| IOD - REGISTER EARLY WITH BSP AND SAVE $400! |
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BSP is proud to announce HUGE savings when registering before August 31, 2011 for this year's IBM Information on Demand (IOD) / Business Analytics Forum. Register for IOD using BSP's preferred customer code, and you will save $400 PLUS receive a free BrightStar Partners/ BSP Software Polo shirt PLUS be eligible to receive free casino chips PLUS be automatically entered into a drawing for a free iPad2!
For more information,
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| BSP TRIATHLON TRAINING UPDATE |
We have a new triathlete among us! As a warm-up to the Chicago Triathlon in August, one BSP team member completed her first triathlon this past weekend, showing all that she can now swim!
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Assassin is a popular game on college campuses. The game consists of several players trying to eliminate the others by means of squirting them with water pistols in order to be the last survivor. Once hit, the player is out of the game. Game play is fair play at all times and all locations, and tends to last several days depending on the number of participants and their stealth. At Troyhill University, 5 students participated in a game that only lasted four days.
Can you determine each player's first name, their color, their assassin alias, how they were eliminated, and their major?
Names: Liam, Anabel, Bella, Oliver, Ethan Colors: Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Black Alias: Captain Dawn, Night Stalker, Dark Elf, McStealth, Billy Capture: Caught at weekly study group, Caught helping friend with car trouble, Ambushed during sleep, Caught on the way to class, Winner Major: Economics, Biology, Art History, Sociology, Psychology
MONDAY: Liam, the girl named Captain Dawn, and the person in purple avoided any action that day. The psychology major was able to easily catch Ethan because she already had a study group meeting with him that day. Since it was a weekly engagement, he didn't suspect a thing. Goodbye red player. TUESDAY: Everyone tried to get in on the action today. The girl masquerading as the Dark Elf (who was wearing either black or red) and the sociology major lived to see another day. The purple player was able to catch the obliging yet naive green player by calling her and pretending he had car trouble. WEDNESDAY: The biology major (who was still "alive") was surprised to hear that the Psychology major, who wasn't Anabel the art history major, ambushed Night Stalker as he slept in his dorm. THURSDAY: The black player was declared the victor after luckily spotting "Billy" on his way to Mammalian Physiology, a class required by his major. |
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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. |
BSP SOFTWARE AWARDED UNITED STATES PATENT FOR INTEGRATED CONTROL SUITE TECHNOLOGY
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BSP Software LLC, an IBM Business Partner and proven leader in innovative, integrated solutions for IBM Cognos software, announced on May 17, 2011, that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued patent number 7,945,589, for its Integrated Control Suite technology.
The patent, entitled "Integrated Change Management in a Business Intelligence Environment," was awarded by the USPTO on May 17th, 2011. The patented technology is the essence of BSP Software's integration of change management functionality into business analytics environments such as IBM Cognos.
For the full story, click here.
For more information on BSP Software's Integrated Control Suite, our other Implementation-Based Software solutions and Professional Services offerings, please visit http://www.bspsoftware.com/ICS.
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BSP SOFTWARE RELEASES INTEGRATED CONTROL SUITE 2.3
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 This release is one of our biggest yet, chock-full of new features and functionality.
BSP's Integrated Control Suite (ICS) delivers governance, risk management and compliance solutions to lower IBM Cognos customers' total cost of ownership. ICS's tight integration into the IBM Cognos environment ensures transparency to users and supporting IT departments. Built from the ground up, ICS appears and behaves as part of the core IBM Cognos product suite.
