C10 upgrade referred to as "Seemless Upgrade"

[triguy]

Rob Ashe touted the seemless and straightforward upgrade process in response to the challenges that customers experience in going from Series 7 to Cognos 8. 

Rob brought Boeing on stage to talk about their Cognos 10 upgrade experiences.  Live with Cognos 10 as of  10/23/10.

Content Manager caching to improve user navigation speed
Cafe performance improvements
Transformer performance improvements
Business Insight - strong graphics, dropping graphic objects on top of hierarchical data
Active Reports
Lifecycle Manager
Upgrade was completed in 1 week (40,000 report objects, 3,500 users)

[MFGF]

It should be as simple as the move from 8.3 to 8.4.  The underlying architecture of Cognos 10 is based on Cognos 8, so there should be no migration issues.

[blom0344]

Now, should I conclude that Integrated Version Control has been left out? Yes, I know it can be bought elsewhere, but it should be part of the fully mature version!!

[Alp]

Hmm., now I realized that I did not even hear such question on the conference, and I did not hear anyone from IBM saying that they added the version control to c10.
Well, looking into how Cognos technology growing through acquisitions, chances are that they will buy someone to fill the gap :-)

- Alp

[MFGF]

Now, should I conclude that Integrated Version Control has been left out? Yes, I know it can be bought elsewhere, but it should be part of the fully mature version!!

Correct - integration with SourceSafe/CVS is not part of the Cognos 10 release.

MF.

[beerguy82]

I would be interested in hearing about snags people hit along the way with their upgrades.  At my shop we usually have at least some minor hiccups, mostly with non-supported things like JavaScript, when we upgrade.

We also see slight differences in report rendering between IE and Firefox, so it was interesting to me that they presented C10 in Firefox.

Tim

[MFGF]

We also see slight differences in report rendering between IE and Firefox, so it was interesting to me that they presented C10 in Firefox.

My experience so far seems to show that IE is the better browser for supporting Active Reports, and Firefox seems quicker at handling Business Insight.  Part of the reason for the former, I suspect, is that Firefox does not handle mht files natively, and requires an addon, whereas it seems to run the java for Business Insight far more efficiently than IE.

Regards,

MF.

[MMcBride]

My biggest complaint is that the Cognos 8 to Cognos 10 upgrade isn't quite seemless...

Technically it is, but from a license perspective the upgrade is a bit of a nightmare...
Insight and Insight Advanced are new products in 10, there are additional features that are in Cognos 10 that are not found in Cognos 8. To use these new features you need to upgrade your license and it is expensive...

We have had IBM on site at least 4 different times to work out the issues and have finally asked for a simple product comparison, you know the kind you can find on any other product available...

What we are looking for is a simple chart that outlines the basic functionality of Cognos 10, we want to compare Cognos 8.4 / Cognos 10.1 / Cognos 10.1 Enhanced side by side so we can justify the huge bill from moving from Cognos 10.1 to Cognos 10.1 enhanced. So far IBM has been as confused as we are on this.

So far this is what we have been able to determine:
You can upgrade from Cognos 8.4 to 10.1 without additional cost. But this does not allow the use of Cognos Insight, or Cognos Insight Advanced. Which to be honest with you is probably the biggest reason to move to Cognos 10.1.

We are licensed by PVU and the cost to upgrade is substantial...

The people paying the bills are asking me to justify the extra cost but with the 35+ different Marketing listings for Cognos 10 on the IBM website I think I may have to bring in 3rd party consultants to figure out how much this upgrade is going to really cost me and what I am losing if I don't get the Enhanced licensing...

Though with all of this complaining I should add in my test environment where I am not worried about licensing issues the migration was extremely simple and painless. My existing content migrated without issue, my java customizations in the reports continued to work and I was able to get all of the new functionality to run seemlessly.

The only issues we have had are with the Mail Service not working (IBM is looking in to this at the moment) and we found out that IBM DB2 9.1 for AIX is not supported for the Human Tasks engine, we had to upgrade the repository to store this content to AIX DB2 9.7

[teverard]

We have been told that our current Consumer license covers Cognos Insight, it is the Advanced version that is extra licensing.  Also Professional licenses will include Advanced.  We have Enterprise Consumer licensed by PVU and separate seat licenses for Analysis and Professional.  We looked at upgrading the Consumer license and you are dead on that the cost is ridiculous.

[perk]

I'm trying to install 8.4 and 10.1. The 8.4 installed successfully. If i tried to install the 10.1 the framework manager failed to install. Can i install both 8.4 planing client and 10.1 planning client on the same machine.

[MFGF]

We have been told that our current Consumer license covers Cognos Insight, it is the Advanced version that is extra licensing.  Also Professional licenses will include Advanced.  We have Enterprise Consumer licensed by PVU and separate seat licenses for Analysis and Professional.  We looked at upgrading the Consumer license and you are dead on that the cost is ridiculous.

Business Insight access requires users to be licensed at "Enhanced Consumer" level and above.  Business Insight Advanced access requires users to be licensed at the "Advanced Business Author" level and above.  In Cognos 8, Enhanced Consumer was the standard Consumer license plus access to GO! Mobile, GO! Search etc.  Advanced Business Author provided access to Report Studio Express Authoring mode.

Regards,

MF.

[james899]

Technically it is, but from a license perspective the upgrade is a bit of a nightmare...
What we are looking for is a simple chart that outlines the basic functionality of Cognos 10 to Enhanced side by side ... The people paying the bills are asking me to justify the extra cost ... and what I am losing if I don't get the Enhanced licensing...

