What’s New in Cognos Analytics 11.2.3

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Tim Aston
Cognos Analytics Senior Product Manager
IBM

Tim joined IBM 14 years ago as a developer. He is currently a senior product manager for Cognos Analytics and focuses on the Cognos home page, customization and mobile support. He is based in Ottawa, Canada.

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Q: When was Cognos 11.2.3 released?
A: It was released on August 30, 2022.

Q: Is Cognos 11.2.3 available for download from the IBM site?
A: Yes, download it from IBM Passport Advantage.

Q: Does Cognos 11.2.3 have a feature where it can send notifications if the report failed during execution?
A: This notification on failed asset is being targeted for Cognos 11.2.4, which will be released at the end of 2022. Email Greg McDonald at IBM at greg.mcdonald@ca.ibm.com if you’d like more information.

Q: Does Cognos 11.2.3 support Azure database and Databricks?
A: Yes, it does.

Q: Will Azure and Databricks be listed as Type, like we have for Oracle?
A: Azure databases are currently available. We are targeting the end of 2022 for native support of Databricks.

Q: What steps are required to setup Microsoft Teams? The IBM instructions for the backend setup that I gave to our Azure cloud team were not understood and we are at a standstill.
A: Please use IBM documentation for information on how to setup Teams. If you still cannot get it configured, then log a case with IBM customer support and they can help you out.

Q: Can we connect to SharePoint as a data source/retrieve data from SharePoint?
A: SharePoint as a data source is not available. What an interesting idea! You should log an IBM Idea for this one or search and see if another customer has logged this already.

Q: Is there a global way to turn off features in the Admin tab or somewhere else?
A: A lot of features are controlled by our capabilities. Cognos has always has a robust and granular way to control features in the product. Learn more.

Q: We’re in the middle of upgrading from Cognos 11.1.7 to 11.2.2. Should we upgrade to 11.2.3 instead?
A: If you have the option to upgrade to 11.2.3 for some of these great features, then yes! Cognos 11.2.4 is targeted for November 2022 and this will be our new long-term support release. So, keep that in mind when considering which version to upgrade to.

Q: We’ve been spending a lot of time on customizing (hiding, adding tabs) to the home page. It’s not very intuitive, does Cognos 11.2.3 have an easy way to customize?
A: The method to customize has not changed in 11.2.3. Sorry you’re having difficulty. Email Greg McDonald at IBM at greg.mcdonald@ca.ibm.com for guidance.

Q: Is Cognos Analytics Content Hub included with the standard Cognos licenses? And is this product available now?
A: Yes, it is available now. The license you need is the BA Enterprise license, please contact your account team to discuss moving to this license.

Q: Is there an easy way to replicate all of our custom changes to the new release? I’ve been making adjustments to users’ features in our TEST environment and don’t want to have to go through all the same steps in our production environment. Is migrating the full content store the best option?
A: Email Greg McDonald at IBM at greg.mcdonald@ca.ibm.com for guidance.

Q: Is Cognos 11.2.3 the long-term support (LTS) version?
A: No, Cognos 11.2.4 will be released in November 2022 and will be the LTS version.

Q: Can you provide a date (or version) when Query Studio will no longer ship with Cognos Analytics?
A: Query Studio is supported in the 11.2.x code stream but only supports Firefox since IE has been deprecated by Microsoft.

Q: Can we upgrade directly from Cognos 11.0.13 to 11.2.3? We are currently planning to upgrade to 11.1.7 in the next couple of months?
A: Yes, you can upgrade from 11.0.13 to 11.2.3 or 11.2.4 (when it’s released).

Q: Are there changes in look and feel of the administration portal or any new features added in Cognos 11.2.3?
A: Email Greg McDonald at IBM at greg.mcdonald@ca.ibm.com to discuss.

Q: Is there any migration path available to migrate the Framework Manager models and packages into data modules?
A: There is currently no migration path.

Q: Will Event Studio be sunset in Cognos 11.2.4 or near future?
A: Event Studio is not being deprecated.

Q: Will the features of Event Studio be integrated into the Cognos 11.2 stream?
A: Perhaps someday IBM will do that. Currently there are no plans to deprecate Event Studio. New features were added to Event Studio in Cognos 11.2.3.

Q: Will we need training with the Cognos 11.2.3 user interface?
A: The new interface is very intuitive but different. IBM has a deck that discusses some of the differences. Email Greg McDonald at IBM at greg.mcdonald@ca.ibm.com for the deck, which will be ready in October 2022.

Q: What are the functional equivalents for Analysis Studio and Transformer Cubes in Cognos 11.2.x?
A: Power Cubes are available in 11.2 and they will continue to be supported. Analysis Studio users should look at dashboarding and reporting.

Q: A PID error is happening in my current prod environment. How can I fix this?
A: Call IBM customer support to get this issue resolved.

Q: Do you have any updates around automating flat file imports in Cognos data module?
A: There are no further changes planned for this year.

Q: Do you have any updates around hide/show visuals in dashboard?
A: Nothing planned for this year.

Q: Do you have any updates around the addition of clickable buttons and images on the dashboard?
A: Clickable buttons can be added today using the link extension.

Q: You mentioned “Titles” in your outline but I think you missed it in your commentary. Will Cognos 11.2.3 have the ability to add calculated Titles including filter states etc. (like Tableau)?
A: Yes, this can be done in reporting.

Q: Are data modules and data set updates coming in future releases?
A: Package capabilities around data modules and data sets will be coming in Cognos 11.2.4 and beyond.

Q: Do you have any updates around automating flat files import into data modules and FM Manager?
A: Please log into the IBM Ideas Portal to track this.

Q: Is there any way to rename “Unrecognized location” (Yellow triangle) in map visualization in dashboards?
A: Call IBM customer support to get assistance.

