Is it possible to burst and email TM1 report using Cognos BI 10.2.2?

[jasnayvarughese]

Hello All,

One of my clients want to burst a TM1 Excel report and distribute it via email to all his users.

He does not want to recreate TM1 Excel report in Report Studio but burst and distribute the report which is already created in TM1.

Is it possible to burst and email TM1 report(websheet) using Cognos BI 10.2.2?

Thanks!

[Alan Kirk]

One of my clients want to burst a TM1 Excel report and distribute it via email to all his users.

He does not want to recreate TM1 Excel report in Report Studio but burst and distribute the report which is already created in TM1.

Is it possible to burst and email TM1 report(websheet) using Cognos BI 10.2.2?

You'll doubtless be aware that the "Print Report" function will generate Excel sheets, PDFs or print-outs but not e-mails.

However I'm sure that you're also aware that it's relatively easy for a skilled professional to knock up some programming code to create an e-mailing burst. After all, many consultancies have written add-in tools to do that very thing.

I'd say you should go for it; give your client their money's worth and impress them!

[jasnayvarughese]

Yes, I am aware of Print Report function

I did not want to use an additional tool but rather use combination of TM1 and BI for bursting and emailing reports.

I am not sure if that's possible as IBM BI scheduler does not recognise pdfs which are not generated by the BI tool.

Thanks for you recommendation Alan. Much appreciated!

[Wim Gielis]

I did not want to use an additional tool but rather use combination of TM1 and BI for bursting and emailing reports.

I would use a TI script for bursting the reports. Use SendMail.exe or similar tools to do the email part.

[jasnayvarughese]

Thanks Wim for the suggestion.

My client is aware of the other options. But he wants to know whether its possible to use BI 10.2.2 to burst and email TM1 report.

I am a TM1 developer but quite new to Cognos space.

So I was wondering if anyone among the forum users has used BI to email TM1 reports?

[Wim Gielis]

I am a TM1 developer but quite new to Cognos space.

Then we are in the same boat.

[PavoGa]

This response may be of limited help, but the answer is yes you can. I've actually done it, but it was years ago on 9.5.2 (I was using Cognos Express) to burst Department/divisional P&Ls and email them to the appropriate managers.

Unfortunately, that is about all I can tell you. I cannot remember the details on how I accomplished it, but was pretty much able to do it from within Report Studio if I recall correctly.

[jasnayvarughese]

Hello PavoGa,

Thanks for your response.

I am aware that it is possible to burst and email reports using Report Studio with TM1 data.

But my user does not want to recreate TM1 report in Report Studio. He wants to email TM1 excel report ( created by TM1) using Cognos BI scheduler. That's the tricky part.

Cheers.

[tomok]

I think the issue you are running into here is that in TM1 there is no such thing as a "report" per se, whereas Report Studio, by it's very nature is all about reports. How can Report Studio burst a TM1 "Report" when no such animal exists? What is a report in TM1? An Excel sheet with DBRW formulas in it? A websheet? A cube view? I think it's pretty clear, at least to me, that's it not possible. If you want to email range-valued Excel sheets to people, which is what the Print Report functionality does in Perspectives, then you're going to have choose another tool to actually send the mails. It's actually pretty simple. I don't understand why any client would be opposed to doing it that way other than just being stubborn.

[jasnayvarughese]

As per my post, it is an excel TM1 report. I am not sure as what an Excel sheet with slice/snapshot information is called, other than being called TM1 Excel report.

We were informed by an experienced BI developer that we could achieve bursting and emailing (of TM1 Excel Report) using Cognos Workspace combined with other features in Cognos BI.

Personally, I don't think it is possible. But I am a TM1 developer and quite new to Cognos space. Hence the question.

That's the reason I wanted a second opinion before informing the client so that he can make an informed decision.

He at this point of time, just needs the information whether it is possible or not.

Thanks for your post.

[jim wood]

When I was at Shop Direct in the UK, the finance guys there a combination of Adobe Pro and the windows scheduler to complete mail bursts of TM1 based excel sheets. As has been mentioned above, something like this or as mentioned a TI process are your options as far as I'm aware. The only other option that be worth looking at is the original work space. Add it as an web sheet. I'm just not sure if mail shots are possible from there.

[tomok]

We were informed by an experienced BI developer that we could achieve bursting and emailing (of TM1 Excel Report) using Cognos Workspace combined with other features in Cognos BI.

Well then then you have your answer. Why are you asking people in a TM1 forum (not a Cognos BI forum) whether something is possible when you've already been informed by an experienced BI developer that is it is. Why not contact this person and get the details. However, I'm willing to get just about everything I own that it indeed is not possible. Why? Common sense. TM1 and Cognos BI are two entirely different products, developed by different companies. Sure, since the two are now under IBM there has been SOME integration, but only the low hanging fruit. I just don't see IBM spending any money trying to integrate the Print Report function from Perspectives with BI, ESPECIALLY considering how much they'd like everyone to switch CAFE. Integrate BI with reporting bursting of a CAFE report? Somewhat to fairly likely. Integrate BI with Print Report in Perspectives. Not a chance.

