Iterative/Burst reports to folders

[bren1519]

Hi all,
I'm very new to Cognos and am currently testing the software to determine if it would work as well as, or better than our current reporting software (Showcase) for our departmental financial reports.  I have successfully replicated our budget variance report in Cognos (after taking an online course!). 

What I am trying to determine is whether Cognos could replace our current software which includes a deployment piece for the departmental reporting.

Currently, I use an iterative report which runs the report for each department (a query has the departments which also exist as a column in the report).  The report is then deployed to the corresponding departmental folder in the repository to which the user has access via a url and security is set at the folder level.

I could not find anything on iterative reporting for Cognos, but a burst report would achieve the same output.  What I can't find in definitive terms is if I am able to send each report to a different folder in Cognos to which that department would only have access.  Or if there is another way to achieve that end result.  Other options might be ouput to a network folder (again for each department)?  Output to Sharepoint? Email would not be an option as there are 50 departments and multiple recipients for each department and that listing changes as staff changes.

I appreciate any input on this.  And perhaps the answer will be that Cognos is not the best choice for this task and that is ok as well if that is the case.  Right now, I am just looking at what is possible and if it is possible, perhaps a direction in which to look for more detailed instructions.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Brenda

[CognosPaul]

Does your auth provider have the different departments defined? If so, create a table that has the CAMID for each department, and the code, and burst on that. This ensures the output will be secured for each department.

[bren1519]

Ahhh..ok.   I will have to check on how it is set up but that sounds like it will work. Thanks a lot!

[CognosPaul]

Other options can include creating a report view for each department and setting up a schedule for each one. You could also embed security into the framework model so the person logging in is automatically filtered for their department. What you suggested could work. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but you can run a script every time a report is saved to the file system.

If your company has a portal set up, you could call the individual bursted reports with the burstkey. You could set up a proxy to automatically set the burstkey and prevent url tampering.

I had one client that had software on their exchange server that would automatically save all attachments sent to specific email addresses to their own folders. I have absolutely NO idea how that was accomplished though as it was a networks guy that set it up.

In general I find the question isn't, "Can Cognos do this?" It's more "Can I implement this in Cognos within a reasonable timeframe and budget". If the answer is "No" to the latter, there's usually a workaround.

[bren1519]

So there are indeed options to accomplish what I want to do and that was the question I couldn't really find a cold hard answer to in my googling.  I think that further education for me as well as working with the admin guys is in the books and I can report back that it is a viable solution to our current software if we choose to make the switch.   I expect you'll see more questions from me in this forum!  Thanks a lot for the responses and if anyone else has anything further to add, that is much appreciated. 

[New_Guy]

Hi,
We acheived similar type of requirement by using excel macros and bursting. First we saved all the reports with the departments names suffixed to the reportname in a drive that only admins have access and then we will send an email with event studio which will run an excel macro that saves the reports to different department folders based on the department name.
Good luck
New guy