Version Control?

[whome]

Hi,

[Yes, I know this forum is sponsored by BSP, but I'm hoping that some frank discussion will be allowed...]

There seem to be two main competitors selling Cognos version control: BSPSoftware ICS (Integrated Control Suite) and Motio CI

Does anyone have experience with both products? Do you have and pros and cons for each?

It would seem that ICS is more feature complete, including versioning of packages in Framework Manager and automatic versioning with each save (but not requiring check-in/-out), for instance. I have heard from a single user with experience with both (and when pressed rather hard!), that  is "rock-solid" and "hardened" but he refused to offer any other insight due to his position as a third-party developer.

Any insight is appreciated. This is a major investment!
Thanks!

[SMitchell]

Hello,

I'm familiar with MotioCI but have not used it. When we were looking into a version control and archiving for Cognos we decided to go with ICS, like you mentioned it's more feature rich. For our needs we were able to implement the ICS platform very easily and adapt the changes into our report development extremely easily. We utilize the archiving component fairly heavily to capture "point in time" snapshots of the reports for audit purposes. When we first deployed the product we requested a number of feature enhancements that took less than a month for BSP to create and implement for us, they were later rolled into a future update but we got them right away in order to meet our business requirements.

The version control has been a massive help in just keeping track of who made what changes and more importantly the release management aspect of promoting changes to QA -> Production has been a huge time saver. Also, the ability to track our Incident numbers on the promotion is tying our Incident, Change and Release Management practices in nicely. I've been looking into the source control for FM and Transformer but we don't currently utilize these new features. I like the concept of folder based versioning and a single management interface and have a need of this as our subversion source control process is cumbersome and at times error prone but like anything I need to make a business case and budget for purchases.

Sorry I can't compare the two software's but we are extremely happy with ICS and thought I should share this. One last thing, we have never run into any situation where ICS has caused us any issues within the IBM Cognos operations. We are a Cognos 8 shop but currently working through an upgrade project to Cognos 10.

Cheers,
Shaun

[kderoos]

We went through the review and acquisition process a little over two years ago and looked at both Motio and BrightStar products.  Functionality between the two products was comparable but we found that the sales and support staff at BrightStar were quite a bit easier to work with and acquired Integrated Version Control (IVC) and BrightStar's companion product, MetaManager.

IVC is easy to install, configure, and use and requires no additional maintenance ("rock-solid"?).  I have no reservations endorsing this product or the company.  In fact, I can't stress enough how great the folks from BrightStar have been to work with.  When you acquire a piece of software like this you are entering into a long term relationship with a vendor, so you want to find one that is committed to their product and to their customers.

In Report Studio, Authors see three additional icons on their standard tool bar: Save with Comments, Lock Report, and View Revision History.  The Save with Comments button allows an author to make a 'major save' and append specific comments on why or what was changed on the report.  View Revision History allows authors to see all previous versions of the report.  They can also open any previous version of that report in Report Studio, or do a side by side comparison of your current report and any previous version. 

We also use IVC to promote a report through different Cognos environments.  We use this to promote reports from our development environment through Q/A and into Production which is massively better than using Cognos' export/import method of moving reports around.

We recently moved from Cognos 8.4 to Cognos 10.1.1 and found both IVC and MetaManager to be very useful in the migration. 

I hope this helps.  Should you have any other questions, feel free to contact me directly.

Kevin

[whome]

Thanks Shaun and Kevin. That's very helpful.