Cognos 8 Upgrade

[wd6ae]

Has anyone upgraded from Series 7 to Cognos 8?  How did you find the upgrade? 

Is there anything you need to be aware of before upgrading? 

Did you completely migrate to Cognos 8 or did you upgrade Series 7 Powerplay and Upfront content into Cognos 8?

Any comments would be appreciated.  :)

[Darek]

Upgrade? I'd rather not ... Not from 7 to 8. Bugs, missing functionality, so-so migration tools.

[MISGeoff]

I'm surprised at your comments.

Don't the benefits of upgrading to cognos 8 outweigh the usual 'new software' trait of bugs and migration issues..?

We are moving to a new hardware infrastructure and were considering moving to Cognos 8 at the same time. We're goint to the conference on Thursday to try and talk to some people about migration issues.

I'd be grateful for a bit more detail on the issues as you see them - am now seriously considering holding off on the migration..!

Thanks

Geoff

[JGirl]

The biggest drawcard of Cognos8 has to be the dimensional modelling, and the biggest downside of the upgrade is that in order to not break reports, the framework model needs to be upgraded to exist as a relational model (unless you want to choose dimensional and rewrite all your reports which are broken), and so no benefit is obtained from upgrading apart from a shiny new portal.

There are also a number of bugs with drill throughs from reports and cubes to reports with optional prompts which turn optional prompts into mandatory prompts (very annoying)


The functionality is considerably different (and new) from CRN, and so its important to consider a move to cognos 8 more as a 'migration' rather than an 'upgrade'....

J

[MISGeoff]

Thanks very much Jgirl - I think I'm tempted enough to go for the migration now - might as well get all the pain over with now as wait and do it later anyway...!

Cheers

Geoff

[wd6ae]

Geoff, did you manage to talk to anyone about migration issues?

Most of our users use Powerplay and with the great differences in Analysis Studio, I think we will need to treat it as a migration rather than an upgrade.

Thanks
Dawn

[mikegreen]

Has anyone upgraded from Series 7 to Cognos 8?  How did you find the upgrade? 

Is there anything you need to be aware of before upgrading? 

Did you completely migrate to Cognos 8 or did you upgrade Series 7 Powerplay and Upfront content into Cognos 8?

Any comments would be appreciated.  :)

If you have cubes, I would wait until the next release includes the Framework Manager version of transformer.  The current architecture and cube design/build/publish process is pretty poor.  The actual functionality once the cubes are hosted is nice; but, unless you have a need for a specific feature (which there are some really cool ones) I would not upgrade at this point.

The CRN reporting is enhanced, but, like PPES, unless you have a specific need for a feature it isnt a huge change for the end user.  More charts, more options, etc..

Cheers,

Mike

[Blue]

From what I have seen so far ...

Pros:
Data Manager (DecisionStream) interface improved
Analysis Studio (PP Web) interface has more features like client tool.  The search feature is quite powerfull.
Report Studio simpler and has some features like IWR/Impromptu
Query Studio more flexible and better interface
Metric Studio interface and performance improved
Event Studio easier to use than Noticecast

Cons:
Analysis studio has lost some features of PP Web.  Drill-throughs don't work as well. E.g. we have a time dimension that has both a standard hierarchy (year<quarter<month) and relative time categories.  The drill through works on the former but not on the latter.  Some features were easier to use under PP Web.
The administrator cannot disable/enable individual cubes: the service has to be stopped to replace a cube!
The administrator cannot see status and queues for reports like in IWR.
No deliverable from the previous tools are directly usable in Cognos 8 BI - all have to be converted/upgraded.