Your experiences with Cognos 11 compared to Cognos 8/10

[Joern]

Hello,

this thread is not a question, it should be a discussion (I hope that such things are correct here).

We are working for many years now with Cognos, first with Cognos 8 and now with Cognos 10.2. We have about 300 Users here in our company and
most of them work with given reports that have a prompt page with more or less options. The users simply execute those reports.
And we have although many jobs, that are running on a regular schedule, executing reports and mail them to users.

For about half a year we are now testing Cognos 11 and I must said, that we are very frustrated about that version.
The whole system is much slower (we had a lot a discussion with the IBM support about this, but it is really so) and most of the reports
are slower.
But the main point is the new GUI. We have shown it to many users, but nearly all of them find it very much worse than Cognos 10.
The whole look at feel,the navigation and so on.
So we have now decided, together with our management, to not use Cognos 11. We will stay at Cognos 10.2, even if the support ends in April this year.


I like to get to know your opinion about Cognos 11. Are we the only ones that have these bad impression about Cognos 11?
What do you really like about Cognos 11, specially what like your "normal" Users?


Thanks for sharing your experiences.


Regards Jörn

[TomCognos]

I would have to say, initially it seemed like a step back from 10 to 11.

Reduced functionality i.e. no default on report run options so if you saved an output that is what you would see when running a report and you would need to delete it to run the report again. Inability in 11.0.3 to set the security properties on the root folder of the portal.
Report Studio layout seemed counter-intuitive and very congested, portal navigation was ok and from 11.0.7 onwards the interface seemed snappier.
No drill through ability on the dashboards.
Difficulty in installs in the 11.0.3 through to 11.0.6 versions configuring SSO with IIS.

Though having said that, the regular drops of new versions have been welcome, features have been making their way back. Dashboards in 11 would have to be the closest I have seen to an actual self service tool. Our non technical business users, managers, BA's are killing it here with dashboards with as little as a few minutes of tutelage (TM1 cube data sources).

Also now that we have gone through the teething problems of SSO, new MS SQL Server drivers, IIS etc, the upgrades 11.0.8, 11.0.9 installations have been smooth as.

Finally, our business users have randomly picked up Report Studio and started using this self taught. I kid you not. Very basic usage or crosstabs off TM1 cubes as a replacement for Executive Viewer. But just wow. Never seen that before so the new portal and RS interface is not impossible to use.

I think over all, waiting until at least 11.0.7 would have been a wise move. A load more issues sorted and functionality available. 11.0.9 seems to be a really good starting point with Auditing fixed to now accommodate the new dashboards usage. Dashboard issues and functionality now fixed expanded.

[Lynn]

Our users have been very receptive to the switch from 10 to 11 and I agree with GrumbleNuts about considering later releases. We did not migrate until 11.0.5 (when support for dashboards using packages was introduced) but we had some annoying issues that 11.0.7 addressed.

The GUI is very different at first but after a while it feels painful going back to 10 and losing the context sensitive menus.

The new mapbox mapping functionality is very popular as are the data discovery dashboards. We still advocate dashboard-style reports using report authoring instead of the new dashboard tool in most cases since the need for drill through and other more complex/pixel-perfect requirements are not always possible with the new dashboard tool. It is poorly named in my opinion - personal data discovery is perhaps a better representation of what the new "dashboard" tool is best used for.

When we introduce report authoring to users that have no experience on 10 we find they pick it up more readily compared with the old 10 report studio interface.

I suppose you can hang out on 10 for a while, but at some point there will likely be issues or need for new functionality that will require an upgrade so it feels a bit like delaying the inevitable.

[Reinhard]

Everyone likes the new interface since it is well organized. However, we only recommended Cognos from 11.0.5 on as "now its possible to use" and we were relieved about the many necessary fixes in 7 and 8. So now we start with upgrades.

Users do not like the rather few properties of visualisations in comparison to former charts.

Customization is better and supposed to get more features soon.

[Joern]

Thanks very much for the information so far, more messages are very welcome.

By the way, we have started with Version 11.0.6 and have now installed 11.0.9.

Can anyone say something about the basic performance of Cognos11? For example time to login and basic navigation. All these steps take 2-3 seconds every click on our system and the server we use for Cognos 11 is much bigger than we have in production for Cognos 10.
Login takes up to 10 seconds.

The IBM Support sees no problem and told us that the system runs "normal".

[CognosPaul]

The login time seems excessive. I'm on C11 at one client and can log in instantaneously.

I absolutely loathe the new report studio. I despise the context menu. It usually covers up whatever I want to click on next (it's like magic, how does it KNOW!?), and it doesn't have all of the options that were in the menu bar from C10. It's infuriating that it doesn't remember setting changes I make to it
- each time I work in an OLAP environment and try to pull a member into a data item, it somehow reverts to aliasing members. And turning off extended data items is a bitch. Most of all, I hate that almost anything I do now takes more steps than in C10.

On the flip side, the custom controls are a major advance. It's a little more user friendly to end users. The fact that I can use jQuery makes a world of difference to the reports. I hope that my RFE gets implemented so I can release control packages.

