What’s New in Cognos 11.2.1

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Rachel Su
Cognos Analytics Offering Management Leader
IBM

Rachel has been working in different areas of Cognos Analytics since 2006. She is passionate about analyzing the market landscape, as well as transforming and modernizing business intelligence. We appreciate her proven track record of delivering advanced product features.

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Welcome to the latest installment of the Senturus Knowledge Series. Today, we’re pleased to be presenting to you on the topic of What’s New in Cognos 11.2.1.

0:14
Before we get into the presentation, a couple of housekeeping items.

0:18
While we have the microphones muted out of courtesy to our speakers, we do encourage you to enter questions via the GoToWebinar Control panel, as indicated by the slide.

0:29
We’re generally able to respond to your questions while the webinar’s in progress, we save them until the end.

0:34
If we’re unable to cover it in the Q&A section, we will provide a written response document that we’ll post a Senturus.com.

0:41
Which always brings up the next question of, can I get a copy of today’s presentation? And the answer to that is absolutely.

0:50
It is available on the freshly updated Senturus.com website.

0:55
You can go to the Resources tab and head over to the renamed Knowledge Center or you can just click the link that was posted in the GoToWebinar control panel and it’ll take you directly there.

1:07
Today’s agenda, after some brief introductions, we’ll get into the presentation on What’s New in Cognos 11.2.1.

1:14
Then, we’ll go through some quick additional resources and Senturus overview for those of you who may not be familiar with what we do.

1:23
Before we get to the aforementioned Q&A, by way of introduction, we’re pleased to welcome back Rachel Su, Cognos Analytics, offering management leader at IBM, with over 15 years of experience in different areas of Cognos Analytics. She’s passionate about analyzing the market landscape as well as transforming and modernize business intelligence. We certainly appreciate her doing on numerous of these webinars and our proven track record of delivering advanced product features for our audience.

1:55
Before we get into the presentation, as per usual, we have a couple of polls for you that we’re going to launch. The first one is, What version of Cognos are you currently on?

2:05
And there’s obviously only one selection there: Are you pre Cognos 10, Cognos 10, Cognos 11.0., 11. 1, or, are you … with 11.2?

2:16
So, I’ll go ahead and get those votes in, And then, I’ll share back the results when we have sufficient dataset here.

2:34
We’re about three quarters of you have voted so far. So, I’ll give it a few more seconds.

2:39
Close it out and share it back.

2:44
All right, So, unsurprisingly, most of you, three quarters are on 11.1, 10% is sitting back on some version of 10 or 11.

2:53
And a very small percentage on Version 11 to not too surprising, given that a relatively new release.

3:01
So, perhaps, this will compel you to those folks on 10, 11 and 11.1 to upgrade.

3:09
Next poll is, What are your biggest challenges with Cognos? And this is a multiple selection so, you can choose all that apply.

3:18
Is it the enabling or the adoption of self-service?

3:22
Is it performance report sprawl or general cleanup needs that you’re moving data to the cloud? Is it running hybrid environments?

3:32
In other words, are you running multiple BI platforms, and different types of environments like that, maybe cloud, maybe on prem, or licensing, right sizing, licensing, matching current use?

3:57
About two thirds of you in here so far, I will give it just a little bit longer.

4:00
This one’s a little, maybe trickier to answer.

4:13
All right. I’m going to go ahead and close it out.

4:15
Share that back, and we got a pretty even split between the first two enabling adoption of self-service and performance reports for all general cleanup.

4:26
We’re really curious to see a breakdown of those. Unfortunately, these polls are limited to five answers.

4:32
And then, about a quarter around licensing issues and 15% split between data migrations and running hybrid environments.

4:40
Great. Well, thank you for those insights, very much appreciated.

4:44
And with that, I’m going to hand the floor and the microphone over to Rachel. Rachel, go ahead. Take it away.

4:52
Thank you so much. I hope you can all hear me and see my screen at any time during the presentation. It seems like I’m not advancing slide or you can’t hear me anymore just to please yell it out and I’ll take a look before I go too far. So, hello, everyone. Welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon, depending on where you are could be good evening. I’m very glad to be able to be invited back to present what’s new with Cognos Analytics with Senturus. Every time when I present what’s new session here, we get a lot of really good feedback and questions. I will leave plenty of time at the end of the session for questions so I encourage you to use the question section of the goto Meeting Tool to submit your question as I will try to get through them at the end of this presentation.

5:49
Now, before I dive into 11.2.1, what’s new feature, I’m going to just have a very quick recap of what’s in what’s delivered in 11.2.0.

6:01
I just cannot assume we all remember what 11.2.0 worst like. And I can’t assume you’ve all heard my presentation by 11.2.0, as well. So, we released 11.2.0, late May, this year. So actually, just maybe a quarter and a bit ago, we’re release 11.2.0.

