Pointers while Integrating/migrating- M&A scenario

Here are some general pointers to be kept in mind, while planning migrations, upgrades, conversions and the likes. Most of these recommendations can be made only after a thorough understanding of client systems architecture, maturity of their BI systems and their future plans. Anyways here is an appetizer.

1. Assess your architecture
2. Huge performance gains can be achieved by having dedicated servers for reporting services, batch report services, Agent and monitoring services and presentation services respectively.
3. Gateways
ISAPI is most recommended gateway. Also improve performance by adding multiple gateways.
Especially, if you have multiple locations for your servers
4. Perform Capacity Planning Exercise. Most BI tools offer pre built exercises.
5. If switching Security namespaces, you will encounter a lot of accessibility issues and will not be able to export personal content
6. If you have external vendors/clients accessing your BI portal the firewalls can cause accessibility issues. You will have to configure your firewalls and gateways to support multiple dispatchers.
7. Consider virtualization of your servers to cut costs
8. If in the near future, you plan on merging data sources multiple companies, you might have to plan back up of existing Models, packages and data source connections. Also, perform a step by step deployment into new environments or domains.

Some Challenges you might come across are:

1. Accessing cross company portals. Are you going to have 2 portals? Are you going to add users in two domains?
2. If development and support teams are in Domain A and have to support users in domain B. Developers and support Team, ticket management has to work across domains with additional privileges. This might not seem like huge liability but it can be time consuming to get it up and running
3. There will be a need for more licenses and appropriate capabilities
4. You will have to assess he hardware requirements and configuration

However, this is a very good time and opportunity to introduce new BI technologies and practices.
- You could start a BICC ( BI Competency Center)
- Upgrade to newer versions of the tools

Create a portal in 6 easy steps!

1. Plan for the objects you need to see on the portal page. The objects could be Cognos Navigator, Cognos viewer, Cognos Search or HTML objects and add third party objects with RSS feeds.

2.Once this is done, create a Page. Click the new page button

3. Name the Page and save it to My Folders( You are just saving this Page/portal so you can edit it later, if required)

4. Now you have to plan the layout of the Portal. You have three options, you can layout your objects in 1/2/3 columns. Basically you can size your columns in percentage widths. See image below

5. Add the Objects to your Columns.

6. Name your page again and Select the Add this page to the portal tabs check box.

Go on and customize your portal...

What is a Snapshot in Impromptu ?

A Snapshot retrieves all the information for a report and stores it in a permanent cache on the PC. The data is stored along with the report format in the *.imr file.

A Snapshot can be used like a database. You don’t need access to the database to use a snapshot.
Snapshots do not allow you to apply less restrictive filters and add one or more columns.
We can schedule Snapshots using Cognos Scheduler

Use a snapshot when you need
- All the data for the report in one file
- To email report as a single file attachment
- Open a report without access to the catalog