Q: Are there any known issues for PA integration with Cognos 11.2.3 upgrade?
A: No known issues.

Q: Do you have any updates on Active Reports?
A: Active Reports remain supported and will be for the foreseeable future. They can be viewed using the Active Reports viewer app for Windows and Mac, as well as with the Cognos Analytics reports mobile app for iOS, iPadOS and Android.

Q: Does IBM have any plans to have dynamic dates filters available for reporting, like Prior Month, etc.?
A: This is currently available by using Relative Dates in data modules.

Q: Can we create dashboards from packages?
A: Yes, dashboards can use packages.

Q: Is it possible to see underlining SQL from the report based on data module?
A: Yes, this is possible.

Q: Are there any bilingual capabilities for Cognos Analytics dashboards?
A: Yes, there are. You can create multi-lingual dashboards for different languages.

Q: Is PowerPlay enterprise still available? And how long to open cubes?
A: Yes, there are no depreciation plans.

Q: Are there plans to depreciate PowerPlay Studio?
A: There are no depreciation plans for PowerPlay Studio.

Q: How long will IBM support Cognos 11.1.7?
A: IBM has not announced end of life for 11.1.7 yet. That announcement will be given well in advance.

Q: Is it possible to use dashboard features from package driven a 32-bit data warehouse or does it still require days modules or a 64-bit framework?
A: Dashboards can use packages.

Q: Where can I download the dataset you used during the webinar?
A: Sorry this data set is not available.

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Welcome to the Senturus Webinar Series. Today’s topic is one of my personal favorites: What’s New in Cognos 11.2.3.

0:23
You’ve got questions we’ve got answers. Please use the GoToWebinar control panel to make this session interactive.

0:28
We’re usually able to respond to your questions during the webinar while in progress and if we don’t reply immediately, we’ll cover it if they’re in the Q&A section at the end of the presentation or via written response document that we’ll post on the Senturus website.

0:46
One of the first questions we usually get is, Can I get a copy of the presentation? And unfortunately, the answer is no, due to changes to the GDPR. I’m kidding, you can definitely get a copy. We will make it available on Senturus.com.

0:59
You can also grab it from the Resources tab and then Knowledge Center or you can just grab it right from the GoToWebinar Control panel, where the link has been posted.

1:11
Today’s agenda: we’ll kind of go over some brief introductions.

1:15
We’ll discuss the recent Cognos releases and the innovation stream, will discuss the IBM content analytics content Hub will get into the new features 11.2.3, and then, we’ll wrap up with some additional resources, and a brief Senturus overview.

1:30
Then, we’ll handle your questions and answer as many of those as we can in the time we have.

1:35
We’ll follow up with any unanswered questions at the actually posted to the website in a couple of days.

1:47
Joining us today is Tim Ashton, Tim joined IBM about 14 years ago as a developer and currently is a Senior Product Manager for Cognos Analytics. He focuses on the Cognos Homepage customizations and mobile support. He is based in the Ottawa Canada area.

2:04
My name is Todd Shuman, I’ll be your host today. I run the installations upgrades and optimization practice here at Senturus..

2:11
You may recognize me from such highly acclaimed webinars in the past such as Cognos Analytics Performance Tuning Tips and Tips for installing Cognos 11.

2:22
We’ve got a few polls today, so, I wanted to get a quick reading from today’s crowd.

2:26
First question, What version of Cognos are you using?

2:30
I’m hoping no one’s before Cognos 10 like Cognos 8.

2:37
Hope to see Cognos 10 some version of that Cognos 11.0, 11.1? Or? are you on the 11.2 innovation stream? Which we’ll be discussing today.

2:48
Take a second and vote.

2:54
See, we’ve got 70%, Yeah, I’ll give it a couple more seconds here.

3:07
OK, so, good news is, everyone’s on, at least Cognos 10 or above? Majority of people seem to be on 11.1. I’m guessing a lot. 11 7, that long-term support version, which is a good stable wanted to stick with.

3:24
We’ll go to the next poll.

3:32
Number two, what are your biggest challenges with Cognos?

3:36
You can select all that apply.

3:38
Is it enabling adoption of self-service performance report, general cleanup, data migrations to the cloud, hybrid environments, or licensing sizing, based on your current use? And feel free to check all that apply.

4:07
Give it just a couple more seconds. We got about 30% in. Just take a quick second to vote here.

4:24
OK, about 70% and so let’s go ahead and post the results.

4:30
So number one looks like the performance reporting general cleanup makes sense, close, second is the adoption of self-service also can be challenging.

4:39
And then we going to kind of go back around 13 to 20% on the other three.

4:43
So, that’s good to know, Thank you for your feedback.

4:47
With that said, I’m going to toss out to Tim, who’s going to take it to the meat of today’s presentations, and I’ll join you back at the end to close up and answer your questions.

4:58
All right. And thanks everybody for joining today. I think you picked a great webinar to join.

5:06
I’m going to cover what’s New in Congress Analytics with Watson, 11.2.3. This is a very exciting release for us, actually.

5:14
We managed to pack in a ton of features, some particularly impactful features, as well so I think you’ll really enjoy what we had to talk about today.

5:27
Just cover a few background things. First, a little bit just where we are in our release cycle here, we’re in the Cognos 11.2.x cycle at the moment.

5:39
So that’s the second from the bottom teal bar on the chart.

5:44
We’re approaching the end of that stream with 11.2.3. We’re planning to do one more release in that stream before we do what we call our long term support release. But we still, of course, have the previous long term support release that is still active, that’s the 11.7 that we’re still producing, fixed packs for, and we will continue to support that for a little while longer still as well.