6:21
We did a lot around the home page, the portal, that content navigation, warehouses received a lot of positive feedback from customers that loved to change the navigation, especially a usability enhancement that we’ve delivered in alignment to zero. That was a big thing. Now, another highlight is that we’ve added our AI capabilities support on top of data source. So not only our AI works on relational data source, it also works on all app cubes as well.

6:54
We’ve also delivered our very first Watson moment.

7:00
It’s called Watson Insights by Leveraging IBM Research and LP to provide additional information when a user interact with AI Assistant.

7:14
And we have done great work to improve the initial loading of our dashboard component without you having to re author. Of course, it depends on how your dashboard was created. You may see 30% performance improvement, or up to 50, 56%. I think it’s the most of we’ve seen, again, we’ve received positive feedback from customers saying that their dashboards are loading much faster now in 11.2.0, without them having to manually recreate or making any changes, and just a single are great. They’re getting much better performance.

7:50
So, really good, a product release for 11.2.0 with the brand new look and feel of the entire portal.

8:00
And, after we delivered 11.2.0, that was the end of May, We released 11.2.1 and September 30th, so the end of the Q3, it is a smaller time period that we spend on product development, but, there’s actually a lot of important features packed inside of Element 2, 1.

8:25
So, these are just highlights, don’t worry. I’m going to go into them in details, but, first, I’m going to talk about this biggest announcement.

8:35
We had an event in the first week of October.

8:43
We have officially announced that Cognos Analytics is now part of the IBM Watson Family.

8:51
So, what does this mean?

8:52
You actually have to have certain capabilities or technologies with Watson product.

9:13
Now, some of these require you to also use another Watson product. What’s the good news is if you’re using that Watson product, like, what’s a studio, Western knowledge catalog will be able to support a lot of workflow and assets used in those Watson products services, instead of Cognos.

9:34
Now, some integration we don’t require you to have another Watson product purchase were installed.

9:40
We, in many areas incorporate Watson Technology Watson products fields directly into Cognos.

9:49
So, what you can see is that, with this name change, it’s telling the market, telling customers of our commitment in investing in a few areas.

9:59
So, first of all, better to get there, Cognos as part of IBM big family. We have a lot of technologies available to us to leverage where we can incorporate into common products and allowing our customers to take advantage of them.

10:17
This is all also showing our commitment to be the best AI, to have the best AI capability for BI product. It is our vision as part of our AI vision.

10:30
Everyone knows IBM Watson is, has industry leading technology in the AI space and we work very closely with IBM research to look at opportunities in areas where we can enhance Cognos. We can bring more value into Cognos in many different areas, and we’re leading with a lot of AI initiatives and work very closely with IBM Watson Family.

10:56
Now, I quickly mentioned that some of the integration are already built into Cognos. Just couple of examples, in 11.2.0, I mentioned about the Watson Insights using Watson NLP.

11:09
We also have the Learn Panel on the right hand side where you can launch, that’s actually using the Watson Discovery technology, to show contextual insights, we’re working with the integration of, What’s an assistant in many more areas?

11:28
Alright, so, that was a big announcement of Cognos Analytics, who our name just officially became really long, but there’s a lot of good information in that name for our customers.

11:42
So we also made some licensing changes in this release.

11:46
Everyone knows that Cognos Analytics is available, not only on premises, but also on Cloud and without Cloud Deployment options, we have hosted, which is Enterprise Ready. We hosted Manage It for Customers, but we allow a lot of customizations, so, you basically have a dedicated environment to yourself. We can manage for you. You can schedule your updates on your own cadence. We also have this On Demand subscription based cloud environment.

12:20
In the past, we had three different tier the licenses. And we’ve simplified it to only two tiers, and reduce the entry point as well.

12:32
So, for, as low as $10 a month per user with no minimum user requirements, you can get, you can access our dashboard component, creating dashboard, consumed dashboard, interact with it.

12:46
It’s not just a Consumer License, you can actually create content without using our dashboard for $10 per month, US dollar per month per user.

12:55
And, everything else, the AI capabilities, exploration, stories are reporting the events to Pixel perfect into Press Reporting. Everything else is $40 per month per user.

13:10
Then, we also came out with a more mobile only license. So, what this means is, of course, you would already be a Cognos customers. You already have Cognos license, right? with our new Mobile app, which was released with as part of the Element released earlier this year in a summer. You can expand your Cardinals footprint.

13:35
You can distribute your Cognos content to more users with cheaper price.

13:42
So, if you have customers or if you have users only need to interact, consume content, Cognos content used a mobile app as $5 a month per user so, you can get those mobile license a mobile only license for these users.

13:58
So, this mobile app, they can connect to Cognos data. They can consume visualizations. They can set notification monitoring data.

14:08
They can also interact with our AI Assistant through the mobile app and ask a question live and have a visualization returned and answered in real time. That is actually content creation or they’ll go Right for $5 a month. So, those are the licensing pricing changes we release as part of the 11.2.1 release.

14:32
You don’t have to read through the lines. I’m going to go into each of them in detail. What I want to say is every release you’re going to see a lot of features in one air may be so more than other.