???
Great Post McBride! We are upgrading from 8.4.1 to 10 in 2 months. I do not know whether it is the enhanced version or not yet as I am not in the loop on that. I am worried because we are also making major reporting changes and i do not know how the timing of the two will be handled yet.

Wanted to know if you ever got your side-by-side comparison?
Did you figure out the cost for the enhanced version?
Did you decide it is worth the extra cost, why or why not?

[rlp]

We use SAP BW heavily in our installation and I'm curious to know if anyone has any experiences related to using SAP BW under C10 they can share.

Thanks,
Randy

[rb73in]

Hi ,

Wanted to know if you have got  side-by-side comparison?can you please share .

[Steve]

It isn't really as 'seamless' as claimed to be. I found the upgrade from 8.3 to 8.4 much more seamless compared to 8.4 to 10. Agreed that the underlying structure is the same but 10 seems to have features not compatible with 8.4 . It requires reports and cubes to be re-visited after upgrading to 10 which makes the upgrade process non-seamless. These are the issues we found so far -

1> 10 is not compatible with IE6 whereas 8.4 is. In 10, the reports have a problem when you click on a drill-thru. Sometimes it works and sometimes it will change the color of the column and not do anything, just sit there. Upgrade IE 6 to IE7 and it works. It hapenned not just to one person but to everybody using IE6 in our company.

2> Reports having 100 rows as the limit on an HTML page size reverted back to 20 in C10. The page down links appeared and this was resolved by changing settings in the report. Wonder why the same setting in report properties won't  work in 10 ?

3> Add a Query calculation in a report and it behaves differently in IE 6 and IE 7

4> The relative time cetagories in the cube change names of the categories by itself !! This is big problem. It broke the reports !

Not sure how many more to come..

So the 'seamless' word applies to only to the technical process, not the results after the upgrade  ;)   

[MMcBride]

Steve is right on this, in my testing we haven't found any that failed the upgrade process but quite a few that were just slightly off, enough to justify a complete manual upgrade once we do go to 10.1

A spot check won't cut it, we have to visually inspect every report... with thousands of reports to go through...  >:(

Though to be honest I gave up using the Migration tools a simple export and import from an 8.4 repository to a brand new 10.1 repository was actually cleaner for us. Some custom security had to be re-applied but the formatting and quirkiness issues with reports being almost correct after the upgrade have vanished.

On a side note I finally did get a Product overview of Cognos 10 compared to Cognos 8, it wasn't exactly complete and it was essentially IBM's marketing materials in a spreadsheet... but I have asked for permission to post it if IBM gives me the OK I will post what we ended up with.

[C10John]

It's not a simple or seamless upgrade. We have been dealing with issues for the last 4 months with the install and "holes" we found during the install. All have been reported to IBM Cognos.

The issue we are having is getting TM1 Contributor installed and running on our distributed environment (2 Web/2 BI/2 EP/TM1) The usual steps were not working from the delivered documentation.  I eventually found out from calling the support team that there are undocumented steps needed to get TM1 Contributor 9.5.2 to work with C10.  There is a PMR, #57181,499,000 that is opened and I have provided the documentation steps to IBM. I do not know if they have released these out yet.

Because of our distributed environment and the fact we use SSL, we have to use our SSL certificates and TM1 was unable to accept them since it generates it own which would not interface with C10. It looks like the issue is resolved but as a result, we found another SSL issue which I understand will be address in a hot fix due for release on 7/29 +/-. There was a PMR for this but since it is a defect, the PMR was closed sent to the escalation team.

Not so seamless an upgrade. There are bugs and defects.

[SomeClown]

I eventually found out from calling the support team that there are undocumented steps needed to get TM1 Contributor 9.5.2 to work with C10.  There is a PMR, #57181,499,000 that is opened and I have provided the documentation steps to IBM. I do not know if they have released these out yet.

Any chance you could post those steps somewhere on this forum?  Thanks.

[bdbits]

I think this is a "your mileage may vary" kind of thing, and a lot depends on your environment and what you have in your reports. We just went from 8.4 > 10 using a content export/import and it was mostly trouble-free. A caveat: we are relatively small, just a pair of servers in prod and one each in test/dev. I don't have an exact count but the report count was likely < 1000 in total. (We do more ad-hoc reports.) Report issues were few and mostly related to embedded javascript, and a few validation errors but the reports themselves actually ran ok even after failing validation. We did not have to republish packages or regen cube files, but our cube regeneration schedule hit them all within a few days anyway.

[rlp]

We started upgrading from 8.4 to 10.1 a few weeks ago.  Between 5 and 10% of our report fail under 10.1.  Some of the issues we can resolve with a simple design change, but most of them were not so simple.

I've submitted no less than 10 support tickets since we began the upgrade and the bulk of them have been converted into defects.  We even waited until after FP1 was available thinking most of the problems would be resolved by then.  This was going so badly for us, we had to put a halt to the upgrade while we wait for IBM to provide us with some hotfixes.

I will admit that we push the envelope and use many of the more obscure options and settings that are not commonly found in other shops.  I was expected things to be much smoother than this though.

[MMcBride]

Going to necro this thread as I feel this is relevant

With the 10.1.1 alot of the "slightly off" reports (not broken but not the same) as in 8.4.1 issues appear to have been resolved

So if you haven't upgraded and are debating between the two I would go with 10.1.1 as it seems like they have been fixing some of these issues.

At least this has been my experiance.

[jayaperi]

Was the 'Product overview of Cognos 10 compared to Cognos 8' posted? Thanks