6:11
I Want to give a little just recap of some of the stuff in the most recent releases saw from the poll. A few of you are hanging back on, on some of the early releases, especially 11.7, which, of course perfectly fine. But I just wanted to recap some of the stuff that you might have missed from some of the most recent releases, and I’ll just cover this really quickly, and then they get into the brand stuff.

6:33
11.2.0, the start of this stream, Of course, this was quite a significant update, and, you know, it would take me the whole time just to cover everything that was in in this. But there was a big UX revamp we brought in the IBM Carbon Design System, and there’s brand new homepage, great new content navigation, as well. A lot less of the slide out panels.

6:56
Our AI features were enhanced to support Cube.

6:59
So that’s especially useful if you’re using cognitive analytics with planning analytics and when access TM one got these system forecasts that are supporting that, we had new visualization types, lots of customization.

7:12
Watson Studio integrations’s better certificate support, and actually quite a big performance in the loading time of dashboards.

7:23
That was a big release. The next two releases were relatively small. Kind of, you know, as we move through the 11.2.1 stream, but there, there were a few changes. You might have noticed they introduced the product as Ivan Cognos Analytics with Watson. That’s a brand name change that we made in the 11.2.1 timeframe. It doesn’t represent new features that were delivered particularly at that point in time.

7:48
It was more as a recognition that we’ve actually had Watson technology embedded in Congress for quite awhile, and we wanted to just put that out front and center.

7:58
This is when our on-demand cloud offering, we used to have three tiers, and the top tier with, with reporting and everything, used to be more expensive. We simplified that lowered the cost, Just two tiers. We also included a mobile licenses now for just $5. You can get people entitled to use Cognos on their mobile devices. If that’s all you want, of course, all your existing users are already entitled to use mobile.

8:24
There were map improvements, dreaming, you and IBM Cloud SQL support is data sources. Some other visualization and big performance, but we’ll tap reports, then 1200 to just quickly. That’s when we brought in what we call the natural language.

8:45
So, this is in Explorer where we show the natural language, details panel, the, that the phrasing of that became a lot better, just reads a lot more naturally now.

8:59
The assistant, you’ll see some more improvements in 11.2.3, but this is when we first brought in support for relative time operators and the assistant. So, you can ask questions from the system about dates.

9:11
There were some usability improvements, some sorting improvements.

9:15
Download experience was improved as well, and reporting, and this is when we finalized all the log for J, where, of course, there were multiple releases, especially in the first half a year, to cover of the various Log J updates. That needed to happen. And that was opened up to two.

9:32
And we added some more support for JWT authentication, which you’ll hear a bit more, as well.

9:43
That’s something I also want to make sure everybody is aware of is a new offering in the Cognos family called the IBM Analytics Content Hub.

9:56
So, this is an offering that is being made available in conjunction with Cognos and or Planning Analytics.

10:03
And it’s really about being able to break down all those silos that you have with your different analytics tools, Because most of us know we do There are multiple tools that we’re using, and this is allows you to put all of those onto the same web portal, the same dashboards. So, you can even have content from other vendors on here, mixed with your cargos content.

10:26
It really allows you to start to consolidate your different BI solutions into one place.

10:35
It’s a very powerful tool, it’s got tons of customization, and it really brings like a common interface onto everything.

10:43
So, this is a brand new offering that we have now available.

10:50
Alright, let’s get into the main subject for today, which is covering What is new in our 11.2.3 release, which, by the way, is out now, it did come out, I think three weeks ago. So, this is available to you, if you haven’t already downloaded it or requested data on the cloud, you can do so, right away.

11:16
Here’s a list of all the features that are in it. I will cover most of these in some greater detail, but I just wanted to show this slide, because it really kind of illustrates that this is a big release, and there’s quite a lot to cover here.

11:32
So, bear with me as I go through some of the things.

11:37
All right. We’re going to start off with really, I think, impactful and game changing new feature.

11:44
And we’re first introducing an 11.2.3 is the ability to do collaboration using Microsoft Teams especially with when the pandemic hit. And we a lot of its transition to working at home.

11:59
Microsoft Teams became a huge part of our daily lives.

12:04
Actually, at IBM where we’re not a teams shop, we use Slack.

12:08
And we’ve had Slack integration in Cognos for a little bit now, but, in terms of what’s happening in this space, is Microsoft is becoming the dominant player. So, we recognize that and we’ve added some great features to integrate cargos with Microsoft teams.

12:31
So, let’s take a look at some of those. Now, there’s two main features that I’m going to walk you through.

12:38
So, here I am in a Cognos dashboard, and I’m going to hit the Share button, which we have today. But, what’s new is, we have the ability to share on Microsoft Teams, who’ve had e-mail in Slack for awhile now. So, it’s the teams. That part that is new here.

12:56
And how this works is, you can include a screenshot of your dashboard, the link to it, as well, which you usually want.

13:07
You’re going to be able to type in message, and all that.

13:11
But you can actually crop and annotate the screenshot of the dashboard. So, in this case, I don’t want to send the whole dashboard. I just actually wanted to send this one chart over on Teams, and I can mark it up with text, and I can scribble on it and draw arrows, and all that kind of stuff as well.

13:32
So, now you can see that my screenshot is updated to reflect that.

13:37
I’m going to pick the actual team that I went to share that with.

13:46
Then, I’m going to choose my recipient, who I’d like to send that to.

13:51
That team has to contact the team server at this point in time, to pull up a list of who is available.

14:00
And you’ll see that, you know, there’s the auto completion as well, as I type the name here.

14:08
Share it with my colleague, Alice.

14:11
And I can type in a message, of course, as well.

14:18
And then, just hit the Share button.

14:21
Then, over here in Teams, you’ll see that in the Chat that has now shown up the link, is there, the, the picture that I cropped and included, the Erawan is there as well.

