Alternatives to Cognos Insight Distributed for Offline Working

[wigglyrat]

Hello:

I need to meet a requirement where several end users need to be able to access TM1 data while off-line.

Aside from using Cognos Insight Distributed, does anyone here have off-line users and how do you achieve this?

If you are using Distributed how have you found it? We have tried but the tool seems to not work as smoothly as we would ideally like.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

[jim wood]

For me you have 2 options:

1) Slice
2) Use VBA to automate PDF and email generation.

Jim.

[wigglyrat]

Thanks - this makes sense. I think we got to the point of trying to use Cognos Insight Distributed and now everyone just wants to see it work. It does to some extent however is not as reliable as we would like (this we had in mind to roll out as the primary tool that these particular users interface with TM1 through.Does anyone here use it? If so how have you found it?

Kind regards,

[wigglyrat]

Also I should say we would ideally like them to be able to do their analysis this way as well so there would be that limitation with PDFs.

[stephen waters]

For static reporting you can burst snapshots to Excel\PDF using the TM1 report generator tool. These can then be distributed\emailed with a custom VBA routine or using a utility.

For dynamic analysis and reports you can generate Active Report packs from TM1 data. These can be viewed via browser, iPad or Android and can generate very high quality, interactive reports. However, I am pretty certain this would involve extra license costs (I am pretty sure it is not included as part of the BI functionality that comes with standard TM1 licenses) and you would need training on Cognos BI; a very different skill set to TM1.

[qml]

Stephen is right. Active Reports are a really cool way to do interactive, visually appealing offline reporting. You will need a Cognos BI license and of course some training in Report Studio and RAVE visualisations, but the results can be very good indeed.

[tomok]

The free option is to have a TI process that dumps a portion of the cube(s) in question to flat files which, via VBA, can be put into Excel and organized into pivot tables. Not real elegant but there is no licensing costs involved and pretty easy to understand.

[BrianL]

At the risk of not answering your question, why are you giving up on distributed mode?

It sounds like you've already invested time into getting it working. Is it going to be worth throwing that out and starting over with a different approach rather than fixing up those issues?

[Edward Stuart]

I have worked on systems with large rollouts of Cognos Insight and it can work very well. However, if performance is a concern then walk away whilst you still can.

Plus the rumours abound that Insight is getting little or no development as all the focus is on Planning Analytics