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"Crossing the Desert"
A military car carrying an important letter must cross a desert. There is no petrol station in the desert, and the car's fuel tank is just enough to take it half way across. There are other cars with the same fuel capacity that can transfer their petrol to one another. There are no canisters or rope to tow the cars.
How can the letter be delivered?
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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 FINISHES IN TOP 10% | |
BSP finished in the top 10% of North American IBM Cognos Resellers for 2009. Late in 2008, BSP made a conscious decision to place a renewed focus on reselling IBM Cognos software. Despite the challenging economic times in 2009, BSP has continued to partner with many new and existing customers to introduce or expand their IBM Cognos solutions. BSP is uniquely qualified to marry Cognos software sales with our top notch consulting services as well as our own implementation-based software products.
If you're interested in expanding your Cognos implementation by purchasing new or additional licenses, please contact Neil Morgan at nmorgan@brightstarpartners.com to allow us to build a custom solution that exactly fits your needs. |
| AVISTA CORPORATION DEPLOYS METAMANAGER TO DELIVER A REMARKABLE 100% ROI WITHIN MONTHS! |
Avista Corp. is an energy company involved in the production, transmission, and distribution of energy as well as other energy-related businesses. After many years of use, Avista's mobile work force application began hindering business efficiency, and they concluded that they needed to upgrade from the existing legacy software to a new, technologically advanced solution. Their challenge was to implement a major technology upgrade, with minimal business impact, to the mobile work force application, and to shift IT emphasis from maintenance and support to new development to bring additional cost saving opportunities.
With BSP's considerable implementation experience and extraordinary deep knowledge of IBM Cognos products, the team was able to recommend the innovative solutions needed to mitigate any potential issues in advance of the deployment. In addition, BSP provided critical insights to the complexities of the implementation that would prove to be invaluable to Avista's ability to meet their business requirements.
BSP's MetaManager was selected as the ideal solution for the business and technological challenges faced by the change management team. With the modifications to the transactional system inevitable, the use of MetaManager greatly minimized the impact of all resulting changes to the Cognos environment making them essentially transparent to the business.
Key business benefits achieved include:
- Easy and thoroughly documented metadata from Framework Manager models, which in turn can be used both by the business and IT as data dictionaries.
- Easier process changes, providing overview and detailed environmental documentation, including security, user access rights, group memberships, available content, etc.
Rapid return on investment - 100% within months of implementation
- Continued cost-saving with a focus shift to value-add activities
- Greater value with extensive features and functionality
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| SharePoint Integration Web Parts For Cognos |
BSP Software has partnered with QueryVision to provide SharePoint Integration Web Parts. Functionality that normally can only be achieved within IBM Cognos Connection can be enabled directly within SharePoint, including navigating Content Manager as well as executing and viewing reports and queries.
By integrating Cognos web parts within SharePoint, you unlock the ability to create countless combinations of applications with embedded Business Intelligence logic. Users become more productive when presented with focused business workflow that can revolve around a single report, a series of reports, or dashboards.
If you are interested in seeing a product demonstration, please visit http://www.bspsoftware.com or reach out to Andy Rachmiel at arachmiel@brightstarpartners.com.
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RUNNING COGNOS REPORTS WITH URL's AND ACHIEVING COOL RESULTS |
 By Dave Munson, BSP Software Sr. Developer
Running a report by calling a URL is more useful than you might think. Discover a little known feature of Cognos that gives you a simple way to integrate with other applications or extend the capabilities of your reports.
Learn how to create a custom master/detail report using 2 separate reports. Use this technique to minimize database impact and allow easy access to contextual detail data when the performance impact of a traditional master/detail report could prohibit it while giving your users more flexibility and better insight by embedding a fully functional report, including drill-through and additional prompting, right inside their summary reports. Allow them to drill down and analyze detail data without ever leaving or re-executing the summary data queries.
Creating a custom master/detail report
- Create a list report with the summary rows, grouped with a footer at the lowest level of grouping.
- Replace the data item in the list footer with three HTML Items which when joined together will create a hyperlink with an attribute to store the grouped value.
- Add an onlick event handler to call a custom function called ShowDetail().
- Add another HTML Item to the body of the report above the list containing JavaScript with the ShowDetails() function which will create the IFrame to display the detail report using the URL to pass in the prompt value.
- Create a second report containing the detail data. Add a prompt to your query to filter on the grouped value passed in from the parent report.
- Run the report and click on the link in each section to expand and display the report filtered for the current value.
For detailed version of the article with screen shots, click here |
 About Gregorian Calendar......
- The Gregorian calendar resulted from a perceived need to reform the method of calculating dates of Easter.
- Under the Julian calendar the dating of Easter had become standardized, using March 21 as the date of the equinox and the Metonic cycle as the basis for calculating lunar phases.
- By the thirteenth century it was realized that the true equinox had regressed from March 21 (its supposed date at the time of the Council of Nicea, +325) to a date earlier in the month.
- As a result, Easter was drifting away from its springtime position and was losing its relation with the Jewish Passover. Over the next four centuries, scholars debated the "correct" time for celebrating Easter and the means of regulating this time calendrically.
- The Church made intermittent attempts to solve the Easter question, without reaching a consensus.
- By the sixteenth century the equinox had shifted by ten days, and astronomical New Moons were occurring four days before ecclesiastical New Moons.
- At the behest of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V introduced a new Breviary in 1568 and Missal in 1570, both of which included adjustments to the lunar tables and the leap-year system.
- Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, soon convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor's measures inadequate.
- The recommendations of Pope Gregory's calendar commission were instituted by the papal bull "Inter Gravissimus," signed on 1582 February 24. Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that 1582 October 4 was followed by 1582 October 15, thereby causing the vernal equinox of 1583 and subsequent years to occur about March 21. And a new table of New Moons and Full Moons was introduced for determining the date of Easter.
- Subject to the logistical problems of communication and governance in the sixteenth century, the new calendar was promulgated through the Roman-Catholic world.
- Protestant states initially rejected the calendar, but gradually accepted it over the coming centuries.
- The Eastern Orthodox churches rejected the new calendar and continued to use the Julian calendar with traditional lunar tables for calculating Easter.
- Because the purpose of the Gregorian calendar was to regulate the cycle of Christian holidays, its acceptance in the non-Christian world was initially not at issue. But as international communications developed, the civil rules of the Gregorian calendar were gradually adopted around the world.
Rules for Civil Use
- Years are counted from the initial epoch defined by Dionysius Exiguus, and are divided into two classes: common years and leap years.
- A common year is 365 days in length; a leap year is 366 days, with an intercalary day, designated February 29, preceding March 1.
- Leap years are determined according to the following rule: Every year that is exactly divisible by 4 is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; these centurial years are leap years only if they are exactly divisible by 400. As a result the year 2000 is a leap year, whereas 1900 and 2100 are not leap years.
- These rules can be applied to times prior to the Gregorian reform to create a proleptic Gregorian calendar. In this case, year 0 (1 B.C.) is considered to be exactly divisible by 4, 100, and 400; hence it is a leap year.
- The Gregorian calendar is thus based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146097 days. Since 146097 is evenly divisible by 7, the Gregorian civil calendar exactly repeats after 400 years.
- Dividing 146097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year.
- But this reveals that the Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years.
- Although various adjustments to the leap-year system have been proposed, none has been instituted.
- Within each year, dates are specified according to the count of days from the beginning of the month.
Next Month....The Hebrew Calendar..... |
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