Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

March 29, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

No other area within Cognos is opaque as security. Within the application itself it’s difficult or impossible to get even the most basic questions answered without a lot of painful, tedious work. Even then, trying to answer the same question again involves the same amount of work, and sometimes even more. Basic questions such as:

• What is the security profile for Melissa Smith?
• Which accounts have access to the folder Accounts Receivable?
• What are the account memberships of all of the Cognos Groups and Roles?
• How can we easily validate that our Security Model is being correctly applied?
• Which objects in our Content Store have overridden security?
• Do we have a record of all security changes being made? Particularly those involving sensitive data?

February 28, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first couple of blogs in this subject series we covered the major elements of the Cognos metadata universe and how to harness them for use. And one of our goals was to be able to access metadata from any of the four major groups and be able to link when appropriate with data from any other group. This is possible because we have all of the metadata from the groups in an XML database which is a virtual image of the Cognos Content Store.

January 30, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first blog in this series published last month we presented the four key data groups in the Cognos Metadata Universe and described them in some detail. These are shown again on the left side of Figure 1 below. In that blog we also listed some of the things we would cover in subsequent blogs. One of these was the importance of having an architecture to deal with Cognos metadata.

Having a data architecture begins with the desired outcome of the process. Which is the answer to the question of how we want to use the data.

December 13, 2017 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

This blog article is the first in a series of articles on this subject. It’s not something that has been explored in depth to our knowledge and deserves move coverage. Our focus will be on the breadth and depth of Cognos metadata, and more importantly, how it can be used to address issues that Cognos administrators and developers face on a daily basis. These will be in depth examples of Cognos Metadata and its use.

September 29, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

In reality the value is only hidden from those who cannot easily see it. It’s more waiting to be discovered than hidden.

This is something we began to explore with our customers. It started more than a couple of years ago when we began to create Custom Queries for our customers. These were specific, often detailed requests for information about objects and relationships in their Content Store. In many cases these were things we had never thought about previously. And while our NetVisn product has broad reporting and analytics, some of the requests we’ve gotten from customers go well beyond basic questions on content.

June 28, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

In Part I of this blog we covered the basics of data lineage; its definition and why it’s important. Here in Part II our will be focus on some of the things that are possible when Cognos data lineage is captured and stored for use in multiple creative ways.

May 23, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

This blog focuses on Part I of the subject of Data Lineage, covering what it is and why it’s important. A Part II blog will follow this and focus on creative possibilities for using data lineage in multiple ways once you’ve broken the code.

What is it?

Simply stated, data lineage describes the data’s origins, where it moves and what happens to it over time. In some environments there are specific requirements for the data lineage and its provenance. This is often the case with financial institutions that have to satisfy regulatory requirements relating to data used for investment purposes.

March 31, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

If you’re a Cognos administrator there’s lots of key information you just need to have access to, especially in the area of security. Here we’re going to focus on what some consider among the top needs. These are:

• Groups, Roles, Memberships and Members
• Security profile of a role, group or account
• Inherited security
• Object security
• User permissions - licensing

January 31, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Perhaps the greatest undervalued asset within Cognos Analytics is the audit data that gets generated for virtually everything that happens inside the application. In its native form it’s all but unusable for anything except rudimentary analysis. We’ve covered this subject in great detail in our Ebook, Expert Guide to Cognos Audit Data. Writing this prompted us to challenge the thinking that there’s only so much that you can do with this data as it comes from Cognos.

What if you could use your audit data for anything you wanted to?

January 5, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

With Watson having become the point of the IBM marketing spear an obvious question being raised by many Cognos administrators is how one relates to the other. Our focus here is on that audience primarily because there is a perception of an overlap between the two, and if there is, what is the extent of the overlap? Here we’ll try to address both questions.