14:35
OK, so, let’s look at another part of the teams integration now, and that’s kind of going in the other direction so, that’s, that was, first, I showed you pushing content from Cognos into Teams now, I’m going to show you the other way around and you can add a Cognos application to Teams, which is what I’m doing right now? And, using that application.

14:53
You can browse through your Cognos content and add that into your team’s instance to share with others.

15:00
So, here, I’ve selected a dashboard.

15:04
You can see now, a tab has been added to my Team’s window.

15:09
And I can have other people in this chat as well.

15:12
This dashboard is totally interactive.

15:15
You’ll see the filtering, working, all the features that you have when you’re viewing a dashboard will work here. Of course, this is a read only mode. This is not where you go and develop dashboards, but this is for interacting and sharing dashboards with people and teams.

15:31
No no need to launch a separate browser window to login to Cognos or, and look around there. You’ve got tab right there in Teams.

15:44
So, here’s some of the interactions working. You can even turn on Insights. So, you can see some of the AI features on charts as well.

15:54
You know, like the meaningful differences and the average values.

15:59
The filtering, like I mentioned, that’s all there, Everything that you’ve set up on your dashboard to interact with is going to be available.

16:14
Then, because it’s teams, you can message other people, I can use the @ Symbol to message my colleague, Zach, and tell them something about this Dashboard.

16:31
OK, that is, knew my team’s features demo sentence, I’m going to skip past the slides.

16:41
And we’ll move on to the next topic.

16:43
Next topic is Data Access, and Data Modeling and Improvements. Since the end of the day, you’ve going to get it to your data.

16:51
So we’re always looking to enable you to get at your data better and more of it.

16:59
There were some small data source conformance updates with this release, Primarily, that’s the single store data source that is now supported through a native driver. It used to be supported using third party driver before, but we’ve got to be the native driver for it. So this is just going to work better with single store. You should see some of orbits improvements.

17:22
Other improvements there with working with single store?

17:26
Speaking of performance improvements, there are some general performance improvements that have been made to querying.

17:35
one of them is just to further optimize our reliance on vendors specific functions.

17:43
You know, of course, Cognos is dynamically generating SQL for you behind the scenes, and it’s always our policy to push as much processing into the database as possible.

17:55
And, you know, that requires using various vendor specific functions to optimize at best.

18:01
And then there’s been some additional optimizations in that area that have been added in this release, also, when you’re working with relative dates.

18:11
So this is a feature of data modules, where you can add relative date filters for things like prior week, same month, next quarter, or prior quarter, that kind of stuff.

18:24
So we’ve been able to optimize the querying for that, So you’re going to see better performance when using the relative dates.

18:36
I mentioned.

18:37
Some support that was added or JWT secure connections.

18:43
In some previous releases, we added a couple more support for that. A couple more databases, 11.2.3, that’s Amazon, Redshift and Tree Node.

18:51
So basically what this is this.

18:52
This means that instead of having to use some kind of no system authentication that’s common for, for all your users into the data source, you can have users authenticate as themselves. So it just allows you to have that additional layer of governance into your data sources, if you would like.

19:18
A feature that has existed in framework manager, for a long, long time that we’ve brought into data modules now, is the description field.

19:31
So, I always had the comments field, but the comments field was something just that showed up in data modules. The description field will be available for you to see when you’re offering things in reporting and dashboards.

19:44
So that’s good field to, to, to set up when you’re modeling so that you can, you have a better form your business users who may be creating self-service dashboards or your authors that are creating reports, You know, what the purpose of the field is, or, you know, any additional context that you want to include in there?

20:06
And then we have another big feature that is also something that’s been available in framework manager, that we’ve now brought into data modules as well. And that’s the ability to create aliases and shortcuts for tables.

20:19
So this is very useful when you’re joining multiple tables together, but in slightly different contexts, so you’d want different aliases for those fields.

20:29
For example, you might have kind of a date field that you want to join with, like a ship date or an order date. You know, in these different contexts, you would want to have them labeled differently.

20:41
Um, so, you know, these two things are part of this, kind of constant push, that we’ve got going on to bring over, you know, to bridge any gaps between data modules and framework manager. And those gaps are becoming increasingly small.

20:57
There are still some, but, there are fewer and fewer.

21:02
So most of your modeling needs you’ll find, can be met by data modules nowadays and, of course, data modules itself has many features that Framework Manager does not.

21:13
That said, Framer Bandura is not going anywhere.

21:17
We know that many of you rely on it heavily.

21:22
So there’s absolutely no immediate plans or given not so immediate plans to get rid of framework mander. It is not going anywhere.

21:33
All right. Let’s talk about AI in its bits.

21:37
There have been a few of those.

21:41
Um, the I mentioned the ability to understand dates in the AI Assistant that came in 11 2.2. And 11.2.3.

21:54
It’s gotten even fancier where we can understand various holidays and things like YTD, QCD, etc., You know, year to date, court date, that kind of thing.

22:05
Um, you’ll see some examples here where I’m typing in things Like I can even say, like, show me sales from last xmas amino figures that out.

22:15
And we’ll automatically create the date filter and the answer for that.

22:23
Going to show me the sales year to date by State.

22:30
It’s quite a wide variety of holidays.

22:36
You have ways of expressing, refer to two dates here.

22:42
And, you know, the relative stuff to, like, Last Independence Day, and that kind of thing, like I’m doing in this example.

22:53
Forecasting is one of the most powerful AI features that we have in Congress Analytics.

23:01
And that’s seen a big boost in functionality in 11.2.3.

23:06
So, the way of forecast worked in 11.2.2 and below, it was always based on what fields were in your chart.

23:16
So, if your chart showed sales over time, then it would just look at the historical data and forecast that out. Outwards.

23:30
I’m making that sounds very simple. But actually, it’s not simple at all. Because it would, and still does look at several forecasting algorithms. And it does an evaluation to determine which algorithm produces the best results.