14:46
You’ve seen a lot of enhancements in our dashboards, We’ve seen a lot of changes in our portal contour navigation. one area, one component, where a lot of our customers use daily reporting.

15:00
We continue to make improvements in reporting, and this release, we actually did more. I feel like we did more and more impactful features than some other releases. So I’m really proud of all the work that was put into reporting for 11.2.1.

15:18
So I’m going to start with the visualization site. Now, visualization features, they will go into both the reporting and dashboarding.

15:26
First of all, we added a new donut visualization in reporting, we replaced the pie visualization that’s currently in Dashboard with this new donut visualization.

15:38
There’s a difference because in Dashboard will actually this donut visualization. You can configure it. So, Properties to make it look like a pie.

15:48
So we didn’t really need to have another pie visualization and so we did that for Dashboard part of the reef.

15:54
However, for reporting, we have to be very careful with customers, existing assets.

16:00
Right? We don’t want to make changes to their existing reports when they upgrade. And, so, we decided to add this as a additional visualization type. So, that report authors has the option to have the option to pick and choose whatever they want to use.

16:15
And, so, this visualization, you can create a donut type.

16:19
You can change the middle, whole radius size, and you can put logo sorry, label in the middle.

16:27
You can change to start at an angle. So, it looks like a half donut or half pie or full donut.

16:34
Or a donut that’s missing a slide, a missing a byte, their loss of configuration changes that you can make with this donut visualization.

16:44
I know, is just a donut or pie a visualization. However, these are some of the most commonly used, important visualizations out there.

16:54
And so we want to make sure that we have all of these, and available for you to customize based on what you need.

17:03
Other visualization improvements. We’ve done Shinji, we’ve added options, allow you to change the shape for the symbol that’s used in our legendary, right? Some people didn’t like the circle or square, or just didn’t fit with their overall look and feel, or business requirements. So we’ve added all these different shapes you can pick and choose, what do you want.

17:27
We’ve also added the access label orientation option, right? So you can do horizontal, vertical, rotate, scatter, stagger, depending on how much data you have and how much room you have to play with.

17:42
And don’t forget, our visualizations are responsible, either responsive, so bad, and it’s a setting you can turn on or off. So if you do it use the responsiveness that’s out of the box.

17:53
When there’s really no space left, we sometimes omit D axis labels for you.

18:00
There’s two tips available, right? Really think about when you’re designing your, your reports or dashboards.

18:07
Be smart about using space. If it’s something that’s taking up too much space and leaving too much white A blank, Don’t Do it like this screen shot here. That does not look great.

18:20
So that’s an example of what not to do around reports and dashboard design, but it shows you what you can do with different options.

18:30
Another improvements around bullet visualization. You can make it vertical or horizontal. It fits nicely. If it’s horizontally, fits nicely, if it’s nested inside of a list or a cross tab as one of the cell. It really depends on what you’re trying to do in terms of achieving the overall design, look and feel of your reports and dashboards.

18:57
Now, this is an interesting one, and I think some of you would probably jump out of your chair, and then happy that we finally did this. We have received a lot of feet, negative feedback from customers about our tap reports.

19:12
We also have lots of positive feedback, because customers love that, we can allow you to flexible, change your reports from pages, multiple pages, to tabs. We allow you to change where the taps are located. We’ve had this feature for a long time.

19:29
Those are good, and those are good. Positive feedback. The is the performance. Performance is an important thing and afford tap report.

19:40
It did not perform the same way as page to report like semi exact pages.

19:44
Page reports, if you switch them to rent taps, they could be running and they run slower for sure. If it’s executed in HTML output interactively, I’m not talking about scheduled report.

19:59
I’m not talking about PDF or Excel. This is HTML interactively run mode only.

20:07
So what that means is, the reason it was slow is that we have to, we weren’t evaluating all the taps in the queries ahead of time before start rendering.

20:18
Customers said, why don’t you just display one tap at a time.

20:22
So, what we did, and it’s not that simple, what we did, is we didn’t just change the default behaviour to render one tab. At a time, we implemented a property at the report level.

20:34
So, depending on how your record is all 30, can choose, if you want to use this option or not, you can choose to have it optimize to run one tab at a time. So, when you’re initially opening up a tap report, it’s going to only render the first tab, and it’s going to be fast.

20:52
Why would you not want to use this?

20:54
yes, if your report is our third with, say, conditional rendered objects.

21:00
That’s the condition is rely on knowing the total page of total number of pages or total number of taps. Because we’re not evaluating all the taps at the same time ahead of time.

21:13
We may not know the number of taps. So your conditionally rendered object won’t show up correctly.

21:19
So, you know your reports, you know, higher reports are designed if you’re not using conditional rendered based on the tab numbers, please feel free to use this new option is going to be much faster. It is good, And if you do have reports rely on total Page or tap numbers may, not be a good option for you.

