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Most IBM Cognos Planning models have a lot of items that will be hidden over the web. These items are often used for calculations but do not need to be presented. To hide the item on the web, Contributor Administrators will set up saved selections and access tables for the hidden items.

Basically, you are able to update global rates in one place and populate them out to your elist nodes via an Admin Link. By using a Contributor Application, you have a bit more flexibility in what you are populating and you don’t have to Synch and GTP. By not having to do the Synch and GTP and depending on your model size, you may increase the speed of data population and since you are not Synchronizing with Analyst, you don’t have to bring over structural changes you are not ready to put in production.

If you have ever moved older models from IBM Cognos Planning to a new release, you may not have noticed the “Expand and Collapse” functionality which was added a few versions ago. Maybe older clients did not experience it because it’s only available if the dlist fits the rules for expand and collapse.

IBM recently announced a major licensing change in their Cognos Planning licensing. Clients that are on 8.4.1 of Cognos Planning and own Contributor, will receive an equivalent license for IBM Cognos TM1 Contributor. This is great news for clients looking to compliment Planning with TM1.

IBM Cognos recently announced a licensing change in IBM Cognos 8 Planning Version 8.4.1 . If you weren’t anxiously awaiting the news like Lodestar was, I’ll bet you missed it. Why were we anxious for the announcement? It paves the way for IBM Cognos clients to leverage both Enterprise Planning and TM1 to provide the Best of the Best Planning solution at a reasonable price.

The idea behind this is that when creating a D-Cube you create it putting the D-List in order of 1-5. This helps in priority conflicts of formulas and formats. Plus, when you browse the library the D-Lists are sorted by the type of D-List. Easy Right? Maybe yes, Maybe no. The naming convention is open to interpretation. If I have a D-List for Years and it has no calculations, is it a 4 or a 3? What about a D-List that has Current Year Budget, Prior Year Actual, and a variance between Current Year Budget and Prior Year Actual. Is this a 5 since it has versions or is it a 1 since there is a calculation? What about a D-List that was a 3 but I’ve recently included a subtotal in the D-List do I need to go back and rename this to a 2? The numbering method works great in a training class environment to help us learn the dimension order when creating the D-Cubes. After we learn the order, do we really need to number our dimensions?

Choosing the dimension for publish is one of the most critical steps in the Generate Framework Manager model process. The dimension chosen for publish will be treated as the Fact table in the publish process. In addition, the Generate Framework Model admin extension will model the dimension chosen for publish as the fact table. More simply put, the dimension chosen for publish will be your measure dimension.

It is always important to consider any Business Intelligence requirements during the design of planning applications to ensure planned information is structured in such a way that it can be leveraged in Cognos BI. Anyone who has ever used planned information as a source for reporting will attest. That being said, it is not always possible to create a planning application that is both Planning and BI friendly. As a result, we have pioneered the concept of a reporting application to help bridge the gap between Planning and BI Requirements. I like to think of it as a mini data mart masked as a Cognos Planning application.