23:44
But what we’ve added in 11.2.3 is the ability to consider more fields than what is shown in the chart, because no sales or all kinds of things are going to be influenced more by more things than simply either historical trends. So now you can add up to five additional factors to consider when you’re making a forecast.

24:08
So for example, here, as it is, sales, Adam, looking to show in this chart into forecast. But you can see they’ve been able to add other factors in here, like labor rate, net loss, and worldwide sales.

24:20
So these aren’t shown in the chart. But the forecast takes those into consideration. So it’s a much more.

24:30
No powerful way of doing forecasting because it’s fed by more complex factors.

24:35
So, um, you know, sometimes the actual visual difference may not be huge, but you can be assured that you’re getting a forecast that is much well considered based on a broader spectrum of parameters.

24:52
Right. We have a few other ongoing improvements in the product. I’m going to switch over to my Cognos instance to show the refresh to make sure I have a timed out while I was loving away there.

25:09
OK, I want to show you the way the new search works.

25:13
We’ve made an important enhancement to that so, you’re just going to go to content view here in Cognos and, I think, older in here.

25:23
Anyone? Very original.

25:25
So, I’m going to do some search. I did some analytics. I did a blog post about this here, so go about the Olympics.

25:33
Um, so, I just did a search for Olympics.

25:37
And, what’s new here is the search results came up in two tabs, so the way that search has worked in Cognos up until now, is it’s always been a global search.

25:46
So, it takes your keyword and it looks inside your content for everything that you have access to and gives you results from there.

25:54
So that’s great if you kind of have no idea where the things you’re looking for are located, but you do get a lot of results that way and sometimes it’s a lot to sift through.

26:03
If you do have a good idea of what you’re looking for and where it’s located, you can navigate into that folder and you can see this search first search results tab. It’s just looked in the folder that I was in. So, this is all the results of things in an older name, Tim.

26:20
And below, that, match my search term of Olympics.

26:25
And, of course, it’s all interactive. I can click on any of these to open them, or I can navigate into folders directly from here.

26:32
But if still like the way, the old search worked, no problem.

26:36
It’s there wasn’t too much more, in this case that matched. But this is the global search from all over.

26:44
Agency is pulled stuff from my content, as well as the results that I saw routine content there. And really, actually, I’ve been searching. Congress has always been very fast.

26:53
So having this additional search, and they’re really doesn’t affect performance at all, it all overturns very quickly.

27:03
Now, another UI improvement I want to show you is, let me go into the Properties. Now.

27:12
It’s just this dashboard. And this is a brand new UI for properties.

27:18
Properties used to be in a slide out panel, You know, that was very much the cargoes 11 way of doing things.

27:26
Of course, in Congress 11.2, we introduced this, this beautiful, full screen content navigation that they’ve been using.

27:36
But we did still have a few holdovers from the old way of doing things in the slide up panels, and the properties is one of those. Properties now has this full page view. And depending on your acid type of additional, for example: reports have additional tabs there all full screen as well. Same permissions are a lot more real estate to work with things. You’re not stuck in that cramped panel like you were before.

28:03
There’s one more very small change too.

28:07
Mccue what, OK, we’re always looking to enhance the customizer ability especially.

28:13
You know the homepage because that’s where most of your users start on.

28:18
This is just a much requested feature is some people didn’t want to have our watch video button there so you can now turn that off and that’s handled through role customization.

28:29
So, if you go into a role, go into its properties under customizations, there’s the features, this is where you can turn off, I mean hundreds, I think, of different features that you can, toggle on and off in here, and easiest way to. There’s so many.

28:46
To find. This one is just search for video.

28:49
And you can see here that we’ve got the option to turn off the watch video based things, so you can say that this role you do, or you do not want them to you.

29:02
Uh, have that button be visible.

29:12
All right. So, are these things?

29:18
OK, let’s change gears a little bit, and we’re going to talk about data science.

29:23
So, this is Jupiter Notebooks. Primarily, and our integration there.

29:30
We have upgraded kernels. So this is important just to keep up to date with recent versions of the R. and Python kernels, So they’ve both been updated the kernel or dot one and the Python kernel 2397.

29:43
And that’s just to make sure that you got all the latest features and other things that have come with those so you can maximize your compatibility.

29:55
Um, Notebooks works in a when you’re working running Cognos on premise, anyways, It’s runs in a containerized environment.

30:05
So, that was a Docker container.

30:07
We do support Pod Man, now, as well, and 11.2.3, Pawed Man is just an alternative to Docker or another way that you can run your containers. Recently, there’s just been, for some, people, have been some reservations around Docker due to do some of the licensing changes that have been going on there. Some have been switching pod, man.

30:29
See, in some of the output here, this is because these are containers running with PubMed instead of Docker. So, you now have that option available to you, Doctor, of course, is still supported as well.

30:42
And then one other update in the data science front is the ability to export your notebooks into an external file. So this is good.

30:53
If you want to be able to bring that into your own instance of Jupyter Notebooks, for example, that’s super easy to access. It’s just in the Context menu, from the content navigation.

31:07
There’s just a new Export option in that menu for you.

31:17
OK, let’s go to another area, and let’s talk about some big changes that have happened.

31:24
I’m going to show you another one of our marquee features in this release as I cover some of the dashboard enhancements. So, what I’m going to show you now is how to do cascading filters in dashboards. Cognos.

31:39
We’re going to do live demo of this so, I’ve got just a blank dashboard canvas here.

31:46
I started from a CSV file that I have and I’m going to make a really simple chart for you, and it’s going to do product line revenue.

31:58
Canvas will make a chart here.

32:02
Then once the filters on here, I’ve got some geographical fields in here, so I’m just going to drag those into filter shelf the country.

32:13
I’ve got province, city.

