Right, very first impressions then… the installation process was quite smooth, not much has changed from Cognos 8 in this respect, the same installer, the same configuration manager, albeit with a few new options etc, but anyone familiar with the Cognos 8 installation routine should not struggle with getting IBM Cognos 10 installed and running.
Now, the product is all installed, time to hit the website. There is a change here. No more http://gatewayserver/cognos8 (or would that be cognos10?) in this release, IBM have enforced their branding and opted for the snappy http://gatewayserver/ibmcognos - a pedantic complaint perhaps, especially as its easily customized to whatever you want it to be, but being the kind of bloke who likes to stick with the recommended configuration I am finding typing the url IBMCOGNOS to be a bit of a pain in the … you know where.
Ok, back to the product, the whole look and feel has been changed, as expected its pretty much what was hinted at if you ever looked at IBM Cognos Express… the blue is liberally splashed throughout the new GUI, it looks pretty sweet. Even the logon prompt (assuming you are not using integrated authentication) now finally looks worthy of the product. Aesthetics… tick!
I spy some new menu options on the default entry portal. Under “My Content” there is now an option called “My Dashboards” – fairly self explanatory I suppose, but one we can cover in more depth another day. The same goes for the new “My Inbox” which from a first glance appears to be a place for notifications to arrive.
Under the “My Actions” section a new option to “Create My Dashboards” appears. Along with “Author Business Reports” and then the usual options for loading Query Studio, Report Studio, Event Studio and the Planning and Forecasting option – Remember, I installed Planning 10.1 as well.
We get a new option under the IBM Cognos Administration screens, this is for Index Search, something to do with the integration of the IBM Cognos Go Search into the main product.
The item that has got my attention is the entry for “Human Task and Annotation Services” – I currently have no idea what that is all about, but it’s now my mission over the next few days to find out all about it.
Now over to IBM Cognos Planning 10.1 – I haven’t had much time to play with this one yet. On the face of it, nothing much has changed, from what I have heard that would be about right, it has been explained to me as a stability and performance release – that will be welcome news to many customer, despite the previous version of the product being pretty robust. One of the key changes detailed though is that this release has “significant improvements in handling sparsity and large models”.
A key change allows the Planning Service to run as a non-administration account, the first time this has happened and this will be very welcome news to many an IT department.
More news later as and when I spend further time working with the product. But first impressions are that it’s a very polished looking release with some very interesting new features. A version upgrade that I will be recommending to customer within a few more weeks of testing.
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