[declanr]

We were informed by an experienced BI developer that we could achieve bursting and emailing (of TM1 Excel Report) using Cognos Workspace combined with other features in Cognos BI.

Before starting I will caveat this reply with similar statements to the others in the sense that I am a TM1 Expert with experience of Cognos BI (more experience in some aspects of BI than others) and as such my word on this matter should be considered far from gospel.

But to address the first point that your expert has mentioned workspace - I would assume (which is always a risky business) that they intended to integrate your "TM1 Excel Report" into Workspace by having the report visible through TM1 Web which is obviously simple (albeit not always advisable) for 99% of excel based TM1 workbooks. The web report can then be added as an item on the workspace; you can not directly add the excel book to the workspace without using TM1 Web as a medium.

Once the TM1 Web report is inside the workspace you can share/email the workspace to other users but that is still a connected version; as far as I am aware "bursting" in terms of static versions of reports is entirely the domain of Report Studio.
And in the event you could burst the workspace I wonder what you would want to do with SUBNM selections etc; if your title elements has say 1000 possible combinations would you want to burst 1000 versions of the workspace?

I would be very interested if someone could highlight a way that workspaces can be burst out to users but it does sort of contradict the point of a workspace so I am quite surprised that the suggestion of bursting TM1 "reports" involved it at all... but then again the phrase "combined with other features" does give said BI Developer a huge scope of how/what they may have intended.

Might be useful if you could give a bit more background on the actual workbook in question e.g. size, number of sheets, is it active forms/slices, number of subnms etc etc etc
However since you seem to be aware of most obvious options for your report bursting then it may not actually add much into the mix but depending who stumbles across this you never know.

Out of interest why does the customer not want to recreate a similar report in Report Studio?

[jasnayvarughese]

My client is extremely good at TM1. He manages to do most of the TM1 development and report building on his own. His reports also include complicated Excel formulas in conjunction with DBRWS.The reporting requirements keep changing at short notice at his company and hence he will have to invest quite bit of time to master Report Studio to meet the needs. He obviously will have to do that outside working hours.Thus he is trying to see whether there are any other options.

They also invested in a tool( as suggested by many ) which did bursting and emailing. But that tool was not 100% reliable.

Regarding the workbook, it is only sheet. The workbook includes combination of DBRWs and Excel formulas, some of which are dependant on DBRWs. He is not using subnms in his report. It is not a massive report. The size of the report is between 30-60 KB and the maximum number of rows will be 300.

Thank you all for your ideas and suggestions. It's much appreciated. I do have decent idea regarding different options within BI suite that can be utilized.

[stephen waters]

jasnayvarughese

Coming slightly late to this post but I thought I would add a couple of non-technical comments.

We frequently come across customers and prospects who use (or are used to) Cognos BI, sometimes in conjunction with Cognos Planning. This can lead to a mindset, particularly in IT, where TM1 is for preparing budgets and "Reporting" has to be done using Cognos BI. It gets even worse when they insist that TM1 data has to be tipped into a data warehouse first! They do not understand the capabilities of TM1 for reporting and analysis and as its own "financial data warehouse"
If this is the case with your customer you may need to educate them.

The other point to consider is licensing. Although this is a complex area my understanding is that, if you use the Cognos BI report bursting to distribute reports, the recipients need a BI licence. If you burst standard reports from TM1 and distribute them disconnected from the TM1 database (snapshot or pdf), then recipients do not need a license. This applies whether you are using the TM1 report generator or a custom bursting tool

[jim wood]

We frequently come across customers and prospects who use (or are used to) Cognos BI, sometimes in conjunction with Cognos Planning. This can lead to a mindset, particularly in IT, where TM1 is for preparing budgets and "Reporting" has to be done using Cognos BI. It gets even worse when they insist that TM1 data has to be tipped into a data warehouse first! They do not understand the capabilities of TM1 for reporting and analysis and as its own "financial data warehouse"
If this is the case with your customer you may need to educate them.

Stephen,

If you read through the post, the report in question is built in Excel using TM1 data, it's not built in TI. They want to use BI for email distribution of the report. We've been asking why they don't replicate the report in BI so they can use the email capabilities, so in this case it wasn't a user trying force a report in TI,

Jim.

[stephen waters]

If you read through the post, the report in question is built in Excel using TM1 data, it's not built in TI.

Errr..... not quite sure where TI comes into it.

They want to use BI for email distribution of the report.

Which is what my post, and several others in the thread were addressing. ie do "they" really need BI to do this, why not just do it with TM1?


Sorry if I have missed something, just about time for pub lunch in London.