MotioPI for TM1

[BariAbdul]

Motio was pretty good for CognosBI ,Now Motio Launches MotioPI for TM1, the Free Software for IBM Cognos TM1.What is Gurus take on this ,Please!.Thanks

[Alan Kirk]

I'm subscribed to a Google Alerts feed for any references that pop up in relation to Cognos TM1. Worryingly it only generates a hit every few weeks at best. This was in fact the most recent one.

Motio was pretty good for CognosBI ,Now Motio Launches MotioPI for TM1,

No they don't.

Motio, Inc. announced today the launch of a free software tool that eases administrative tasks in Cognos TM1 software.

Except that it wasn't launched. The last line of the press release read:

Applications for the MotioPI for TM1 Beta program can be submitted at http://www.motio.com/TM1.

Mmm. Vapourware announcements always go down incredibly well with customers. I'm amazed that their marketing department don't know how well. They immediately put potential customers right on your side.

I'm not saying that they won't deliver this. But when you're at the beta testing stage you announce that you're looking for beta testers, not that a product has been "launched".

What is Gurus take on this ,Please!.Thanks

I dunno about the gurus but my take on it is... "meh". However that is a provisional "meh" based on the amount of information released to date, which is minimal. I watched a 2 minute 39 second, low res video about the tool's memory usage features which had a funky back beat and no voice over telling you what information the video was going to impart. I got about 30 seconds worth of content out of it. The tool puts a superficially glossy graphical front end on your memory usage stats, nothing that you really couldn't do yourself by turning on Performance Monitor and using an active form, a bit of MDX and some charts in Excel. The fact that you can exclude some wedges of the pie chart and can limit the selection to others is kinda slick, but is it something that would be useful day to day? I have my doubts. We get enough of the Cult Of Gloss from IBM.

Most likely, you have best practices in place to provide consistency in Cognos TM1 development. Sometimes, these standards are accidentally overlooked. MotioPI for TM1 lets you find what’s out of compliance by querying for application entries that do not meet specific criteria.

Like what? The example given in the sheet is "Audit Items With Writeback Capability" such as views and blobs. I'm sorry, what? Pretty much any view or websheet can be writeback depending on the element selection that's made after it's opened. Even consolidations can be affected by data spreading Clear if you have the right permissions. That's why we use cube and element security to deal with this. And that's something that this thing would have no way of analysing. (Not to the level of views and blobs anyway, since writeback ability on those will vary by user.)

What TM1 processes can be removed? Because there are so many processes that accumulate in Cognos TM1, it’s hard to answer questions about them, such as if they are referenced by a chore.
MotioPI for TM1 identifies the processes not referenced by a chore so that they become candidates for removal.

And yield a fistful of false positives like:
- Library files, a la Bedrock or internal libraries; and
- Processes which were never meant to be part of a chore but are triggered by users via Action Buttons.

I suppose that the true solution to this particular conundrum is to use a sensible and consistent naming methodology for your processes and to document them, but I'm just guessing.

I doubt that that's all that the final product will do and doubtless there will be a non-free "Pro" edition which will have additional features as well, but nothing that I've seen so far is making me go "wooooowwwww!"

[BariAbdul]

Thanks a lot,Alan.