TM1 Web vs EV

[ug301]

Hi
I am new to Cognos TM 1 and have some basic question for you experts.
What is the difference between TM1 Web and TM1 Executive Viewer ?

Thank you in advance

[Alan Kirk]

I am new to Cognos TM 1 and have some basic question for you experts.
What is the difference between TM1 Web and TM1 Executive Viewer ?

That's far too big a subject to cover in a few lines, but the most basic difference is that EV is intended to (potentially) connect to multiple data sources (such as MS Analysis Services, TM1, Essbase, etc), while Web is TM1-Specific.

EV client requiers an ActiveX component to be installed (or did in the last version that I looked at), Web has a zero footprint (a raw IE browser can display it).

They handle the display of data in different ways. EV is probably more flexible but (IMHO) more fiddly in terms of creating the views. Others have a different view on that.

Web provides you with the ability to manipulate TM1 views in a way similar to Cube Viewer, albeit more crudely. (Compare selecting an element in Web with selecting an element in the Subset Editor and you'll see what I mean; a long dimension won't appear all at once but will appear over multiple "pages".) Web supports Websheets, which are normal Excel reports that you publish into your Applications folders, but they don't support VBA. (In fact, the reports are just taken, converted to HTML and pumped out to the browser.) In short, most of what you can do in native TM1 client you can do in Web, which isn't the case with EV, but equally there are things that you can do in EV (such as connecting to other data sources) that you can't do in Web.

On a more speculative note, I don't know how long I expect either of them to live as independent products in view of the takeover by Cognos. My own bet is that their features will end up being Borged into a flavour of Cognos BI, though I do emphasise that that's merely speculation on my part.

[Jeroen Eynikel]

I would say the biggest difference is not that EV can connect to multiple data sources but rather that EV is read only, while TM1 web is read/write.
Also, you can not publish excel templates to EV.

On the upside I believe EV to be a bit faster than TM1 web and it has more customization possibilities, but my experience with EV is limited.

I don't really see a lot of future for EV as cognos has its own applications that do more or less the same as EV and I think the installed base for EV is pretty small.

[RLReyes]

I would say the biggest difference is not that EV can connect to multiple data sources but rather that EV is read only, while TM1 web is read/write.
all.

I'm not sure about other data sources but in TM1 both EV & TM1 Web can be read/write. It will depend on how you structure your views/worksheets.

[Jeroen Eynikel]

I would say the biggest difference is not that EV can connect to multiple data sources but rather that EV is read only, while TM1 web is read/write.
all.

I'm not sure about other data sources but in TM1 both EV & TM1 Web can be read/write. It will depend on how you structure your views/worksheets.

Ok - I stand corrected - as said my experience with EV is limited. But you can not publish excel templates right? Which is where we see 90% of the data input happening and maybe 10% directly in the cubes.

[RLReyes]

But you can not publish excel templates right? Which is where we see 90% of the data input happening and maybe 10% directly in the cubes.

In EV, you can not publish excel templates. I look at EV as a cube viewer on steroids. EV has a lot of features and formatting is the one that we more. For budgeting, we are 100% TM1Web but when doing our 10 yr forecast we are 100% EV.

[lotsaram]

EV is a very very good tool (and it does support data input.) It's lightning fast, it supports user defined calculations, has decent graphics and charting and enables great on the fly analysis and drill down and drill through. There's also a lot that can be done with integration via the API to build great dashboards and applications, but unfortunately this is also why it is only a very good tool and not a great tool as the big downfall is that you really have to build everything from scratch with hand coded web pages which is quite technical and beyond the reach of most TM1 users and fair to say beyond most BI developers too (who are used to drag and drop wizards and GUIs not handcoding js and vbs).

Unfortunately I can't see much happening in the way of improving the out of the box interaction and true application building capability of EV as IBM already has C8. Still let's wait and see what we really get with Cognos Express. It would be really great if an EV like interface became the new TM1 cube viewer but I won't hold my breath.

[David Usherwood]

One of the components of Cognos Express is EV (can't remember what it's now called) and Hubert Heijkers and the EV team had quite a lot to do with putting Express together.

[lotsaram]

In Cognos Express
TM1 = "Xcelerator" (includes Excel client and web AFAIK)
EV = "Advisor"
C8 = "Reporter"