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Cognos Analytics is an exciting, fresh take on the Cognos experience you have been using for years. Being a preferred partner with IBM, we have been keeping up to date with the latest changes and challenges. As with any new major release, there are some bumps along the road. Here are a few issues to be aware of as of Release 3.
Additional export options in report viewer
Interactive Mode, for the Report Viewer, is one of our favorite enhancements to Cognos Analytics. The new ability for users to interact and manipulate report output is a feature you are going to wonder how you lived without. Unfortunately, this mode only allows HTML and PDF output at this time. To get an Excel or CSV output, you will need to run the output from the report editor or from the portal.
Changes in browser preference
For as long as we can remember, Internet Explorer has been the gold standard for working with Cognos, especially if you needed to access all of the developer tools. Cognos Analytics opens the door for additional browsers to leverage all the features that used to be restricted to IE. In fact, Chrome seems to perform much better. One catch though: if you are planning on using all of the companion/legacy tools from Cognos 10/8 (i.e. Query Studio, Analysis Studio, etc.), you will still need to use IE.
File uploads
In previous Cognos Analytic releases, file uploads were physically stored on the server. In order to make this work in a distributed environment, you had to setup a shared network location to make files available across dispatchers. In Release 3, this is no longer needed as files are uploaded directly to the content store. This helps simplify the upload process across multiple servers, but make sure you have strong file and quota restrictions set if you have a lot of users. Your content store could grow very quickly.
Thanks to our own Todd Schuman for contributing this post. Todd is the Cognos practice lead at Senturus in charge of installation, upgrades, and optimization.
