Cognos BI 10.1 and Cognos Express 9.5

[fstrydom]

We have quite a unique setup at our company. We currently have Cognos BI and Cognos Express on two different servers installed.
Cognos BI was OEM'ed with our new ERP package and we started deploying the standard ERP data warehouse BI modules via Cognos BI.

Beginning of the year we invested in Cognos Express Xcelerator to provide us with a driver based budgeting solution. At that time the pricing seemed very attractive and the only issue was that the instance will be limited to 100 users only.

Fast forward to today where our users start to request drill through to transaction level.
First of all, our company do not support Excel 2003 or 2007 and has already started with Office 2010 roll-out. So the Xcelerator client can't be installed on the user's local machines.
So, we tried to implement the drill through on the TM1Web, but once you are at transaction level, you can't do anything with the output, except view it.

Now we are trying to create a data source of our TM1 cube in Cognos BI 10.1.
But we are getting security errors when we use a sign-on username and password.
The other issue is that we do not know how to configure Cognos Express as an external name space in the Cognos BI configuration.

We would appreciate any help in getting us to configure our Cognos Express Xcelerator (TM1) as a data source in our Cognos BI 10.1

[lotsaram]

You can still export a transactional drill-through from TM1 Web to Excel as a TM1/CX client install is not necessary ....

But by the sounds of it your company likes to make things difficult for itself. Why not downgrade to Excel 2007 and do away with the headaches?

[David Usherwood]

I think you need to read the contract you signed when you bought CX. I don't believe you can legally publish Excelerator cubes to BI. You may find a technical workround, but you are at risk from an IBM compliance audit - and you wouldn't enjoy that.
Your options are probably to migrate to TM1 Enterprise (pricey) or to export the data and structures from Excelerator to flat files and populate a set of warehouse tables, then build the BI stuff over the top.

[stephen waters]

We currently have Cognos BI and Cognos Express on two different servers installed.
Cognos BI was OEM'ed with our new ERP package and we started deploying the standard ERP data warehouse BI modules via Cognos BI

As David says, under the Cognos Express licensing the TM1 cubes can be used only with Cognos Express reporter, not full feature Cognos BI.
You should also check that the OEM version of Cognos BI can be used on databases outside of the ERP data warehouse, OEM licenses often have restrictions on their use.