The Integrated Control Suite is comprised of several individual offerings from BSP's ever-growing solution portfolio:
· Integrated Version Control - Versioning tightly integrated inside of the studios, including notification of multiple authors in a report and locking to prevent multi-person edits. · Integrated Change Management - Version Control with Check-Out and Check-In capabilities. · Integrated Client Version Control - Version control of client files (Framework Manager, Transformer, etc.) with integrated security. · Integrated Archive Service - Versioning of outputs (HTML, PDF, XLS, etc) to preserve the content store as a metadata repository and not a content management system. · Integrated Recycle Bin - Like Windows Explorer, users can recover any deleted object with the click of a button. Admins can recover anyone's deleted objects. · Integrated Deployment Manager - Directly through the Cognos interface, bundle a collection of objects into a project and deploy them to any other environment in batch. · Broadcast Notification - Provides the ability to broadcast messages to users within Cognos Connection or the studios. The Integrated Control Suite is the only real-time, transparent and truly integrated solution for governance, risk management and compliance within an IBM Cognos environment.
Click here for more information.
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| PODCAST 3.9: REGRESSION TESTING FOR COGNOS |
Volume 3, Episode 9: Regression Testing for Cognos
Lifecycle Manager was designed to help organizations in their upgrade from one version of Cognos to another, as well as assist within the development lifecycle of content. See how Lifecycle Manager can be used for Regression Testing within ReportNet, Cognos 8, and Cognos 10.
Click here for more information.
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HORIZONTAL DOT PLOTS IN COGNOS
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By Michael P. DeGeus, Consultant
When deciding how to visually represent data in a report or dashboard, Cognos report authors can choose from a number of built in chart types offered through the various Cognos studios. One "hidden" chart type which can be created in Report Studio is a Horizontal Dot Plot.
The dot plot is really just a Cognos point chart configured in a specific manner, but it can be used as a powerful alternative to the more common vertical bar chart. A few advantages of the horizontal dot plot:
· The chart quantitative scale does not necessarily need to include a zero baseline. (A bar chart should always include zero in order to avoid skewing the message encoded in the data.*)
· The chart takes up less space, especially when multiple measures are displayed for a large number of categories.
· The horizontal nature of the chart means category labels show up on the y-axis, and are therefore easier to read (there is no need to rotate or abbreviate in order to fit the labels on the chart).
* The reason for this is that the human brain is programmed to make judgments about the relative length of the bars displayed in a bar chart. When a zero baseline is omitted, however, the length attribute no longer provides accurate information about the values encoded in the chart. Stephen Few (http://www.perceptualedge.com) provides excellent explanations and examples on this topic and many others concerning the optimal way to communicate effectively through data visualization in a business context. Search for "dot plots" on the Perceptual Edge website for an excellent article on this particular topic.
For detailed steps to create a horizontal dot plot in Cognos 8, click here to read the full article.
For questions regarding this technique, please email us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com.
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USING INCLUDE / EXCLUDE FILTER IN REPORT STUDIO
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By Vinay Gupta, Consultant
The technique described in this article demonstrates how to create a report with greater filtering flexibility than can be achieved with an out of the box multi-select optional filter. This approach is especially useful when the list of potential values in a prompt is long, and the user wants to see everything except a small subset of those values.
For detailed steps for how to create and use an include/exclude filter in a report, click here to read the full article.
For questions on this technique, e-mail us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com.
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NASA's Space Shuttle Program Facts:
The Space Shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned as a frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicle, four space shuttle orbiters were built by 1985. The first to launch, Columbia, did so on April 12, 1981.
In 1995 Russian-American interaction resumed with the Shuttle-Mir missions. Once more an American vehicle docked with a Russian craft, this time a full-fledged space station. This cooperation has continued to 2011, with Russia and the United States the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built: the International Space Station (ISS). The strength of their cooperation on this project was even more evident when NASA began relying on Russian launch vehicles to service the ISS during the two-year grounding of the shuttle fleet following the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The shuttle fleet lost two orbiters and 14 astronauts in two disasters: Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003. While the 1986 loss was mitigated by building the Space Shuttle Endeavour from replacement parts, NASA did not build another orbiter to replace the second loss.
NASA's shuttle program has made 134 successful launches as of May 2011, including the most recent Endeavour mission.
Atlantis is currently on Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center after taking a 3.4 mile trek from the Vehicle Assembly Building that took about 7 hours. Target launch date is July 8th, 2011. This is the final launch before the Space Shuttle program is disbanded.
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