21:41
Another performance area of new feature that we implemented is, I’m not sure how many of you currently aware that, when you’re also in your report, within the report offering UI, you have the option to show performance details, which will break down, what’s the rendering time versus query time, or show you which query takes, what, how much time, in which objects, with which query. We can show you, which prompted taking hold, how much time? So it’s very good for authors to troubleshoot a performance issue, or just to have a better understanding of where we’re spending on rendering the report.

22:24
So that was only available in Report all three. The same exact capability. We brought it into batch report rent. So, batch report means, when you’re scheduling report, or run a report in background, you’re not actively opening it up to select that option. So, when you’re scheduling report, go to reporting, background. You have the option to show up to say, I want to also have performance details as part of my report output.

22:56
Active report viewer now. This is not exactly part of the 11.2.1 release because it didn’t get released with the product. It didn’t have to. It is its own tool.

23:09
It’s a standalone tool, But I’m including it here because we did this whole war. We did this work during the element 2, 1 development period, and also, I don’t know if everyone is aware of this.

23:22
So, this is for customers who currently use active reports and if you don’t use that to report, sorry, you can sit back relax for a couple minutes. And when I’m talking about this, but if you do use active reports today, you will know that.

23:39
Well, first of all, I need to clarify if you use active reports offline, download it from Cognos or got it from somebody else in the MHT format. You can consume it offline.

23:53
Right now, you can only open that format in IE, it’s an IE only format.

23:59
Now, with the Microsoft messaging of moving away from IE, we had to find a solution for our customers, who invested, heavily rely, who rely on active reports.

24:13
What we did is, this is a new, lightweight Windows desktop app that you can’t use.

24:21
You do not have to use browser anymore.

24:23
You can use this app too open, consume, interact with existing active reports in MHT format. You don’t have to recreate them. You don’t have to rerun them.

24:34
Um, Any MHT file that you got or you’ve been consuming a should open from this viewer. It’s available of our Accelerators catalog. Just Google Accelerators.

24:47
catalog Active Report viewer, it is completely free.

24:51
For any users. You do not have to have IBM ID. We’re not checking your licensing. This is a consumer and user tool. It is using Electron open-source technology.

25:05
It actually performs a lot better than IE, which I’m not surprised, IE, it’s very legacy us, very legacy code. It doesn’t manage resource very well whereas this is Chromium based technology that it’s it’s a lot faster to render to interact to the initial load. It’s much faster.

25:33
Now, another very important enhancement. It just seems like a small one, but it, it has been a pain for many customers is, search and select prompt had been missing.

25:50
When using data module as the data source.

25:54
So, this release in 11.2.1, We brought the search and select prompt available, back, fully tested, officially supported when you’re using a data module as your data source.

26:11
Another looks small, but very important feature, is allowing users to copy value on a HTML report output.

26:22
This was available in the Cognos 10 classic viewer. It’s still available through the classic viewer. We have a lot of votes on our Ideas portal to say, we need to bring this feature into the Interactive viewer.

26:39
So, that’s what we did, is, based on customer feedback, they want to be able to call P, value, out of an HTML report outputs.

26:48
The weight weight, the way we did it, is through argument toolbar. So what’s so good about that is it’s discoverable, because all your two bars are right there. You’re not going to miss it. Went hiding it from right click. We actually did not enable it’s through Control C Word.

27:07
Comment C is because some customers don’t really want this. This is what we have to deal with Thrive. Some customers need, some customers absolutely can’t have it, so if you don’t want your users to interact with data like this, you can disable anti meant to bar. We have property at a report level allow you to do that.

27:30
We have a global setting allow you to disable, aren’t meant to bar.

27:35
So if you don’t want that, you can take it away. But if you do use it through this copy button, you can copy the value that’s currently selected. So, right here in the screenshot, camping equipment that has the darker blue background, that is the selected value, we have multiple selection model. You can tell right here, you are selecting the entire column body, where it means you could do something for the entire column.

28:04
But you can also just select that campaign equipment as the value of the sale that’s being selected, and that’s going to get copied from the drop-down. There’s actually a way for you to, also, the option to copy raw value.

28:19
What does that mean? Is often your data stored in a format that’s if at a source that’s not exactly user friendly to report, to create reports against. So, a lot of times, report also with the data formatting, all these things.

28:37
It’s more common measures, for example, measures. However, where you’re copying value and taking it, I don’t know where you’re taking it.

28:46
Of course. So, when you are taking it outside of Cognos, you may want the raw value that’s actually store that source. Could be 16 digits, 32 digits long. So, that’s what’s copy raw value will give you. It’s allowing you to copy and format it data.

29:10
There are a few mapping enhancements in this release as well Now, if you, you may recall, we currently support a few different grouping options.

29:21
Cluster, so, which will classroom group data points Into different buckets, as round shaped points on the layer.

29:33
We also have heat map as a way to show you the density area, It’s a different view. Now the third option around grouping is hex pin.

29:44
And it’s available for point layer as well as latitude and longitude layer, where we’re going to, And this is an example to show you bad things or group Using Hacks Bin option, and you probably already saw that. We also support 3d. maps.

