Cognos BI Integration

Salesforce Integration with Cognos

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Let’s talk about two of my favorite pieces of technology – Cognos BI and Salesforce.com and the Salesforce Integration with Cognos. Users of Cognos BI and Salesforce have run into integration issues based on an on-demand model for data access over the internet and dealing with communication issues. The salesforce.com data interface requires an adaptor providing security and business naming. Additional issues that come into play are accessing hosted and on premise data, hard to extend reports beyond simple lists, limited historical trend reporting, and users who often extract data into spreadsheets and distribute. When it comes to historical trend reporting, the capability exists to expand pipeline this month versus pipeline last month and see what’s changed?

A key strength of IBM Cognos 10 is data access and integration. The strong integration is environment based on integration kits and a software development kit. IBM has been working with Salesforce.com for some time, primarily because of Salesforce.com’s history of delivering successful projects. IBM and Salesforce have developed best practices based on knowledge of the environment and known deployment strategies.  Also, IBM has a very strong capability from data integration right through to portal deployment.

Stemming from this, we’re now able to integrate with just an ODBC connection.  We can integrate even within the SFDC portal as you can also do with Cognos BI.

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Integrating TM1 9.5 and Cognos BI – Part 2

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​Integrating TM1 9.5 and Cognos BI – Part 2

We continue from the previous Lodestar blog on Integrating TM1 9.5 and Cognos BI  withTM1 tips.

Integrating TM1 9.5 and Cognos BI

The }HierarchyProperties control cube in TM1 stores custom named levels for the hierarchy levels of TM1 dimensions. You can enter your own names for these levels in the }HierarchyProperties control cube and then use these names outside of TM1 to access TM1 data with IBM Cognos Report Studio, MDX statements or other MDX OLAP tools. You can also use this control cube to assign a default member for the dimension.

  1. In TM1 Architect, click the View menu and select Display Control Objects in the navigation pane, click to expand the Cubes
  2. Open the }HierarchyProperties control cube
  3. Click the title dimension list to select the dimension for which you want to assign named levels
  4. In the default Member cell, enter an existing element name to set as the default member for this dimension: Allows for filtering the dimension when TM1 data is retrieved from IBM Cognos Report Studio
  5. Enter your own custom name for each hierarchy level that exists in the dimension
  6. After configuring named levels, you must do one of the following to apply the changes: Restart the IBM Cognos TM1 server, or Run the RefreshMdxHierarchy function in a TurboIntegrator process.
Heads Up!
  1. Changes to element names or dimension structure are not automatically detected by the named levels feature.
  2. If your dimension changes, you must first manually update the named level assignments in the }HierarchyProperties control cube, then either restart the TM1 server or run the RefreshMdxHierarchy TurboIntegrator function to update the MDX hierarchies in the TM1 server.
  3. Watch out for names: if a TM1 cube has a level named "Products" and a member in the hierarchy also has the name "Products" when the cube is published, it will error.

In case you missed part 1 of our Lodestar TM1 tips, click HERE.

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