Distribute reports to users who have neither CAMIDs nor Email Ids

[kalyan_y]

Hi All,

I got a business requirement, where in a report needs to be distributed to all the advisors (can be around 5000 in number) and these people do not have either cognos access or email ids.

I know bursting can be used to distribute reports, but this works only when the people have either email ids or CAMIDs.  Is there any way to distribute reports to each person's individual directory in Windows using Cognos 8?

I thought of getting the report output in excel format with multiple sheets, such that each sheet has data specific to each advisor. Then, do some coding which extracts each sheet and then place it in each advisor's local windows directory. But the end user says, he does not want the report output in excel format.

Any ideas... please suggest....

[RobsWalker68]

Hi,

You could potentially burst the report to a file directory.  Have a look at the link below, although you will then have to code something to move each file to the appropriate windows directory.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/page193.html

Before you start you should also be completely clear about any licensing implications as I guess potentially these could be classed as recipients or a form of.  I've been out of the licensing loop for some time but I vaguely remember IBM introducing a new level of recipient to cover this type of situation where reports were passed on as is without additional modification first. I would just check with IBM if your a direct customer or your IBM partner to be on the safe side.  The last thing you want to do is have to deal with IBM compliance.

Regards

Rob



 

[kalyan_y]

Thanks Rob.

The pdf file in the link describes how to save the report outputs to a folder outside of Cognos 8 and then rename the files to the corresponding burst key.

But I require to burst the report for each advisor who have neither CAMIDs nor E-mail ids. Not quite sure of how to achieve this.

I'm thinking of the below approach.

Generate the output for all advisors in the format required by the users in a signle report.
Save this ouptut to a location outside Cognos 8.

Than have some coding which does the following for each advisor.

1. extract the pages from the main file for each advisor.
No. of pages may vary from one advisor to another.
2. write these pages to a new file.
3. place each new file created in the corresponding advisor's local directory.

If anyone did similar kind of stuff before, please share...

[doru]

I find DocumentBurster - http://www.pdfburst.com/ to be a good report bursting and report distribution alternative. It is very easy to set up and it can burst and distribute the relevant PDF reports to individual windows directories - one windows directory can be mapped to one individual advisor.

Report delivery quick start guide can be found here - http://www.pdfburst.com/reports-bursting-quickstart.pdf

[kalyan_y]

Thanks for sharing...
Its good but I dont think my organisation will go with this s/w.

I got reports in PDF format for each advisor saved to a location outside Cognos.
I need a DOS script, which accesses each pdf file from this location and then place it in the advisor's local directory.

If anyone has done this kind of scripting, please share.

Thanks