30:03
Now you can use a search measure, ST excursion the height to show which area has higher density data.

30:14
And to put the two together, you can see through this type of gesture, you can tilt the map to see the height of your 3d locations.

30:25
You can actually configure the maximum and minimum excursion height depending on your data, because sometimes maybe the height is, too much higher than the lower part and the lower part doesn’t show up anymore, doesn’t show very well anymore. So you can configure it arrange to scale yourself.

30:48
Of course, you can change the color of those, create any type of view that you want, and this is using a heck spin grouping with the 3d mapping View. It’s Endpoints layer and then this you can use the 3d maps. It’s available on all layers. So, if this is just rigid layer, you can see that whole region with the shape popping up instead of just points.

31:15
Now, there are some other enhancements.

31:19
They didn’t really need to have their own slides, but they’re very important. They want to call out in the first one is Event Studio Support. And this, I know this is a big ask from many, many customers. We did it to have Event Studio also supportive in.

31:37
Chrome browsers, which means Google, Chrome, and Chromium Edge.

31:42
So when I say Chrome, it means both Google Chrome and Chromium Edge.

31:48
This is available in 11.2.1, but we’re also back putting it into another was seven F P for which is scheduled to be released.

31:58
The end of November that’s going to have this browser conformance update for Event Studio as well.

32:06
We’ve also done some usability improvements for the home page, navigation, Continental vacation. As I mentioned, we made a lot of my husband’s changes at the 11.2.0 release. There a couple other little things that didn’t get in. We completed them 11, 11.2.1, for example. Now, from the switcher switcher is where you can find all your opened reports or dashboards or data modules, all the Cognos objects are currently open. You can find them from the drop-down switcher.

32:43
You can also find your content navigation there now, So, searches, couple clicks, you can go back home where you were around content navigation.

32:53
We also can persist more things. Remember more things, how you configured around your content navigation, such as how you want to sort things, how you want to hide things, we want to make sure that we’re remembering everything.

33:09
So when you go back to that, content navigation is exactly where you have left it out, left at.

33:17
And for the search area, we’re also persisting filters that you use last, and we can build on top of that instead of having you to start over.

33:28
We also have bumped up our accessibility based on IBM accessibility 7.2 requirements. So, there are 5 or 6 additional accessibility requirements at it as part of the IBM accessibility requirements, so we’ve added those tasks fully tested with Cognos.

33:50
If you are familiar with our WKC a Western knowledge catalog integration.

33:55
We now, at D S schema import, you can select specific WKC catalogs, instead of loading up and importing all of these schemas all the catalogs in a schema.

34:09
We’ve also added TLS 1.3 support In this release, in a deprecate it the older ones.

34:20
Around data access, we’ve added two additional connectors, so Dre Meal as well as IBM Cloud SQL query.

34:30
So, what’s really interesting about dream meal is that this kind of going through disconnect here.

34:36
Not only you can connect to the traditional databases, like Oracle, SQL Server, DB two, and so on, but it also allows you to connect to local and distributed file systems as three cloud storage systems as such.

34:55
So, treadmill is a supported connector that comes with the Cognos install, Of course, you’re going to have to purchase Tremulous separately yourself, but the connector is part of Cognos installed now.

35:11
All right. So, that’s the end of what’s new in 11.2.1.

35:16
I’m going to pass this back in. I will come back at the end of the session to answer questions.

35:25
Great stuff. Thank you very much, Rachel. Yeah, definitely stick around everybody. We’ve got a ton of great questions.

35:33
I pretty much flag them all, Rachel so maybe you can take a peek at those if you can multitask and go ahead and get all your questions and we’ll get to them very shortly.

35:42
You may be asking yourself, you know, how can I take advantage of these great new features and modernize my system and enable self-service, increase user adoption, and reduce my administration and cost? Well? That’s where Senturus can come in and help you out. We can help you with other things that are bulleted out here, whether it’s optimizing your data models, introducing better governance to support self-service.

36:04
I’m helping you with your performance.

36:07
Cleaning up and rationalizing content, leveraging some of our proprietary technology, showing you how to run Cognos in concert with another BI platform.

36:16
I’ll be right size your Cognos licensing or upgrade to Cognos 11 or the latest version. So, please, click the link there, or, just, reach out to us, and we’d be happy to discuss that with you.

36:30
On the next slide, we have a lot of great additional resources in our newly branded Knowledge Center at Senturus.com, it has tons of valuable content in addressing a wide variety of business analytics topics, Whether it’s technical tips, product demos, webinars like this. And, upcoming events, and our new website makes it even easier to find what you’re looking for, so, make sure you go over there and bookmark that.

36:53
Speaking of events, we have an upcoming event on Thursday, November 4, so, that’s next week.

37:01
Where you can easily connect Power BI and Tableau to Cognos data will be hosted by yours truly.

37:06
I will demo the Senturus Analytics Connector. Same time, Same channel.

