolutely black, and so far, none has been developed artificially.
- Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
- Oranges, lemons, watermelons, and tomatoes are berries.
- Orchids have the smallest seeds. It takes more than 1.25 million seeds to weigh 1 gram.
- Peanuts are beans.
- Quinine, one of the most important drugs known to man, is obtained from the dried bark of an evergreen tree native to South America.
- Rice paper isn't made from rice but from a small tree which grows in Taiwan.
- Tea was so expensive when it was first brought to Europe in the early 17th century that it was kept in locked wooden boxes.
- The California redwood - coast redwood and giant sequoia - are the tallest and largest living organism in the world.
- The fragrance of flowers is due to the essences of oil which they produce.
- The oldest living thing in existence is not a giant redwood, but a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, dated to be aged 4,600 years old.
- The pineapple was a symbol of welcome in the 1700-1800's. That is why in New England you will see so many pineapples on door knockers. An arch in Providence RI leading into the Federal Hill neighborhood has a pineapple on it for that very reason. Pineapples were brought home by seafarers as gifts.
- The popular name for the giant sequoia tree is Redwood.
- The rose family of plants, in addition to flowers, gives us apples, pears, plums, cherries, almonds, peaches and apricots.
- The world's tallest grass, which has sometimes grown 130 feet or more, is bamboo.
- There are more than 700 species of plants that grow in the United States that have been identified as dangerous if eaten. Among them are some that are commonly favored by gardeners: buttercups, daffodils, lily of the valley, sweet peas, oleander, azalea, bleeding heart, delphinium, and rhododendron.
- Wheat is the world's most widely cultivated plant; grown on every continent except Antarctica.
- Willow bark, which provides the salicylic acid from which aspirin was originally synthesized, has been used as a pain remedy ever since the Greeks discovered its therapeutic power nearly 2,500 years ago.
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