BSP Software prides ourselves on referenceable customers. Though we live in a world with many corporate restrictions on the use of company names and quotes in success stories, many of our customers feel so passionate about their success with our software that they want to share their story. Stay tuned for more and more success stories as we chip away at legal departments around the globe ;)
One of the most common requests we hear from our customer base is the ability to understand if they have enough or too many IBM Cognos licenses. Up to date the answer has been to make the best out of the Audit package. That answer just got better for one of our Integrate Version Control customers! Partnering with this customer we were able to extend the monitoring and broadcast messaging capabilities of IVC to include Studio Usage Tracking by user per day. We now have a report that clearly indicates how many people are using each studio, who they are and how often they use it. We now know where we can save money in licenses and have data to justify the licenses we need to keep.
BSP’s Integrated Version Control was designed to provide governance and compliance within an IBM Cognos environment, and in addition to enabling version control, report locking, change management and broadcast messaging, IVC tracks system usage (who is logged in and what content they’re accessing). Through utilizing the included Framework Manager model, package and associated reports, this customer was able over time to monitor Cognos activity and track studio usage by user by content.
By preparing a simple dashboard of usage over time, they were able to identify not only what licenses were being utilized and required, but which named users were using the system. They were able to identify peak usage times and the frequency of access for any object within their environment.
For more information on Integrated Version Control or any of the other implementation-based software in our growing portfolio of productivity tools for IBM Cognos, please contact us.
To view a sample report Click Here.
The University of Oklahoma was recently dealing with a database change that created some problems in their complex Framework Manager model. The result was countless production reports becoming broken, and as a MetaManager customer, they were hoping we could help them to bring resolution and quick! As the support ticket came in after hours, we quickly contacted the customer letting them know that we would absolutely help them resolve and had them jump in the car to head back to the office.
The detail table, which is the core of all of the relationships in this massive foundation, had been modified in the database (6 columns removed and 8 new ones added). When the university updated the query subject in the model, they were confused as to why the shortcuts to the query subject were not also updating. In an effort to fix the issue, they deleted and recreated some objects in the model. Inadvertently, this caused more problems, as all of the reports that used to run fine were reporting runtime errors - Cognos wanted to create a cross join between the query subjects from different namespaces.
Did you know you cannot create a relationship between Query Subjects in different namespaces. However, if you have a common Query Subject in the namespaces (e.g. a Detail table), Cognos will recognize this common element as a way of joining the tables from each of the namespaces. The trick is that you create an instance of the Query Subject in the database layer, and then in the namespaces create shortcuts to the Query Subject. Cognos will know that all of the shortcuts are truly the same table and furthermore the relationships built off of all of these Detail Query Subjects can effectively be merged together. As a result, a Query Item from one namespace can join to a Query Item in another namespace through the relationships of this common Query Subject. The problem they were having was that one of the shortcuts pointed to a different instance of the detail table. Since Cognos could not determine a relationship, it was planning on cross joining the tables, which would be pretty bad.
With midnight rapidly approaching, we determined that one of the shortcuts was incorrect and recreated it. The model was working properly once again, and reports were no longer trying to create cross joins. However, we still had our initial problem - the database change. This is where MetaManager took over. The customer opened Report Validator and found all of the damaged reports in his environment. Through a right click, they used the Fix Report feature to effectively drag and drop the new Query Items over top of the old invalid Query Items. When the mapping was complete, they clicked a button to send this information to the Find / Replace module to resolve any similar issue in every single report authored off of this package. We could easily see that Find / Replace found a number of reports in the Public Folders and some user My Folders that were broken and was able to fix all impacted reports due to the model change within seconds!
BSP's relationship with our customers doesn't stop after the sale. We took this customer’s problem on as our own and stayed on the call until the problem was resolved and the production system was whole again.
Creativity Inc. is a leading designer, marketer and distributor of arts and crafts products. They sell their proprietary designs and brands, plus commodity products, primarily to national craft chains and mass merchandisers, and to some independent craft retailers.
In 2005, Creativity executives recognized that the reporting and analysis capabilities of their existing system were limited and required significant IT support, which negatively impacted the company's bottom line. To overcome these barriers, the company sought out a BI solution that could be easily implemented within the company's existing IT infrastructure, could tap into multiple data sources, and would require minimal IT maintenance.
Creativity implemented IBM Cognos 8 BI along with BSP Software's MetaManager. Read the full story here.