32:20
So the issue, previously, anytime you’ve had kind of some kind of natural hierarchy, like this with filters, is, they don’t filter each other.

32:31
So if I filter on Canada, and then I wonder, then filter on problems or state, I’m still seeing all these provinces and states from everywhere that have got in the dataset.

32:48
So that’s not always relevant for, for how you want to filter. What’s new. This is what we call a cascading filter. And I think just seeing it in action, it’s probably the best way to show it.

33:00
And it’s really easy to do.

33:01
I’m just going to say, start adding these filters to cascading, set, see visually that they’ve been grouped together, in this gray box, now.

33:14
So, what this means now is basically that each of these fields will filter the other ones.

33:23
So, now, when I select Canada.

33:26
I select province or state.

33:35
Like Canada, Select Canada.

33:39
It’s my province or state.

33:41
Now I’m only seeing Canadian, and if I select Ontario.

33:48
And now like looking at cities.

33:50
These are only cities in Ontario.

33:54
Select Ottawa because that’s where it, so really easy to set up. It just makes the filtering that much more powerful.

34:03
You can have, whatever fields you want in here, I mean, something like geography, of course, is very natural hierarchy, but any kind of hierarchy that you might have, it could be product category, product line, no Units and divisions of your organization on, and on and on. You know, however you want to do this, these don’t even have to be navigation paths. I actually didn’t define an application Paths are either.

34:31
So it’s really just that simple to use.

34:35
Now, another feature I’ll show you that’s new in dashboards, kind of related to filtering as well, is it’s a new widget type drop-down list.

34:48
So, I’ll just add this to my canvas.

34:52
And this is a very simple widget, actually, but really useful, again, to act as filtering, but this is an on Canvas filter, which is sometimes preferable depending on your use case, too, you know, having an filter shelves.

35:08
So, here, I drag education and it just means that now that I can have this on my Canvas, of course, I can resize things.

35:17
Anyway, I wanted to make them fit better. I’ve got various styling options on here.

35:24
I can change the placeholder text. Of course, I can.

35:27
I can type whatever I want here, and, no, change all the fonts and that kind of stuff, too. So, just, you know, additional flexibility of things that you can put it all begins.

35:43
OK, and I’ll go back to the slides and cover a few more features that are in dashboards.

35:53
Um, this is actually something that was in an extension, and this is something that we’ve started to do with 11.2.3, is bring in some of the features that we had.

36:04
We have available in the accelerator cataloging extensions, Trade Bill, bring in some of the most popular ones as built-in features of the product, so that you, you don’t have to deal with extensions to enable these features. We’ve got a couple of these, we’re going to see here, and led to three. They’ll be more in the next release, as well.

36:23
This one is all about improvements to the cross tab, being able to create cross tabs that are based only on values, and the ability to move the value fields cross, to have them appear as row headers, just depending on certain conditions here that that would have to be met.

36:42
So, just, you know, a lot more flexibility in the cross tab, which is, of course, one of our most popular visualizations in dashboards.

36:53
Um, This one is the filter stuff that I covered.

36:59
Another new one is, the ability to add an additional field to tool tips to see in this little demonstration here on the tooltip field. I’m going to put another field in here. I’m going to put income as well, so it’s not shown in the chart.

37:14
Just means now, whenever I hover over something, I’m going to see the related income value as well, in the tool tip. So, it’s just a way to convey more information.

37:23
Normally, you’d just see revenue, which is the date in the chart, but now you can, show additional fields that aren’t in the chart, without making your chart unnecessarily. So really handy. Little feature was previously an extension, but that’s now just built it.

37:40
Speaking of visualization, improvements, we’ve got this new Zoom bar, which is it, just a different way. New user interface into zooming into visualizations, so it’s off by default.

37:53
You can enable it and then you get this enables this slider that you can then interact with to change the, the Zoom level and viewable area of the chart. So you could use various pynchon and swipe gestures before to get this, which is still there.

38:12
But now, you’ve just got a more visual way of allowing users to, to zoom into charts as well. And this is available for the bar area and line chart 11.2.3. You notice the chart types, where Zoom is, is most useful, will certainly look at other chart types for the next releases, as well, to add this feature to.

38:36
Then a little bit just on the security front, there’s been some additional package capabilities, the been added to support dashboards.

38:45
So, you can now have see it ticked off here, the dashboard, create and edit capability on a package, so, that’s new, we didn’t used to have that impact just before. And, again, kind of started the journey a bit here.

39:04
In coming release, we do plan to also Add Disability, or Data module is a data asset, so, You know, we’re always trying to make governance enhancements too, As we go as well, it’s obviously something that we pride ourselves on.

39:23
All right, let’s talk about reporting. Now, there have been some enhancements there.

39:28
We’ve got a few new visualization properties that have come in.

39:32
So, in the bubble chart, there’s new properties for setting the bubble size and also being able to limit the smallest and largest ones. This can be useful sometimes when you’re your data, it’s got quite a wide variety of things, or some outliers and you don’t want them to.

39:54
They can dominate and you lose the rescue data with no extra bigger, extra, small outliers so having these kind of min and max options will help you control that and just better visualize that kind of data.

40:09
Some improvements in tree map labeling, being able to show intermediate labels, show leaf labels, some new options that you’ve got available to you.

40:23
There are some general labeling enhancements as well.

40:26
Being able to select the fonts and colors and vibrant bold blue here on my bar labels. So, you’ve got full control over that Now.

40:38
Some tweaks, just sort of in general, it ministration in general authoring.

40:44
We’ve separated out some capabilities for, so you can differentiate between who can edit and create reports versus who can run user defined SQL, use HTML items, and do bursts.

41:02
So, just again, that sort of finer grained control, binary green governance.

41:09
A few configuration options, as well. I showed you some, you know, the ability to hide the watch video button.

