Cognos 8 - Migrating Reports/Packages from One Environment to Another

[cognos8_1]

I have been trying to find out the best possible ways to migrate the Cognos 8 reports/packages from one enviornment to another. For example, from Development to QA, QA to Production.
Simplest way is to change the Data source details in FM in case the Dev and QA has the same schema. Could you please explain more on the "Deployment Export/ Deployment Import" in Cognos Connection.

Can we have only one LDAP for Dev, QA etc? As the IDs are going to be the same. Let me know.

Anybody has any best practises (for Migration / Deployment Strategies) to be followed in this regard would be great.

Thanks in advance!

[goose]

We have the same data source names in all our environments (DEV, QA, PROD), they just point to different servers. You can have a datasource called "sales" in DEV that points to the development sales data warehouse and one in QA that points to the PROD (or QA if you have) sales data warehouse. Their schema's should be the same for tables used for report development, if they are not thats a problem.  Then when you export/import your reports from one environment to another there are no changes required to FM models or reports that use sql.

The most important things you want to setup up first are:

1. A cvs repository where you can keep all your source for your models and maybe even reports

2. Backup jobs to archive your content stores databases

Being able to recovery to a point in time is critical. Make sure to test your drp plan after is inception as things might look like they are working, but when its time to restore a backup it all goes wrong.

After that you can create import/export jobs to move reports/packages from DEV->QA->PROD. You can create the import/export jobs via CC from Tools -> Content Administration. The process is simple and well documented in the cognos docs. When you run an export cognos creates a zip archive containing all the reports/packages you configured for moving in <cognos-install-dir<\deployment. Now you can copy the zip archive to another environments deployment folder and import it.

Alas this is a very laborious process if you have a large system so I would recommend automating this process via the sdk or something, but basically that is a good way to do it I think it has been working for us. You should also be fine with one LDAP server for all your environments.

[cognos8_1]

Hi Angus Miller ,
Thanks for the reply.
How do you acheive this thru SDK? Could you please throw some light on that?

Thanks.

[goose]

Check out this working sample from Cognos, it can import/export package(s)

http://support.cognos.com/knowledgebase/googlesearch?load_kb_document=1&dr=kb1&uniqueid=117096