August 15th
How Do I Retrieve My Folder Cognos Content from a Deleted User?
As a Cognos BI Administrator, you arrive early on a Monday. While sipping your Americano coffee, you read an email. “HELP! We accidentally deleted Mary from Active Directory last week, but we recreated her profile. However, she still can’t see her reports in her Cognos My Folder. This is urgent!” You immediately think, crap the new Active Directory profile must have created a new CAMID in Cognos. How do I retrieve My Folder Cognos content from a deleted user?
Deleted Cognos User’s Content Still Exists
When a user is deleted in a Cognos namespace all of their content in their My Folder gets orphaned and is difficult to access. The good news is, you didn’t lose it. The content of a Cognos user that is deleted still exists. For clients that have used Cognos BI for years you can imagine how much extra junk is sitting in your content store as a result of Cognos users leaving the company, and being deleted through Active Directory. But their content is still sitting in your Cognos Content Store, taking up space.
How Can you Retrieve the content?
You could import the content store from last week, prior to the deletion, into a sandbox to find the profile that says the CAMID is missing. You could then run an SDK script to query the content store for orphaned My Folders. Just a note that every Cognos Administrator license now includes an SDK license, so you don’t have to worry about licensing of the SDK. If you didn’t know that IBM changed the Cognos BI Administrator licensing a few years ago, please see our previous blog on this topic:
But if you don’t have the Cognos SDK installed you can still manually retrieve the contents of the My Folder. Here’s a link to IBM’s site to explain how.
And if you want to install the SDK here’s a link to the Cognos SDK version 11 installation guide.
Now you might be thinking, Lodestar isn’t there an easier way?
The Easy Way to Access Orphaned Content - Motio
The easiest way to access the orphaned content is leverage the functionality of MotioPI. Motio is a fabulous company, and partner of Lodestar Solutions, that creates tools that every IBM Cognos Administrator should have. Their tools help save administrators huge amounts of time, and headaches.
MotioPI
MotioPI is a tool that includes the ability to easily identify the orphaned Cognos reports and objects and then either delete the content to clean up your ever-growing content store, or move it to an accessible location. To see a demo of how easy this is visit the Motio site by clicking HERE NOW.
The cool thing is that Motio makes some of their software available to everyone! Don’t have a budget, no worry. Motio has made their MotioPI tool, the basic version, free!
To get the free copy of MotioPI access this link.
When you register please select Lodestar Solutions as the Business Partner that referred you.
So now you know the best answer to, "How do I retrieve My Folder Cognos Content from a Deleted User?” is to leverage the right tool, MotioPI. But as we stated Motio does so much more! Yes, their free MotioPI is great! But when you want to get serious about maintaining your content store, doing mass changes and most importantly controlling your version, then we should talk about all of Motio’s offerings. Here’s a link to our previous blog on some of the other Motio tools for Cognos clients.
Let’s Talk
Lodestar Solutions is an authorized reseller of Motio tools. So, when you want to make your life easier, or when you are ready to upgrade to Cognos Analytics 11 and want to do it faster and cheaper, contact Lodestar Solutions. Email Services@lodestarsolutions.com to schedule a free discussion of how Motio tools can make you look like a Cognos Ninja! We want to hear your challenges and work with you to make life better.