41:17
It’s the same, you do access exact same way through role customization, because if you just want to hide the more, button, or the properties button, from, reporting, you know, again, just some people like very controlled view of what’s available and what’s not. So, we’ve added those options.

41:44
There’s some drill through enhancements as well, so when you’re forming a drill through from reporting to reporting, the values will be included, that are included in the context filter, are going to be automatically passed along this, for package drills only, I should mention So.

42:04
It’s limited to working with packages. This also works if you’re drilling from Analysis Studio to Studio.

42:13
And a little new additional information in the audit database, as well, where, if you’re using report views, the source report will be captured in the audit database, too.

42:26
So, those, looking to, for, increased information in their logs, we’ve got this information in there now.

42:36
Great, And just the very last thing I’m going to cover, and then we’re going to be able to start working through some questions.

42:43
Some deprecations, generally speaking, we deprecate support for things because the vendor that makes them no longer supports them either so if they don’t support them, there’s not really much we can do to support them.

42:55
So, you see some older versions of Windows, IIS, Firefox, things like that. So, just an FYI on some things that have been deprecated.

43:10
All right, that was it for my part. Todd, did you wanted to do a quick wrap up before we get into Q&A?

43:17
Yeah, thanks so much time that was great. So, let’s go through these slides. What does Senturus do? We offer a variety of resources to help you with your Cognos environments? Anywhere? From optimizing data, models, data, governance, self-service performance tuning, cleaning up content. We have a tool that we’ve recently introduced that can help really scan.

43:38
And, if all the objects in your content, started giving you better insight for cleanup purposes, running content from Cognos and other platforms, sizing upgrading and our wonderful training practice.

43:52
We’ve got hundreds of free resources on our website under the Knowledge Center. We’ve been committed to sharing our BI expertise for over a decade now.

44:02
If you just go to Senturus.com/resources, you can take advantage of that.

44:06
You can also find my blog post on 11.2.3 for my favorite new features I touch on, which are a lot of the things that Tim just demoed.

44:17
We’ve got some upcoming events.

44:22
If you want to join us for either these, please go to our website and register.

44:28
Specifically on October 13th, we have a demonstration of our proprietary app that we developed that automates the Cognos content cataloging process that Tim was just talking about, it’s able to help sort out valuable content from all the necessary bloat and help you identify content that can be impacted by different data source changes. So lots of different ways to kind of analyze your calculus content with this tool. So I’ll be working in presenting on that one as well.

44:55
Then here’s a little more background on some Senturus.

44:58
We concentrate on BI, modernizations and migrations across the entire BI stack.

45:03
We provide a full spectrum of BI services and training in a variety of BI platforms.

45:08
Our proprietary software facilitates bimodal BI.

45:14
And we’ve got a long history of success.

45:17
We’ve been focused exclusively on business analytics for more than two decades. Our team is large enough to meet all your business analytic needs, yet, small enough to provide personal attention.

45:32
And we are currently hiring. If you’re interested in joining us, we’re looking for some positions specifically in analytics, business intelligence trainer, and a managing consultant.

45:41
Check it out on our website or email on resume to jobs@Senturus.com.

45:53
And finally, Q&A time, So we’ve got about 10 minutes or so to go through your questions.

46:00
I know Greg and myself have been answering questions in the panel throughout the webinar, but if you’ve got additional questions, now’s a great time to put them into the chat, and we can talk to them now.

46:13
Take a quick look and see anything that hasn’t been answered, and see if we can dive into that.

46:29
Here’s a question, any updates around hiding, showing visuals in dashboards?

46:35
Not sure. Exactly.

46:38
Dream by high shell, but maybe it’s like conditional, like a conditional block. You know if you toggle between one or the other.

46:44
Is that something that’s available, or that you’re aware of this being considered?

46:52
Not Available.

46:55
Closest I can think of that is the tab widget which we have in the Accelerator catalog which lets you have tabs and your dashboard, canvas.

47:07
I suspect that’s a little different than what the question would be, though. It is about. So other than that, they can’t do anything related to that. That’s upcoming.

47:18
OK, got it, Thank you.

47:21
Let’s see, a couple of questions. Someone was asking, is 11.2.3 available, And the answer is, yes, it came out late August 30th of August, so it should be able to download if, here.

47:33
To access your Passport Advantage website, You should go to download the latest version.

47:38
And this will not be the long-term support version.

47:41
There’s be one more version towards the end of the year.

47:45
November 11.2.4. That will be sort of the long-term  support version.

47:52
So, if you’re sticking to those and kind of upgrading less than, you know, all the releases that currently go on, that’s going to be the one that you want to get you in and stay on if you want to avoid upgrading, you know, every couple of months Yeah, that’s absolutely correct.

48:17
If you want to preview any of these features without committing to downloading, you can always sign up for the free trial of Cognos and play around with it there.

48:30
It’s nice, easy way to preview some things with it.

48:34
Absolutely, no.

48:36
Time commitment required to set it up.

49:04
Customizing the homepage.

49:16
Someone’s asking about titles in the outline. Are you able to add calculated titles, including filter states, etc, Like?

49:29
Nothing new in titles? Yes, the short answer is no on that one.

49:39
Someone asked about Query Studio, if that’s still available.

49:43
It is still available. We don’t do updates to Query Studio or Analysis Studio.

49:58
But, it’s quite possible that 11.2.4, maybe the last release, to support those.

50:10
It’s best to get off Query Studio Analysis. We’d like to help you with that.

50:20
We are working on some documentation, too, to help guide you. well, you know, way, better using dashboards and reporting depending on your use case.

50:32
Those are two of the legacy studios.

50:41
No, we haven’t really been supporting.

50:45
In terms of new features, we have been developing, what I should say, for awhile.

