IBM has released the new version of Cognos Business Intelligence– version 10.2. The latest release contains increased usability, performance and a host of new features across the suite of BI applications.

Cognos 10.2 Features

Cognos Workspace (Formerly Business Insight): The first thing that catches the eye is that Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced have been replaced/renamed as Cognos Workspace and Cognos Business Workspace advanced. Additional useful functionality to the workspace are that the user can now create Multi Tabbed Workspace that has a new control called an Action Button which the user can program to trigger tab changes. Users familiar with Excel will be pleased to hear that you can now Freeze and Unfreeze column and row heading when scrolling. There is a Data Visualization Guide called Visual Recommender that will help you select the appropriate chart type based on your data values in your workspace, including reason for that decision. The ability to print your workspace has also been included in this release.Technically, it also includes support for Safari and Google Chrome.

Cognos Insight 10.2 Cognos Insight, the #1 ranking among all Self Service Business Intelligence Platforms in The Forrester Wave, is the Personal Analytics solution that has taken over the marketplace and user’s desktops. Cognos 10.2 continues to improve ease of use, and integration with IBM Cognos Enterprise to encourage collaboration and enterprise distribution while avoiding data silos that other competitive solutions can create.

Report Studio Report Studio has a new Prompt API. This is fully supported and documented. Using JavaScript it allows you to set, read, delete and validate prompts values. Exporting report output to Excel is now easier as they have increase the maximum number of columns to 16,384 and 1,048,576 rows. Users can also export in a new format called Excel 2007 Data, which is a lightweight transfer of Excel without any report formatting.

Dynamic Cubes The most significant feature in Cognos 10.2 is the addition of a new OLAP technology to the IBM Cognos solution suite which in conjunction with pre-existing OLAP options provides developers with the option of the appropriate tool required. It is aimed at any organization with large or mature star and snowflake schemas that would like to provide their users with an OLAP experience without having to compromise on the data details or high performance.

• 100% in memory OLAP Engine for a high Performance, low latency user experience.
• Aggregate Awareness to allow query routing to in-memory or physical aggregate table in the data warehouse.
• Aggregate Advisor feature will monitor, recommend new physical aggregate tables and even generate SQL/DDL.
• Security aware caching features.
• A new OLAP modelling tool.
• Multiple Cubes can share conformed dimensions.

Skin Management Utility This allows you to visually create new “skins” for Cognos to customise the appearance of the product. Custom palettes can be setup so that only your corporate colours are available for Cognos Connection. SMU has a live viewer so that you can see the impact your change makes on Cognos Connection before saving it. You can publish the new skin to Cognos Connection and Make it available to users only after fully testing it. You can then quickly move your tested skin to other environments such as Development, QA/UAT and Production. Images, background colours, banners, text colours and more are easily customised.

Architecture and Environment Support The important feature here is the native support for Big Data and integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights (Hadoop). Additionally, native support for a number of ERP vendors has been added to Cognos via Dynamic Query Mode for increased performance and reduced implementation complexity.Cognos 10.2 now supports multi-tenancy, and also now natively supports fully integrated content archiving to a file system. All the components on IBM Cognos 10.2 are 64-bit. You can expect full support for a number of new data sources, a few of which are listed below:

• Big Data Support: Hadoop / Hive via JDBC Connector.
• SQL Server and Analysis Services 2012.
• Salesforce.com (Native DQM).
• SAP ECC (R3) (Native DQM).
• Siebel (Native DQM).

Content Archival This feature allows customers to move report output from their content store database to either their file system or FileNet but to also allow this output to be fully accessible through the Cognos Connection user interface. This feature also helps the Content Manager by helping to reduce load on this component by distributing the load of retrieving report output to the dispatchers in the environment. When archived output is requested by a user, the application tier dispatchers have a Repository Service that, when enabled, is responsible for serving archived output to the user. This feature will be greatly favoured by storage administrators for database servers; now that Cognos content can be easily archived off into a file system relieving storage capacity strains on an ever increasing Content store database.

Cognos Mobile Cognos Mobile which was a major extension to Cognos BI functionality, brought in on the 10.1 release. As well as the continued support for the native mobile application across Blackberry OS and Apple iOS devices, Cognos Mobile 10.2 brings in additional functionality from both an application and administration side.For BI report consumers on the go; the native Cognos Mobile application now features push notifications, which alerts users when a new version of a report is available.Reports can now be streamed to devices as a pose to being downloaded to the device’s local cache. This is particularly useful as users no longer have to wait for a full report to download before viewing, reducing the wait time, especially over slower mobile networks.Cognos Mobile 10.2 brings increased security features to Cognos Administrators. As well as the standard Cognos security controls in place with previous versions of Business Intelligence, administrators can now restrict access to Cognos Mobile on a ‘per device’ basis.