37:10
So, please go register for that if you’re interested in leveraging that great Cognos metadata.

37:17
Quick couple of slides about us at Senturus. We concentrate our expertise solely on business intelligence with a depth of knowledge across the entire BI stack, and, on the next slide, our clients know us for providing clarity from the chaos of complex business requirements, disparate data sources, and constantly moving targets. We’ve made a name for ourselves because of our strength in bridging the gap between IT and business users.

37:42
We deliver solutions that give you access to reliable analysis, ready data across the organization, so you can quickly and easily get answers at the point of impact, the decisions you make, and the actions you take.

37:53
Our consultants are leading experts in the field of analytics with years of pragmatic, real-world experience, and experience advancing the state of the art.

38:01
We’re so confident in our team and our methodology that we back our projects with a 100% money back guarantee that is unique in the industry.

38:10
And we have a full selection of courses on Cognos 11.

38:15
We offer training in the three main platforms that we support.

38:19
And in modalities featuring things like tailored group sessions, small group mentoring, instructor led online courses, and self paced e-learning.

38:27
We can mix and match those to help optimize for what’s best for your organization.

38:33
And we’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve been focused exclusively on business intelligence for over 20 years now.

38:39
We work across the spectrum all the way from the Fortune 500 down to the mid-market solving business problems, across just about every industry out there.

38:47
And most functional areas, including the office of finance, sales, and marketing, manufacturing, operations, HR, and IT, Our team is both large enough to meet all of your business analytics needs, yet small enough to provide personalized attention.

39:01
If you’re interested, we are hiring talented and experienced professionals.

39:05
You can see we’re looking for various positions there, and you can join the Senturus as team. You can either e-mail your resume to jobs at Senturus.com and analyse or dive into the job descriptions at the link provided here.

39:19
So, with that, we’ll go to the next slide, and jump into the Q&A, Rachel.

40:24
Do you have to be on cloud version to have Watson moments? No, you do not, this Watson moments, were branded as, what’s a moment of Watson insights built into the product, and for Cognos really, We have feature parity between our on Prime and versus the cloud offering. It is the same install. Some of the legacy components may not be available on cloud, but when we implement features, they’re mostly available for both on prime, as well as in the, for the one that we host on Cloud. So, you don’t have to be on cloud in order to have this is built into the Cognos install base.

41:06
Next question, if you have no access to MapBox, is there any other mapping solutions? Where do we have to create our own custom maps? So, when you say No access, is it because you can’t access to the public internet from the client machine? I assume that’s. That’s why you’re saying, no access? You need a mapping server installed behind firewall for your users to reach to, So, if that’s the case, we, our current integration without mapping capability is through web map Box only. That’s the one that we officially support, and it does not require you to have Cognos server. I just want to make this clear is that your Cognos servers can, still, behind a firewall. It doesn’t have to reach to the public internet. It’s only declined machine who’s running the reports from our browser, your laptop, that has to have Internet connection.

42:06
Now, if you can’t do that, we do have some partner done solutions to integrate Cognos with as treemaps.

42:15
So that’s something maybe you could go Google. Cognos has some of the partners built a lot of custom mapping integration solutions. Quite, a few of them are available there, so, if you just Google that, you can probably get some results.

42:34
The next question, Does the Cognos 11.2 and Restoration half the same look and feel as 11.1? Yes. So for the 11.2 so that for the administration part, this is how it’s been going. It is going slope. This is how it’s been going. It’s going slower than some other areas within the product to modernize. We can see from every release where every other release will have some of the admin area. UI move to reform the legacy old administration console to the new what we call managed area.

43:11
For element two, specifically, we didn’t really do the 11.2.0 and 11.2.1. We didn’t do much work around moving the old legacy admin UI to the new manage, but actually 11.2.2. We’ve got quite a few things that’s currently scheduled being worked out around it, area, to move some of the legacy UI into the new managed area.

43:37
So, you should be able to, You should expect more work to be done in this area In the element dart, 2.2 release.

43:48
What about PV your licenses?

43:50
Are there any changes, not no changes to your PV licenses from this release?

43:57
The next question, it’s a little bit long, but I read through it, and this is asking about upgrade from 11.2.2, 11, sorry, from tend to 2 element 2.

44:07
So, in Cognos 10.2, you only allow a user to see their own my folders in the portal, but in  11.2 they’re able to see team content. There’s no way to hide.

44:21
Well, I think you should log a support ticket, maybe perhaps to contact us for this question, because for sure, we support the option to hide the content.

44:35
We even have some internal environments where that’s how it’s configured, so that capability is still there. And it should not even break when you upgrade, it should automatically be applied.

44:46
So if you do see Issues, and if you’re not able to find the option, how to hide it, please log a support tickets, so we can take a look at your environments sitting more closely.

45:07
Here’s the first one is the conditional coloring palette. You want to be able to see assigned color to a specialist, to a specific value or graph in the graph. So this one is currently being worked out for dashboard component. And for reporting, we haven’t started this work in that specific area, but it is something that we do want to plan. Right now, what’s currently being worked around the visualization in reporting for a new visualization engine is master detail. That is currently own the number-one priority list that we want to bring master detail into the new visualization engine.

