Distributing reports to external customers using 'email' field in report

[Tsunami]

We have a report that will list all our customers and their progress.  We want to distribute each customer's progress to them based on a field that contains their email address.

I don't want to creat 1,000 views and input 1,000 email address so I'm trying to find out if anyone has come up with a way to do this.

So the report would be something like this:

Customer A          CustomerA@customerA.com            10% Progress
Customer B          CustomerB@customerB.com            30% Progress
Customer C          CustomerC@customerC.com            20% Progress

Then I would need a way to send Customer A only their progress percentage.

Is this possible with bursting?  I'm not too familiar with it and I'm not finding anything in-depth online.  Or could their be a way to drop off all the versions of the report into an area where exchange could pick it up and distribute based on file names?

I'm at a loss and appreciate any advice or guidance.

[MFGF]

Bursting is exactly what you need here. In the burst options, set the grouping based on Customer, and set the burst key to be the email address.  Save the report, then when you run it (or schedule it), select the burst option and send it to email.  The output for each customer should then get delivered to the customer's email address.

The only other thing to consider is the licensing aspect. If Cognos 8 is delivering content to each customer then you effectively make them remote recipients, which carries a licensing implication (and cost).

Regards,

MF.

[Tsunami]

Thx MFGF!  I was able to get the reports to burst to a location on my hard drive.

I'll have to run the licensing concern up the chain of command. 

Just to clarify, anyone that recieves an output (.xls, .pdf) will need a liscense?  What type of liscense would it be? 

[MFGF]

It would be a Remote Recipient license. Not expensive, but obviously if you are emailing hundreds or thousands of customers it can soon add up :-)

MF.

[Tsunami]

Thanks for the heads-up.  :)

I still have a question though about renaming the files.  There is supposed to be a script available but when I download it, the files are empty of code.

This is the KB article:  https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21344694

Update:  The code is there, it's just a mess  :(

[doru]

You might be interested to take a look at DocumentBurster - http://www.pdfburst.com/
It is a very good report bursting software and it might be a more attractive option when it comes to license
costs.