IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) is a web-oriented solution with a variety of available dashboards, analysis tools, reports, events, and many other features. Cognos gives diverse options to users, whether they are data modelers, report authors, analysis teams, administrators, or end users. Cognos works best on RDBMS and OLAP databases that are designed based on warehousing architecture, although it can work with any database design. With the help of Cognos, organizations can use all their company data sources to make better future decisions to help them achieve their goals.
This book is a guide for beginners who are planning to select IBM Cognos BI Administration as their future. This book will help them to grasp the basic knowledge of IBM Cognos BI Administration quickly. The core topics of IBM Cognos BI Administration have been covered in this book, including the architecture of Cognos, its components, configurations, security, and backups. This book will help you to learn the administration tasks necessary for a Cognos environment.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Cognos BI 10.2, will cover an introduction to Cognos and its history along with the new features of Version 10.2. Cognos Administration will also be introduced briefly here.
Chapter 2, The IBM Cognos Configuration Window in Detail, will cover the Cognos Configuration window along with some global configurations.
Chapter 3, Managing IBM Cognos BI Server Components, will cover Cognos BI's components and architecture. The load balancing option will also be discussed at the end of this chapter.
Chapter 4, Administration Portal, will cover the Administration Portal in detail, showing you a detailed description for all tabs (including Status, Security, Configuration, and Index Search tabs).
Chapter 5, Securing IBM Cognos BI, will cover major security features of Cognos BI, including security architecture, managing authentication providers, overcoming initial security, permissions management, secure features, functionalities and capabilities, Cognos firewall and logging, and Single Sign-on (SSO).
Chapter 6, Drill-through Definitions, will cover drill-through definitions, including an overview of them, and some ways to create a drill-through feature/definition.
Chapter 7, Logging, Auditing, and Cognos Backups, will cover Cognos BI logging and backups.
Chapter 8, Additional Configuration and Customization, will cover the customization of Cognos BI's appearance and functionality, the administration of portlets, and managing user profiles.
Chapter 9, Administration of New and Enhanced Features, will cover Cognos Mobile and multiple-tenant environments.
There is an online resource that covers all the requirements for Cognos BI 10.2's installation. Since only one operating system can be selected at a time while considering installation of Cognos BI, the remaining requirements and prerequisites depend on the OS selected. Hence, to make combinations and see for supported environments and applications, the following link must be visited prior to purchasing Cognos BI and of course, prior to the installation and configuration activity:
This book is for beginners planning to learn IBM Cognos BI Administration 10.
It is recommended that you have prior basic knowledge of Business Intelligence, systems administration, IBM Cognos BI, databases, and Linux (any flavor).
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on the NE_Name column of the source report in the page view and go to the Drill-Through Definitions 1 option".
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