45:48
And then we’re going to move on to enhanced advanced sorting. These are a couple of things we’re really have to implement right away.

45:56
And the other question is customize a new chart.

46:01
So we have done some custom tips on the chart prototypes. We feel that it’s not good enough. The prototype that we had, we want to do a bit more. We want to tie that to value, instead of just a chart body. So, that work is currently on the Roadmap, but it’s not actively being worked out, it’s just a little bit lower priority, comparing to master detail and hence sorting, which is what we’re currently worked up.

46:30
When you read tap Report, as a Report View, this, your new tab work the same as a Report view. So, the Optimization Work for Tap to report, It triggers when you run that report interactively in HTML format. So, if you are running your Report View in HTML interactively, yes, you will get D in optimized performance as well.

46:59
All to turn on the performance detail in Admin Console, What services do we need to pay keyword? Oh, you don’t have to pick any special services.

47:10
The Performance details I mentioned in the slide. That captures Batch Report runs. You do not have to do it on a specific dispatcher.

47:22
Report service has a link to the document, to explain how that works. It is a event setting that you set to True, and then you can just as Advanced setting on the, in the Admin console, but we have a link in the documentation to explain how to enable that.

47:58
The next question, does Framework Manager come with Version 11.2? Yes. It is still part of element two, it’s part of Cognos 11. We have not deprecated Framework Manager. We continue to support it.

48:12
We do have a new web based modeling data module. It does not have full feature parity with framework manager.

48:20
It is something that we continue to improving hands.

48:24
But at the same time we absolutely still support Framework Manager with the current version. And we do not have a timeframe on when to deprecate. it. It’s not being actively discussed at this point.

48:38
Next question can we disable parts of the on demand toolbar? Yes, some people have asked about this before.

48:48
This is not currently available.

48:50
Please help us to vote on the idea that’s going to help us to understand what requests are more important to customers.

49:00
We look at some of the highly voltage enhancement request from the portal, so I’m pretty sure this one has already logged. Please go ahead and vote on the idea if it’s something that you want. We did. We did talk about this. It’s something that we’re opening, we’re open to do, but we want to see if it’s more important than some other priorities that we currently already have plant.

49:28
What is the next version of Cognos after 11.2.1 and when it is targeted?

49:34
For the next version of Cognos as 11.2.2? It is currently scheduled for next year.

49:49
Advanced settings are not exported in a content store export.

49:54
When you upgrade a version, this is not comfortable, when do you plan to include advanced options into upgrades scenarios?

50:03
That’s a good question. I think that’s something I should look into a bit more. I did not know that they’re not being included in the content store export. Sorry, I don’t know the answer to everything in a product, but I’ll take this note down and to do a follow up. So, I’m not sure about this one.

50:25
It’s sitting, content store, right.

50:32
Next question. How does the Framework Manager author works in your cloud environment?

50:44
Through VPN connection, we actually have a few different options.

50:49
If you are interested in the cloud offering and how your existing components may work, please feel free to send me an email, so we can take a look at your plan and see what you’re using and how to migrate them.

51:07
This in an area that we have a lot of ongoing discussion on work and resources planned to help customers who has the modernization play to cloud.

51:20
We want to help our customers to modernize their infrastructure, their user base, and help them to move their current workloads to cloud.

51:30
So, as sent me an email around this, now, we can do a deeper dive into this.

51:38
Next is file upload automation he has spent in the pipeline. Yup. This one is currently on our 11.2.2 list.

51:46
We haven’t started this work because we’re finishing up some other work for up to 11.2 and 11.1, but this is on top of our priority list. We were discussing of different mechanism that we can support scheduled file upload. We may not have to implement this organically. There are lots of technologies available we can leverage. So, this is something. Yeah, it’s currently targeted.

52:13
Any improvement on search. Not on this release. So this is one that I would encourage you to contact us through the portal with their suggestion, and we can take a look at that.

52:33
Next question: Any change install on Windows Server? Now, we’re still monitoring this issue with with Windows Server on this. Next time we looked, there’s no progress on that side. So, we cannot make our Jupiter Notebooks available on Windows servers still, but we will keep our close eyes on that as soon as Microsoft making the changes as needed, or we can, We can be on there.

53:02
It is definitely something that we want to do, and a lot of customers have asked for this.

53:09
Next, we would like to have a greater degree control over elements in charts and visualizations in the dashboard.

53:17
Can you please be more specific about what exactly you want to control?

53:27
Asking about to conditional rendering in a dashboard that’s currently being worked on last time I checked with the team. I don’t know where we are on that. exactly, in terms of progress, but that’s an area that we want to do.

54:03
Visualization improvements are quite high, but we don’t really know exactly which feature customers are voting on. So it’s difficult for us to prioritize, so let us know your priorities.