BSP Software prides ourselves on referenceable customers. Though we live in a world with many corporate restrictions on the use of company names and quotes in success stories, many of our customers feel so passionate about their success with our software that they want to share their story. Stay tuned for more and more success stories as we chip away at legal departments around the globe ;)
One of the most common requests we hear from our customer base is the ability to understand if they have enough or too many IBM Cognos licenses. Up to date the answer has been to make the best out of the Audit package. That answer just got better for one of our Integrate Version Control customers! Partnering with this customer we were able to extend the monitoring and broadcast messaging capabilities of IVC to include Studio Usage Tracking by user per day. We now have a report that clearly indicates how many people are using each studio, who they are and how often they use it. We now know where we can save money in licenses and have data to justify the licenses we need to keep.
BSP’s Integrated Version Control was designed to provide governance and compliance within an IBM Cognos environment, and in addition to enabling version control, report locking, change management and broadcast messaging, IVC tracks system usage (who is logged in and what content they’re accessing). Through utilizing the included Framework Manager model, package and associated reports, this customer was able over time to monitor Cognos activity and track studio usage by user by content.
By preparing a simple dashboard of usage over time, they were able to identify not only what licenses were being utilized and required, but which named users were using the system. They were able to identify peak usage times and the frequency of access for any object within their environment.
For more information on Integrated Version Control or any of the other implementation-based software in our growing portfolio of productivity tools for IBM Cognos, please contact us.
To view a sample report Click Here.
The University of Oklahoma was recently dealing with a database change that created some problems in their complex Framework Manager model. The result was countless production reports becoming broken, and as a MetaManager customer, they were hoping we could help them to bring resolution and quick! As the support ticket came in after hours, we quickly contacted the customer letting them know that we would absolutely help them resolve and had them jump in the car to head back to the office.
The detail table, which is the core of all of the relationships in this massive foundation, had been modified in the database (6 columns removed and 8 new ones added). When the university updated the query subject in the model, they were confused as to why the shortcuts to the query subject were not also updating. In an effort to fix the issue, they deleted and recreated some objects in the model. Inadvertently, this caused more problems, as all of the reports that used to run fine were reporting runtime errors - Cognos wanted to create a cross join between the query subjects from different namespaces.
Did you know you cannot create a relationship between Query Subjects in different namespaces. However, if you have a common Query Subject in the namespaces (e.g. a Detail table), Cognos will recognize this common element as a way of joining the tables from each of the namespaces. The trick is that you create an instance of the Query Subject in the database layer, and then in the namespaces create shortcuts to the Query Subject. Cognos will know that all of the shortcuts are truly the same table and furthermore the relationships built off of all of these Detail Query Subjects can effectively be merged together. As a result, a Query Item from one namespace can join to a Query Item in another namespace through the relationships of this common Query Subject. The problem they were having was that one of the shortcuts pointed to a different instance of the detail table. Since Cognos could not determine a relationship, it was planning on cross joining the tables, which would be pretty bad.
With midnight rapidly approaching, we determined that one of the shortcuts was incorrect and recreated it. The model was working properly once again, and reports were no longer trying to create cross joins. However, we still had our initial problem - the database change. This is where MetaManager took over. The customer opened Report Validator and found all of the damaged reports in his environment. Through a right click, they used the Fix Report feature to effectively drag and drop the new Query Items over top of the old invalid Query Items. When the mapping was complete, they clicked a button to send this information to the Find / Replace module to resolve any similar issue in every single report authored off of this package. We could easily see that Find / Replace found a number of reports in the Public Folders and some user My Folders that were broken and was able to fix all impacted reports due to the model change within seconds!
BSP's relationship with our customers doesn't stop after the sale. We took this customer’s problem on as our own and stayed on the call until the problem was resolved and the production system was whole again.
Creativity Inc. is a leading designer, marketer and distributor of arts and crafts products. They sell their proprietary designs and brands, plus commodity products, primarily to national craft chains and mass merchandisers, and to some independent craft retailers.
In 2005, Creativity executives recognized that the reporting and analysis capabilities of their existing system were limited and required significant IT support, which negatively impacted the company's bottom line. To overcome these barriers, the company sought out a BI solution that could be easily implemented within the company's existing IT infrastructure, could tap into multiple data sources, and would require minimal IT maintenance.
Creativity implemented IBM Cognos 8 BI along with BSP Software's MetaManager. Read the full story here.