Licensing for Mashup/SDK?

[shoreline]

I work at University and administer a medium sized Cognos 8.4.1 installation, among other things, and at this point we're facing a dilemma that it seems most Cognos customers are: lack of licenses.  I've been investigating the use of the Cognos Mashup Service and/or SDK to provide dashboards to our central portal.

If I were to provide such functionality, would each potential viewer of the Cognos content in the portal require a Consumer license?  We were hoping to provide some widget/dashboards to some members of the university community, but are unsure if we'll be able to handle the cost of thousands of consumer licenses.

[Rahul Ganguli]

You can put the Mashup widgets on the portal with anonymous access.

[shoreline]

This was my thought, but would anonymous access of this sort without an account for each user break the Cognos license agreement?  Does anyone know the details of this regarding licensing?

[hardstep]

In order to use the mashup service you need to have purchased the SDK license.

[shoreline]

We do have an SDK license; does this provide for us to distribute widgets, etc to non-licensed Cognos users?   If so that would be perfect.

Even better, could you point to a location in which IBM states the way licensing works with the SDK?  We are just trying to stay legal. =)

[Grim]

A question I believe could be best answered by your sales rep. That's what they are there for.

Just sayin...

[MFGF]

If I had to make a judgement call, I would err on the side of caution and assume that delivering Cognos 8 content to users through a portal would class them as BI Consumers. Your situation doesn't exactly fit the license description for a Consumer license, though, so as Grim suggests, you will need to get clarification from your IBM Account Manager. This is what the Cognos 8 Consumer license is defined as:

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Consumer
For each use authorization acquired, You may use the Program to: (i) access the Cognos Connection Portal to select reports, view reports and set personal preferences (for languages, time zones etc.); and (ii) run and schedule reports created by a licensed IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Studio module, interact with prompts, output the reports to other formats such as PDF and CSV, subscribe to a scheduled report, create and manage report folders and portal pages and use the Cognos Connection Portal to create and consume portal pages, including use of all of the portlet types provided with Cognos Connection, personalize standard reports, and receive Event Studio notifications and use the IBM Cognos 8 Go! Office module. You will configure the Program to ensure that those users are restricted from using any other Program functionality.


Cheers!

MF.

[hardstep]

I work for a premier IBM business partner here in the UK and we have had this question asked before.
Let me clarify...
1. Your BI server that your end users connect to via the mashup server needs to have a base set of licenses  (BI Admin license as a minimum).
2. If the SDK/Mashup application that you have developed requires no access to Cognos BI (Cognos Connection Portal or any other capability (studios or otherwise), then
consumer or author licenses are not required. If your SDK/mashup application is passing user credentials through to the BI server then you will need at least a consumer license for the user whose credentials are used to run the report.

Hope this clarifies the situation !.

[MFGF]

I work for a premier IBM business partner here in the UK and we have had this question asked before.
Let me clarify...
1. Your BI server that your end users connect to via the mashup server needs to have a base set of licenses  (BI Admin license as a minimum).
2. If the SDK/Mashup application that you have developed requires no access to Cognos BI (Cognos Connection Portal or any other capability (studios or otherwise), then
consumer or author licenses are not required. If your SDK/mashup application is passing user credentials through to the BI server then you will need at least a consumer license for the user whose credentials are used to run the report.

Hope this clarifies the situation !.

Thanks for the great insight Mr W! :)