Cognos Express Reporter- who is using it?

[stephen waters]

We come from a TM1 background and mainly implement budgeting and analysis systems for finance departments. When asked in demonstrations what the benefit of CX Reporter is I respond that many reporting needs for these systems can be met by either Excel or TM1 websheets. CX Reporter will give you "pixel perfect" (IBM Cognos phrase) reporting on TM1, nicely formatted layouts and will also report on relational databases and allow you to combine these in same reports.
From the systems where we have used CX reporter it seems quite hard work to develop fairly inflexible reports.

So, out of general interest I have some questions:
- How many people out there are using the CX Reporter module
- Are they using it as a reporting tool without the Xcelerator module
- if using it with Xcelerator is it for relational reporting or just to replace\complement Excel and TM1 Web
- Am I missing something in my assessment of CX

Given this is the TM1 forum I realise this is not a representative sample but I would be interested from a general point of view.

And a final question, does anyone use the CX Advisor module!

[Harvey]

- How many people out there are using the CX Reporter module
- Are they using it as a reporting tool without the Xcelerator module
- if using it with Xcelerator is it for relational reporting or just to replace\complement Excel and TM1 Web
- Am I missing something in my assessment of CX

Reporter is a pretty good product, I think. However, I don't think it really needs a developer to create these kinds of reports, as they are drag and drop and targeted to business users.

I only have one customer who bought CX (I'm working in the Asian region and it's a discontinued product in many regions here), and they don't use it for reporting. They also don't use web at all. It is a fairly out-of-the-box client, though, so their needs are very specific.

And a final question, does anyone use the CX Advisor module!

[stephen waters]

I only have one customer who bought CX (I'm working in the Asian region and it's a discontinued product in many regions here),

I am surprised CX is discontinued product in some regions. Is this just that IBM prefer to position Enterprise TM1 and BI?

and they don't use it for reporting. They also don't use web at all. It is a fairly out-of-the-box client, though, so their needs are very specific.

Does this mean they are using Xcelerator only? And surely they will be doing some reporting, if so which front end do they use?

[Harvey]

I am surprised CX is discontinued product in some regions. Is this just that IBM prefer to position Enterprise TM1 and BI?

I spoke to a colleague who contradicted this view, so perhaps it's no longer the case. We were certainly instructed at a point a year or two ago to stop selling it, but perhaps that was reevaluated. I agree it's silly to discontinue it.

I think it was originally a pricing issue, as CX was positioned to be cheap enough to avoid complex negotiations and discounts, but the Singapore market would negotiate just as strongly no matter what the starting point.

Does this mean they are using Xcelerator only? And surely they will be doing some reporting, if so which front end do they use?

Yeah, they use an Excel front end with many input templates and active forms. It's far from ideal, in my opinion.

I tried to pitch them a new reporting technique I devised, but haven't had a bite on it yet. Basically, I was planning to write a program that would make it possible to generate a Word document from a TI process.

I'm still planning to build this solution for my own purposes, as I think it's much more appropriate for reports that have many rows across multiple pages.

[tomok]

If you are going to use TI to dump a hard-coded report to Word then you are just really doing a report bursting type thing, If that's the case why not just use the PDF generator in TM1?