My Folders Content is missing after 10.2.1 upgrade

[KS]

We are upgrading from Cognos 8.2 to 10.2.1.  We have taken a cold back-up of our cognos 8 Content Store db and sucessfully upgraded it to 10.2.1 in a new development environment.

We can see all the 'Public Folder' packages/folders/reports when logged into the Cognos 10 Portal, however under the My Folders tab, all the content/reports are missing.

In the Cognos 8 environment, we used the local server as authentication. In our Cognos 10 environment we are using Active Directory as authentication.  The namespace ids/names are different amongst the 2 versions. Do the namespaces need to be the same in Cognos 10 to see the My Folders content from Cognos8?

I can see the inactive namespace from Cognos 8 in Cognos 10. Do I need to reconfigure the old namespace in  order to view the My Folders content? If so, how does Cognos 10 know which namespace to use at run time?

Need help! Any advice is much appreciated!

[MFGF]

Hi,

I'd expect exactly this. You are using a different authentication provider, so all the internal CAMIDs for your users will be different in AD than in NTLM. It doesn't matter that the namespace is called the same or that the user and group names are the same - the CAMIDs will be different so effectively you have a whole new population of users as far as Cognos 10 is concerned.

I think your best bet will be to set up your AD namespace in Cognos 8 alongside the NTLM namespace, log into both namespaces as a user(s) with System Admin privileges, then you can copy the My Folders content from each user in NTLM to each user in AD. You will also need to reconfigure your Cognos role/group memberships and any capabilities you have defined to bring in the new AD user population to these.

You can't perform this exercise in Cognos 10 because IBM deprecated NTLM and it is no longer an available authentication provider. You will need to do it in your Cognos 8 instance before bringing the content into Cognos 10.

Cheers!

MF.

[KS]

Thanks so much for your reply. Unfortunately, setting up AD in Cognos 8 is not an option for us since we are upgrading in a completely separate environment that cannot 'see' the Cognos 10 environment.

We have 83 Cognos8 users. I'm trying to figure out a way to copy the 'My Folder' contents for a specific user and then import it into Cognos 10. There might be a tool out there that can automatically do this for us. Any suggestions/ideas?

[MFGF]

If all else fails you can create a folder in Public Folders called C8MyFolders (or similar). Within that, create a folder for each user and copy each user's My Folders content into there. You can then deploy this folder to Cognos 10 and do the reverse to copy back all the content to the new users. It's ugly but free. :)

As I mentioned, you will also need to redefine all your security and capabilities since the old user CAMIDs will not match the new user ones.

If you're willing to spend a little, our hosts at BSP have a great tool for the job - Metamanager:

http://www.bspsoftware.com/Products/MetaManager/Secure

Drop a line to one of the site admins and I'm sure they will be happy to have a conversation with you about the suitability.

Cheers!

MF.

[sunosoft]

MF - I had tried once that ugly option :) ..its very ugly in fact :) but it was succesfull and users were happy :)

[KS]

Thank you very much for your help. I will try the ugly option and hopefully things will run smoothly.

I have another question however, does anyone know how to get a Cognos users list out of Cognos 8.2? I can do screen shots of the users but can seem to find a way to export/get output as a list of users....

[Sunil Viswam]

Hi,

What will be the impact if we are upgrading cognos version  from 10.1.1 to 10.2. The security is the same ( AD ) in both environments.
It will be greate if you can provide best practices for the above mentioned environments. And also how to handle private folders while upgrading. I know the ugly path shown in the previous post. If the security is the same wheather the private folders will upgrade smoothly ?.

Thanks in advance
Sunil

[MFGF]

Hi,

What will be the impact if we are upgrading cognos version  from 10.1.1 to 10.2. The security is the same ( AD ) in both environments.
It will be greate if you can provide best practices for the above mentioned environments. And also how to handle private folders while upgrading. I know the ugly path shown in the previous post. If the security is the same wheather the private folders will upgrade smoothly ?.

Thanks in advance
Sunil

Hi,

Sounds like a simple upgrade scenario to me. Back up your content store and your configuration folder (to be safe), uninstall Cognos 10.1.1, install Cognos 10.2 into the same folder structure, go into Cognos configuration, save and start. As part of the process the content store should be automatically upgraded (this can take some time depending how much content you have). Because you are using the same authentication source you don't have to worry about private content in the same way as KS did - his issue was caused because he switched to a different provider and therefore Cognos had no link bwtween the old and new user IDs.

Once you have got 10.2 up and running, clear your browser cache and make sure your users do the same. There are some big UI changes between 10.1.1 and 10.2 and having old 10.1.1 pages cached can cause issues.

Cheers!

MF.

[Sunil Viswam]

Thanks for your quick and timely response. stil I have one more thing to know. if I go the way you mentioned is it possible to upgrade the FM Packages, Transformer Cubes, report studio reports and analysis studio reports by the above methode ?. Or if we required to use the Export and Import utilities to bring these in the new environment ?

Thanks
Sunil

[MFGF]

All the metadata in the content store gets automatically upgraded, and this includes reports, analyses, published packages etc. When you go into a client tool such as FM and open a model, the model files get upgraded at that point, but there's no need to do this immediately unless your model requires changes.

MF.

[Sunil Viswam]

In Our case client set up the target system Cognos 10.2.1. We are planning an upgrade from Cognos 10.1.1 via Export it to the new environment and later import in the target environment. If you are choosing the entire content store option, Will it be possible to successfully upgrade FM Packages, Cubes, Analysis and Reports as well as Active Directory Security objects in the new environment.
Just clear the impact after the upgrade process. Thanks once again for your timely replys and valuable inputs.

Sunil

[MFGF]

Hi,

Anything held in your content store (packages, reports, security definitions etc) will be upgraded automatically as you import your deployment into 10.2.1. Your client metadata (FM models etc) will upgrade as you open each model, but there's no pressing need to do this immediately unless you need to make changes to it.

[Sunil Viswam]

Thanks a lot MF. I got a clear picture now. but still in the security side, my client has different security providers for multiple locations. Initialy I thought it's AD to AD. The requirement is to consolidate security after the upgrade. Any thoughts of using SDK for this ?.

Regards,
Sunil