54:20
Something similar to legacy charts or they crawl. Control things at a deeper level electric nodes, nodes bar, thickness.

54:28
That gives you some ideas.

54:34
Crucial thing, set deeper level.

54:37
Please log you requests in the idea portal, and make sure you separate them, and be clear on what you are trying to control. So that we know how to prioritize different features when, whenever we group them, in the ideas, it’s very difficult for us to leverage that in our prioritization exercise.

55:05
Add custom sorting on visualization? Yes, So I talked about this.

55:10
That’s actually, right after we finished master detail, that is another thing that’s quite high priority for us, For the new element that one visualization engine to, enhance, is custom sorting sorting based on another item. Right.

55:31
Another question, Can this version be installed over an existing element 1.1 version? Yes. So, you can install over top, and a lot of customers do.

55:44
But, I personally, recommend you to not do that in your production right away. You should always do that your test environment, your QC, or dev. Make sure that if you’re comfortable doing something like that and always make backup, make backups. But, yes, we do have customers install overtop. We still allow the same preserve file options. So, see, installation side of the product has not changed in element two version.

56:18
Are there plans to implement aggregate awareness? Capabilities? In the module? Today it’s only available in dynamic cubes? Aggregate awareness. I remember the team talking about this quite a bit lately, it is something that is on our roadmap. As part of the data module enhancement.

56:38
We’re also evaluating constantly about feature gaps between data module, and framework manager, for example. So, a lot of things are on our data module enhancement list to implement.

56:58
OK, so Jason had a clarification around Mapbox, your client machines don’t have access to Mapbox. Sorry, it’s not officially supported by Cognos.

57:13
That’s why I suggest that you to search for partners solution. We do have partner integrated build connector to support as rate and Cognos.

57:22
They have this solution already implemented, and they support it fully, so, it is through our partner solution.

57:32
Custom control is complex. Can it be streamlined? Make it user friendly?

57:38
Yeah, see, custom control is a feature so, customer choice is our way of allowing JavaScript to be brought into Cognos reporting. You can store it on any web server. You can store it in the extension with Cognos Server to upload it. So, it is a feature that’s targeted for developers.

58:00
So, if you’re a JavaScript developer, that’s the targeted user persona, but I completely understand what you’re saying, that doesn’t matter what user persona that you’re working us. We should be able to make it easier to use for all type of users. So, a couple of saints who have thought about is making the custom control available as a suitable object, for example. So, that’s one area. But the concept of custom control, allowing users to do use JavaScript, that’s going to be to remain as an advanced use case for developers. Probably likely, unlikely we’re going to make it simple for business users to, to be able to comfortably use.

58:54
Will there ever be a conversion process to convert FM into data mode? Shoot? That’s an interesting question.

59:02
We got that question quite a bit. There our partners do this.

59:06
So, again, this is another one that you can Google it. I don’t want to advocate and promote one partner over another. That’s why I’m not mentioning partner names on this call, especially I’m on the partner webinar today.

59:25
There are some custom tools developed by Cognos partners can do this type of conversion from FM to data mode.

59:38
Is there a plan of enabling filters as drop-down where radio button in Cognos dashboard that’s currently there?

59:45
The only option, I think, filter’s list box in dashboards, yes. Dashboard is lacking of some of the prompt can show object right now for dashboard, when you’re performing filters. Dashboard is already our dashboard is already used. Cognos, have a prompt, UI prompt controller, with each widget, is really a filtering mechanism. So you don’t really see a lot of different visual views of the traditional typical prompt controls. It is on our plan to implement them. We have a set of prompts that reporting will want to implement. And hopefully, that’s shared, but the goal is to share it across the product. So that’s something that we’re currently evaluating.

1:00:32
Is there still an option to run reports in the background in version 11.2? Yes, that has not changed.

1:00:44
Any updates to CAFE? I’m not familiar with CAFE, the Excel plugin. That’s owned by analytics team. Sorry, that I don’t have the answer to that one.

1:01:19
Thank you very much. Maybe 1 last question: are there plans to implement relative time functions for relational data sources?

1:01:27
Yes.

1:01:29
So in our data module, in our data module today, we have relative time functions already implemented, associated with custom calendars that you can import. But we have another initiative to enhance our AI, natural language, understanding of relative time. So that’s another thing, And more over, we’re looking at how can we leverage the data module relative time functions in the product, across product in other areas as well.

1:02:00
Great! Yeah, that’s a really powerful piece of functionality. And we actually do some webinars on it and you can find it over in the Senturus Knowledge Center at senturus.com.

1:02:07
How you can leverage those calendars and the relative time functionality and the great KPI functionality. So with that, we will wrap up here.

1:02:16
I want to thank Rachel again for great webinar and great depth of knowledge here, banging out all those questions and thank all of you for joining us today.

1:02:25
We hope you’ll reach out to us at sales at Senturus.com or give us a shout or hit us up via the chat here.

1:02:33
We look forward to seeing you on the Next Knowledge Series event.

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