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Some of our favorite new features in Cognos 11.2
Buckle up ladies and gents, Cognos 11.2 has launched and a lot has changed. The UI redesign is the most obvious and biggest difference. Other notable changes include on-premise mobile access, significant enhancement to dashboard performance and new visualizations.
Portal redesign
The biggest change with the new release is the massive redesign of the user portal. Carbon X was teased out in 11.1.7 but now takes over in 11.2.
Tabbed view. If you preferred the navigation of Cognos 8/10, you’ll be incredibly happy: the good-ol’ tabbed Explorer view is back. We can even add additional tabs like we did in Cognos 8/10 using portal tabs. And now there’s a New button at the top right corner, similar to the Launch button we used to have.
Déjà vu, anyone? I’m going to break out my old Razr flip phone and fire up my old MySpace page.
We can change the view from tile to list and even adjust the row size.
Sadly, the ability to do a custom report/folder sort didn’t make it in. It will be coming soon, we are told. So until then, keep adding a 1 or * prefix to your report names.
Redesigned welcome page. You’ll find changes to the welcome page as well. Helpful videos for new users are easily accessible after logging in. More experienced users can disable this feature if needed. The tile in the Quick launch section provides access to upload, prepare, explore and present data.
Get started tab. This tab is the place to access sample reports and additional resources. Here you can also connect to the Accelerator Catalog, which has tons of custom visualizations and sample reports that leverage the full capabilities of CA 11.2.
Best of all, everything can be completely customized. You can create quick launch tiles, additional tables that show dashboards, custom welcome screens, etc.
With all of the new portal additions, it’s a good thing IBM provided a bunch of new sample extensions you can use to customize the portal the way you want.
| Mmmm. Burgers! Gone is the Navigation panel that used to slide out for My Content and Team Content. Instead…enter the new “hamburger” menu.
Dive into the burger and you’ll find the folders and tools are neatly stacked in here, arranged in a more user-friendly way. |
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On-premise mobile app access
The new mobile app was released last summer but was only available to IBM Cognos cloud users. On-premise users can now connect and take their analytics to go.
Shhhh, don’t tell anyone but users who are on 11.1.7 FP2 can download an add-on to enable the mobile app from Fix Central at IBM support.
Adios Internet Explorer
Hey Internet Explorer, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. IE has run its course; it’s being phased out by Microsoft, and Cognos is joining the farewell party in 11.2. If your organization is still using IE, start preparing for a future with the next generation of browsers.
- No IE support in 11.2.X
- Firefox will be the only way to access Query Studio and Analysis Studio
- Power Play Studio will support Chromium Edge
- PDF drill-through will support Chrome, Chromium Edge and Firefox
- A separate Active Report desktop app will be released in the near future
Dashboard enhancements
Dashboard performance gets a huge boost. Another significant improvement is radically enhanced dashboard performance. Sample benchmarks are showing performance enhancements up to 800% faster. A dashboard that took 50-60 seconds to fully load in 11.1 can now be loaded in less than 10 seconds.
Two new visualizations. Each new Cognos release includes new dashboards. With 11.2 we get Box plot and Radar visualizations. Don’t forget to keep checking the Accelerator Catalog where you can always find additional visualizations there.
Built-in AI assistance. The AI assistance is also now baked into dashboards. You can ask questions, get additional insights or even have it build a dashboard for you.
| OLAP cubes. Last but not least, you can now leverage OLAP cubes for AI and forecasting.
Want to know more about what’s new in Cognos Analytics 11.2? Catch our on-demand webinar with Rachel Su, the principal offering manager for Cognos. It’s a great opportunity to learn about 11.2 straight from the source and see demos of our favorite capabilities, plus other functionality not discussed here including improved search functions, natural language generation and questions, and new automated statistical forecasts. |
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