In this recipe we will explore IBM Cognos Business Insight User Interface in more detail. We will explore various areas of the UI, each dedicated to perform different actions.
As stated earlier, we will be exploring different sections of Cognos Business Insight. Hence, make sure that IBM Cognos 10 BI installation is open and samples are set up properly. We will start the recipe assuming that the IBM Cognos Connection window is already open on the screen.
To explore IBM Cognos Business Insight User Interface, perform the following steps:
1. In the IBM Cognos Connection window, navigate to Business Insight Samples, as shown in the following screenshot:
2. Click on one of the dashboards, for instance Marketing Dashboard to open the dashboard in Business Insight. Different areas are labeled, as shown in the following figure:
3. The overall layout is termed as Dashboard. The topmost toolbar is called Application bar. The Application bar contains different icons to manage the dashboard as a whole. For instance, we can create, open, e-mail, share, or save the dashboard using one of the icons on the Application bar.
4. Similarly, it has a Widget toolbar for every widget, which gets activated when the user clicks on the corresponding widget. When the mouse is focused away from the widget, the Widget toolbar disappears. It has various options, for instance to refresh the widget data, print as PDF, resize to fit content, and so on. It also provides the user with the capability to change the chart type as well as to change the color palette. We will see each of these options in detail when we visit Chapter 2, Business Insight Dashboards. However, all these options have help text associated with them, which is activated on mouse hover.
5. Content tab and Content pane show the list of objects available on the Cognos Connection. Directory structure on Cognos Connection can be navigated using Content pane and Content tab, and hence, available objects can be added to or removed from the dashboard. The drag-and-drop functionality has been provided as a result of which creating and editing a dashboard has become as simple as moving objects between the Dashboard area and Cognos Connection.
6. The Toolbox tab displays additional widgets. The Slider Filter and Select Value Filter widgets allow the user to filter report content. The other toolbox widgets allow user to add more report content to the dashboard, such as HTML content, images, RSS feeds, and rich text. We will see all these in more detail when we visit Chapter 2, Business Insight Dashboards.
In the preceding section, we have seen basic areas of Business Insight. More than one user can log on to the IBM Cognos 10 BI server, and create various objects on Cognos Connection. These objects include packages, reports, cubes, templates, and statistics to name a few.
These objects can be created using one or more tools available to users. For instance, reports can be created using one of the studios available. Cubes can be created using IBM Cognos TM1 or IBM Cognos Transformer and published on Cognos Connection. Metadata model packages can be created using IBM Cognos Framework Manager and published on Cognos Connection.
These objects can then be dragged, dropped, and formatted as standalone objects in Cognos Business Insight, and hence, dashboards can be created.
The next chapter will explore Cognos Business Insight in more detail and we will actually be exploring the whole idea of creating dashboards using Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced, more deeply.