50:49
And so, they are probably not much long for this world, but they will continue to be supported in the loaded to stream, for Sure.

50:57
When you’re on Level 2, 3, 11.2.4 coming up, they’ll still be there. And they will still work. You know, the browser conformance has been a big issue for people that are staying the course. Because ever since Internet Explorer 11 finally died off, your only choice is Firefox.

51:22
And we certainly don’t plan to add additional parameters to Analysis Studio or Query Studio, right?

51:31
I believe 11.2, in general, It doesn’t even support, Even, like connecting to the web page with Internet Explorer.

51:39
No, it does not. You cannot use Internet Explorer at all with colors love to know.

51:48
I just wanted to quickly answer, events studio is available 11.2.3, 11.2.4 and 11.

52:00
And beyond there’s no plans to deprecate Event Studio.

52:05
Period. End of story.

52:07
Great, thank you.

52:10
So there’s a question coming in now about event Studio Query Studio. Analysis studios are same answer. There’s all kind of legacy tools that are available. They require you know, an older browser or Firefox.

52:25
As Tim mentioned there, they are going to be going away at some point.

52:30
Sorry, I do want to make sure this is 100% clear because the similar names it’s a source of confusion sometimes.

52:42
They are on the way out. Event Studio is not on the way out, As Greg said, I want to re-affirm that  we added support for the Chrome Browser there as well.

52:52
So you don’t have the same issues with the browsers.

52:55
In any Event Studio has even seen a couple of minor new features, the last couple of releases as well. So, but then Studio will be there. It’s there in Web 2 3. It will be there and 11.2.4, as well as Query Studio and Analysis Studio.

53:08
It’s then what happens next for Query Studio and Analysis Studio. They may not be in 11.3. I don’t think they’ve confirmed that decision yet. But I can confirm that event studio will be there in the future releases 11.3, and beyond.

53:26
Great, thank you.

53:37
I noticed someone asked the same question about Workspace as well, Workspace. I can’t remember.

53:43
If that, mean that that is still in love to three, and will be an 11.2.4 as well. We wouldn’t pull something, by the way.

53:51
In this stage of a release cycle, You know where, it would, kind of, in the, in the lifetime of, of 11.2.x, we wouldn’t pull something kind of in the middle of it.

54:03
So, basically, anything that’s supported by 11.2.3, it’s going to be supported by 11.2.4, which will be a long term support release, which, you know, if you do want to stay with somebody or technologies, you’ll be able to do that.

54:18
So, yeah, so I don’t know the future of Workspace beyond 11, too.

54:24
Related to stream, but it’s still there for now, but that’s about getting up.

54:34
As I said, I did an upgrade webinar a while ago on 11.2.2, or 2.2 when it first came out.

54:40
And that version wasn’t supposed to have a lot of these legacy things that are going to pull the plug way back then. It’s been going on and on and on.

54:48
So it’s been probably almost seven or eight years now since they threatened to pull the plug on those tools.

54:53
So, they are still there, but, so yeah, tried to be nice about it. You know, we want to, we don’t want to leave anybody behind. Like, you know, we get it that people do rely on these tools, but.

55:08
You know, they’re, they’re getting pretty old now, The time has come, so. a couple that we are going to get a little more for.

55:18
But, it’s not like any of that should be, huge news.

55:28
Couple questions about PowerPlay Studio and PowerPlay web, are those still supported and they can neither be supported?

55:48
PowerPlay continues to be supportive.

55:53
PowerPlay Studio continues to move forward, continues to be version number updated, no plans to remove that yet.

56:35
Someone’s asking about the long term support for 11.2.4, when that comes out, Will that be 18 months or 24 months from that?

56:41
Or at least, It should be at least the two years, And then, there’s the be an option for, to extend that for a year. As I said.

56:51
Standard two plus an option to go to three.

56:56
11.1.7 That’s on That’s that that two years will be coming up soon, correct?

57:04
So you’ll have little beyond the two years with with 11.7, just because the timeline where, know, it’s a little more than two years before 11.2.4 has come out. So just between the LTS because it was longer. So there’ll be, I think, a little longer there. We have announced the end of life of 11.7 yet. so that will be announced with lots of notice. No, we don’t even have. The next LTS are out yet either. So, you know, we always intend to give you a good amount of overlap there. So, if you are first day, on the long term support releases, you don’t have to jump right away on 11.2.4 with no fears, that 11.7. It’s going to be killed off imminently. We will allow a decent amount of overlap there. Of course, would you like to see updates as quickly as possible. But no policy to accommodate news much as possible, as well.

58:27
Any updates and active reports also steady state there, although, you know, they were impacted by Internet Explorer getting killed off, because Internet Explorer was the only platform that supported the file format.

58:43
So, there’s now a standalone download that you can install to view active reports so, you know, in Cognos itself. No change with active reports. They’re still there. They’re not going anywhere. We know a lot of you have put a lot of effort and investment at the actual reports, so.

58:59
So, they’re not going anywhere.

59:01
But, you do have to be aware that, you know, because of the depth of 11, that your users are probably going to have to use this viewer now.

59:10
We actually have the advantage that it also works on back. So it’s not just Windows only. So you can now do reports on Macs.

59:16
And actually the performances of it is quite a bit better than it was using Internet Explorer as well.

59:22
So, you know, slight disadvantage of having the download to install, but, but real plus as well.

59:32
Great. OK, so we are at the top of the hour and I want to be respectful of everyone’s time. I’m going to leave the question and answer panel open for a couple more minutes. If you have any last-minute questions, go ahead and enter them now. We’ll go ahead and save that, and post the written responses, along with this recording and the deck on our website, and a couple of days. I want to thank Tim and Greg for their help, and a great presentation today, and thank you all for attending.

1:00:02
Thanks, everyone.

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