New Deployment - 8.3 or 8.4?

[jocelyn_hsu]

We are just starting the project for a brand new deployment of Cognos Planning with a scheduled go live in May 2010.  We bought the product via a reseller/partner, Deltek, because we are implementing their accounting software (Costpoint) and currently get our support through them as well.  Deltek does not support 8.4 yet so they want me to deploy on 8.3.  Any thoughts on deploying on 8.4 vs. going with 8.3 with a plan to upgrade to 8.4?  The later just sounds painful to me and I would really like to avoid Active X and give the users the slick new interface.  But if it's still too new and painful to implement on 8.4 because of bugs etc. then I need to consider that. 

[mrobby]

I would go 8.4.  Plenty of people using it so far and I haven't heard of any dealbreakers with it.  Much of 8.4 is bug fixing for 8.3 to my knowledge as well.

[JaromirSeps]

I would go for 8.4 but with the old contributor client. From what I've seen and tested, some more complex models will not work, or you will have to do workarounds. The new client is far from ready.

Just as an example:
1) no data items in rollout dlists normally grayed out, will be shown as white in the new client - so this will confuse users a lot, because they select a "seems-to-be-writable" item and they will get a blank screen with a message "there are no data to display"
2) in cubes with weighting on multiple dimensions & formatting based on d-lists , you could get a very different results - some items could disappear, some could show different result than in the old client

If you plan to build simple models, than the client is a way to go and there is always the option to turn on the old client.

Regards
Jaromir