Cognos Public Folders and Content Organization

[nfldbunker]

hi

Just wondienrg if anyone has any best practises or thoughts on setting up content in a production environment and public folders. We have a dev and production environment. In dev all developed of data would have a sandbox and pre prodcution holding area for testing. IN productions users will only be able to run pre designed reports and preform such tasks as save to my folders, export to excel or pdf and not much else. We are currently setup in cognos 10.2.2 and will be migrating data and content over from a single cognos 8 platform which contains all dev and production content.

Any ideas or documenst which the community could share as a starting point would be great

regards

bunker

[nfldbunker]

HI

Anyone have any thoughts or best practises on public folder lockdown and content Distrubution to public folders for consumers .....any feedback appreciated

bunker

[bdbits]

Maybe because it is Friday afternoon and my brain has left for the day, but I am not entirely clear on the scenario. I think you want to put all three 'environments' on one box, using folder security to restrict what people can see and do in each. Is that right? If not, please ignore the rest of this post.

I know people sometimes do this, mainly out of licensing cost concerns. I totally get that, but I am not a big fan of doing it this way. The main reason is that normally, you do not want dev/test users going after production data. Framework Manager packages are typically going to point to one or more named data sources. Normally, you want to use different databases for prod, dev and maybe test, too. So now you need multiple connections for each named datasource, one for each environment. But then either the user has to choose the correct one, or you have to set up security at the connection level. Either way is subject to human error and to me rather messy to manage. Not to mention the hazards of bringing down a production server with development activities.

If it must all go on one box, I would rather use multiple Cognos installs. You can make the host servers default page contain links to get to the proper environment, as there will then be Cognos instances running on multiple port numbers which makes the URLs a bit more complicated. And whoever sets things up has to know how to do this. But you get a much cleaner separation of the environments, which can now be mostly identical from a user perspective, and you can export/import to promote content between environments.

That's my two cents worth, and I hope I am not off by myself out on a tangent.