There are better logging tools to help track down problems in the system. It can be enabled without restarting Cognos! You can see the run time of individual report objects!

On whole there are a lot of improvements, but the terrible changes to RS really ruin the entire experience for me.

[dougp]

If you are considering upgrading from v10 to v11, wait at long as possible.

I upgraded from 10.2.1 to 11.0.4 on January 13, 2017.  It was the worst mistake I've made in the 10 years I've worked for IT.

I agree with Paul about the context-sensitive toolbar.  It's always in the way.

More importantly, the product is still half baked.  I'm now using 11.0.7, which was released 20 months (?) after IBM claimed v11 was ready for production use (12/26/2015).  Most of the features have become more cartoonish (lots more white space, big fonts, etc.), which is I guess what users want.  But the same features are buggy or just missing capabilities.  Take the Filter Condition dialog, for example.  If you want to filter on a string attribute, you can select one or more specific values.  What happened to starts with, ends with, contains, and matches SQL pattern?  This change was made in 11.0.5 or 11.0.6.  Until a week ago, IBM's company line was, "It's working as designed."

They have also introduced a new license tracking tool.  It's baked right into the portal under Manage.  You'll need to have your server folks firewall off your Cognos server so you can only get to it from the workstation where your admin is performing the installation and configuration tasks.  Don't turn off that firewall until you are completely done configuring.  If you don't...  Remember that Everyone is a member of the System Administrators group?  This is required so that you have a way into the system to perform configuration tasks, like setting permissions and importing content via a deployment.  But as soon as you start the service, those thousands of users expecting Cognos to be up 24x7x365 will begin ticking up the Analytics Administrator counter.  How many per-user Analytics Administrator licenses do you really want to pay for?

[Redrichmond]

The sleeping giant awakes.. Ha.. 11.0.9 - This 11 is the worse version since Reportnet... Anyone remember that gem. What IBM have done to Cognos is killed it, totally. We keep saying.. Why would you put that there?? 2 clicks instead of one.  I assuming that this whole version was built by people who have never used Cognos or new to it, some of the key drivers just don't make sense. Alas 2 of my previous clients have dumped it quoting the reasons , too little too late.

The new Dashboard is not fit for purpose. Build a simple cube , I mean really simple. 10 dimensions 4 deep, 10 measures , 1000 records . The cube works fine in Analysis studio fine , works in Workspace fine.. Dashboard just dies and cant load the data. This is now a confirmed bug.. 

I imagine eventually all the issues will be ironed out but I would say please please please keep logging the bugs so they are addressed. (I don't bother with the Go sales , I have a better POC (government expenses freely available data online)

The major problem with this agile development approach of cognos 11 (banks and larger institutions cant just reinstall the software, its classed as an upgrade) is the Fix packs or what seems the lack of.  I have never seen in my life the amount of new versions (like one every month)

On 10 to fix pack was very simple (on 11 its a repackaged full install - still easy but not so if you have a change board to convince ). This is a nightmare for Change control and this would be classed like a full upgrade project which costs $$$$$$ for every new version. Fix Packs these were different and you could navigate the Change control differently, like the windows server patches they do at weekends.

22 Quarters of revenue losses and IBM shares tanking again "After providing a disappointing earnings outlook last week, "Big Blue" now makes up about 0.6 percent of the S&P 500 and has sunk to 35th in the index, according to FactSet. Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said it's the lowest IBM has been in his four decades following the market at S&P"

I ,m not going to grumble too much as Cognos puts food on my table and all these issues/workarounds keeps me in work so I say the above with a pinch of salt.

I find it a challenge to try and break it and find bugs. I found 3 so far but we have more.   We have some validation Webpage error around javascript (no java in the reports), 2 Dashboards ones and an image IIS browser within report studio that was supposed to be fixed in 0.9 but isn't.. 

Once we are into UAT that's it.. Any new versions will be deemed like a new Upgrade, so wont happen.  So if you got an issue, get onto your account manager or please log with IBM

Cognos Analytics could be a good tool... But next time give steve wonder a miss as the beta tester and give it to Cognos users/partners  who have been around for more than 6 months.

[dougp]

Please provide the URL for the

government expenses freely available data online

data.  That sounds useful.

[Redrichmond]

I was using data for Big data/hadoop and tableau stuff, scraping other websites with flume and storing in haddoop as I needed to turn something around in a day for POCs not a huge amount of data but meaninfull.

I did build a sample cube in c11 (v9) and tried using it on the dashboard tool but there's too many bugs in it as present just dies and cant drill down . Works okay for workspace and analysis studio/powerpray but in the  dashboard tool is not useable, such a shame. I am hoping its fixed in v10

(I did stumble across a part fix pack site which may help big companies get around the pain of a full new version and the whole change control nightmare that goes with it (e.g To go from v9 -v10 we would class it as a full upgrade project so it wouldn't happen)

https://www-945.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/swg/selectFixes?parent=Cognos&product=ibm/Information+Management/Cognos+Analytics&release=11.0.9&platform=All&function=all


Your free dataset from the UK government is here.

https://data.gov.uk/


Happy playing with the datasets :)