Advice Needed: Managing your reports

[antexity]

I would love to get advice from many of you on the following:

We have two Cognos Environments:

• Cognos DV - BA's have access - No Package Security
• Cognos Production - BA's + Other report studio users (business) + Consumers have access - Package security

Background:

After 10 years of mess, I finally had the chance to get the business to determine which reports to keep and discard.  Now that we are at this stage, I want to implement a bullet proof solution to prevent this from happening again. 


I would love some advice from you guys on what would be the best solution to prevent from this happening again.  This is what I am thinking:

• No reports under the blue report packages
• I have setup all the Reporting Folders by Business Unit then Business Process. I.E. Finance (Business Unit) and Manage GL, Manage AR, Manage Taxes as Business Processes
• Under each business process I have the following folders: Scheduled, Adhoc and then the Keep reports
• Under Scheduled, it will be secured to two of us, to control the schedules
• Under Adhoc, Folders of users that belong to that business process.  This is where they can develop reports, have it as messy as they like. It will be unmanaged
• Under the business process, the list of keep reports, no users can save in there.  If they want to promote a report to scheduling or under the root of business process, I will pull it from there Adhoc folder.  In other words, Scheduled and the root of Business process will be managed by us and read only and Adhoc is free reign
• Since our Cognos DV environment has no security, we don't want to allow the business to create reports

Setting it up this way, do you foresee any issues?

For schedules, There will be jobs, views and reports.   Is it good practice to have ALL schedules to be Job and Views only, no standalone reports that are scheduled?

Thank you in advance!
Mark

[AnalyticsWithJay]

I think the folder setup you laid out is fairly similar to most businesses I've seen. The perfect setup is whatever is best for your users and organization, but it looks like you're on the right track. I don't foresee any issues with what you've described.

I would only use Jobs and Views for schedules where it makes sense, or if there's some business requirement. I wouldn't recommend placing everything in jobs and views if it's not necessary.

[antexity]

Thanks so much for your reply.  Thanks for the scheduling advice.

Any others that have setup advice and seemed to work with their end users?  Thanks.

[ganguskhan]

Our Cognos environment is set up by our vendor.

However, it looks like a good approach. When my unit finally takes over, I'd like to adopt your method.