Recently, one of my colleges wrote about an easy and cost effective way to add BI or TM1 to your small Cognos deployment which you can find by clicking HERE. I’m going to take that a little further and explain how you can move your Cognos Enterprise BI content store over to your new Cognos Express bi system.

It's a fairly easy process to move to Cognos Express and it can be done relatively quickly.  You will need to be the Cognos admin to accomplish the following steps:

1. Log into Cognos BI and go to the IBM Cognos Administration
2. Go to Content Administration
3. Choose export from the icons to the right side of the screen
4. Name your export and click next
5. Select entire content store and choose if you need to include user info
6. Select new archive and name it
7. Create a password
8. Choose save and run now, later, or just once
9. Finish

You have now downloaded your entire content store to a zip file that you can move onto your express server and import in.  The process to import in is fairly easy and can be accomplished by the following step:

1. Log into Cognos BI and go to the IBM Cognos Administration
2. Go to Content Administration
3. Choose import from the icons to the right side of the screen
4. Select your exported file (if you don’t see it, you have not added it to your deployment location)
5. Name your import then Next
6. Make sure you check the box next to the name on this page or you will not import anything then Next
7. Shouldn’t need to change anything here then Next
8. Next
9. Choose save and run now, later or just once
10. Finish

You have now imported your exported content store from Cognos Enterprise to Cognos Express.  *Important note – Make sure all of your data sources and data bases have been set up and configured properly or your reports will not render any data.

That’s it!  Simple process to move your content in BI from Enterprise to Cognos Express!