Report from Cognos on number of users and their detail

[M]

 Hi all,

if there is a way to report from Cognos on the number of users and their associated profiles? their roles etc . Ideally we need to set this up to send an e-mail from cognos to recipients.

how can we do this..

thanks in advance guys

[COGNOiSe administrator]

I think you could do it easily with the Audit package. You will be able to pull out all active users, meaning those who ran or read a report.

[larsonr]

I know with the SDK you can query the content to store to obtain the roles that a user belongs to.  I use this when modifying user security to make sure I delete all their roles they shouldn't belong to.

[M]

thanks for you reply.

i want report like user name, email id, role .i.e report authour or analysis studio authour or system administrator ...i know we could do it in SDK .but i dont know how to make it ..could you help me

thanks in advance

[larsonr]

In terms of reporting, Cognoise Administrator is right in that the audit package would be easiest in terms of showing every active user that has ever logged in.  As far as their profiles I do not know if the audit package supports that. 

Even then, I do not know of any construct pre-built within Cognos that would give you exactly what you are asking for with email, roles, etc. for every user in one pull.

To be able to build a Cognos report you need to establish some data source that is going to have all the pieces of information you are searching for.

I think the best place to start is understanding your user community.  Is it everyone in a certain Authentication Provider (example, Active Directory).  It may be easier to contact that Administrator to give you everything from the AP as far as all user attributes except for Cognos Groups/Roles.  Essentially this is where Cognos is picking up all these attributes such as email, phone, last name, etc...

As far as the SDK approach I was speaking of, it is just querying attributes in the content store and spitting out a text file as well as a screen message for the one user I'm interested in.  I am confident it could be modified to find the attributes you are searching for, but may not be beneficial for what you are searching for.

If you are really needing this information in a nice user/friendly Cognos report, my recommendation would be some ETL process that writes all the attributes from your LDAP to a table as well as merge that data with output from an SDK script.

Example-- we have a process that spits out everything I need from Active Directory every night to a csv.  This is loaded in a table and I use this to automate user creation every night to assign users to the Cognos Roles they should belong to by default.  The same table is then used to help create an audit report of AD as compared to HRMS.  So there is benefit of the table other than just for this one report, in case you need some business cases for having such a construct in your enterprise.

Good luck and keep us posted.

[larsonr]

I just noticed in the your initial response you wanted to send emails.  Is this an automated feature you are looking for? 

If you can automate your role membership creation, during the update to the role, your process could email the user that their account has been created using the SDK.  I have a process that notifies new store users at night that they have an account created in my Cognos system as well as a few others. I automate this since there are over 1600 accounts to manage. Using java, I query certain tables from the ETL process and the content store, and then utilize the activation.jar and mail.jar libraries to send off the message via SMTP.

If it is a case by case basis (no automation), your time may be better spent in manually sending the emails yourself as it may become cumbersome for all the cases you are looking for.

Also,as an FYI,the users are capable of seeing which roles they belong to by going to their my preferences tab.