PowerPlay 8 Reports Are Not Excecutable by Consumers?

[nj]

Hello

It's my first post, be gentle.

We have users creating reports in Cognos PowerPlay Client 8.4 and publishing these to an 8.4 Cognos Connection. These reports are for a sales force who are all Consumers (and so they should be - they will be undertaking no analysis by themselves). However, it appears that Consumers cannot execute these reports - only users with the PowerPlay Studio capability can.

One workaround we've found is to save the report output, the consumer can then render the last saved version without a problem, but this falls down when the report is prompted and is also something else to maintain. I have also tried to migrate the reports to Report Studio and resaving as a workaround but the migration fails every time.

This was standard in 7.3 Upfront - have I found a glitch or is the product really meant to be this way? Surely if IBM were concerned about unlicenced beneficiaries of PowerPlay, they wouldn't have allowed saved versions to be viewed either?

Thanks very much for any advice you may have to offer.

Regards

Nik

[DustPanMan]

Nik,

This is unfortunately intentional.  IBM considers a consumer someone who can view saved versions of any reports.  With PowerPlay Studio, you have to be a PowerPlay use in order to be able to make any changes. 

As far as migrating the reports to Report Studio, you have to convert them first to PPR's.  If you try to move a PPX, it will fail.  Did you try that?

Best,

Dustin

[nj]

Morning Dustin

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

That's a real shame and somewhat at odds with the ethos behind previous versions (i.e. Upfront 7). I wonder how many customers purchased Consumer licences expecting that to mean a user can 'consume' reports, no matter what the source...

Moan over, I looked into saving a report as a .ppr but PowerPlay client 8 doesn't seem to offer me this option in the Save As drop down: any ideas?

Thanks very much again

Nik

[DustPanMan]

Nik,

I'm not sure about that one.  What options do you have?  i wonder if PPR has just been replcaed with a different extension that still give you a reporter version of the report.

Best,

Dustin

[nj]

Dustin,

Thanks for still trying with this one! If I open a remote or local cube and save as either an explorer or reporter report, I only have:

PowerPlay Portable Report (*.ppx)
Delimited ASCII Text File (*.asc)
Microsoft Excel Workbook (*.xls)
PDF File (*.pdf)

as options...

Where did you pick up the nugget:

"As far as migrating the reports to Report Studio, you have to convert them first to PPR's.  If you try to move a PPX, it will fail."

out of interest?

Thanks again.

Nik

[DustPanMan]

Nik,

That information is from a migration guide that I had read at some point. 

In order to save as a PPR, you'll have to open the report in PowerPlay client.  You should then have the option to save as PPR.

Let me know if that helps.

Best regards,

Dustin

[MFGF]

Hi,

This was actually an error in Cognos 8.4.  According to the license documentation, a consumer should be able to "run and schedule reports created by a licensed IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Studio module", which obviously includes PowerPlay Studio.  There was a similar issue in 8.4 where consumers were unable to successfully use Metrics portlets too.

I think both these issues were fixed in the 8.4.1 release.

Regards,

MF.