Contributor Web Client issues in Cognos 10.1

[jonathan.webb@raytheon.co]

Hi everyone

We've recently upgraded to Cognos 10.1 (EP and BI). We're having some issues surrounding Cognos Contributor Web client. We previously used Cognos 8.4. I'm hoping someone can shed some light and potentially help other people upgrading to C10.

1) The Contributor Web install doesn't seem to follow as per instructions when downloading the software from the server. When users first enter an elist item in Contributor, we expect the screen to change to an install type screen with instructions to follow. What actually happens is a pop up flashes for half a second, then there appears to be no activity for around 3 minutes, then the pop up comes back, installs the rich client, and Contributor is updated. If a user clicks on any other elist item in that time, the install is corrupted for that user and cannot be re-run - Cognos 8.4 contributor is also corrupted by this. The only way we've found around this is to create a new profile for that user, and then manually install the Client from the original installation software. They cannot reinstall Contributor from the web client again - I guess there's some registry setting stopping this.

Has anyone else seen this? It's obviously not ideal to have a combination of automatically and manually installed Contributor versions because when it comes to upgrade time, we'll have to update manual installs ourselves rather than relying on the download.

2) On at least one PC, we've never had an automated download run and have manually installed the Client software onto the D:\Program Files\ibm\cognos\c10... (usual location). However when running Contributor, we get an error message that Windows cannot find a cogrcp file under C:\documents and settings\user\...  this looks to me like it's expecting an automatic install and therefore is not looking for the manually installed software. Any ideas how to override this?

3) We don't seem to have an uninstall type path for anyone with an automatic install. I expect to see a Cognos Rich Client in the add/remove programs but can't see any Cognos stuff at all. Any ideas how to force an uninstall?

Thanks in advance as ever.

Jon

[ericlfg]

Hi Jon,

1. With an upgrade from 8.4 to 10.1 and specifically regarding the rich client, if the intention is to use both 8.4 and 10.1 concurrently on an end user machine, you must uninstall the 8.4 components first.  Once the 8.4 stuff is off, you then run your preferred method of installation for 10.1 and then re-do the install of the 8.4 contributor piece (not the framework).  The reason for this is that the 10.1 cognosrcp (framework) is backwards compatible with the 8.4 contributor piece.  You cannot run the 10.1 contributor piece on the 8.4 framework, or, there could be a number of problems.

As for the method of installation, typically if there are a large number of clients to roll out, a package product or SMS product is usually leveraged to build an install that the end user's would utilize.  The delay I believe you're seeing of 3 minutes may be a latency being encountered interacting with the cognos servers to pull down the software.

2. I believe you are experiencing this due to the automatic download / update settings configured in the CAC under System Settings > Web-Client Configuration.  If you disable the automatic update then it will likely resolve the errors.  It should, however, not be generating errors if the version is the same.

3. Normally, you should have 2 items presented in add/remove programs.  If it's not present then I believe there is something environmental preventing the update to this section.  Since we leverage .MSI files to perform our installs with end users that have pulled the pieces down through the web, you can use the MSIEXEC commands to pull off the software.
EG: msiexec /uninstall "C:\contributor.msi"
*note: in this example you must have both the cognosrcp.msi and the contributor.msi files present in the C:\ drive root in order to run the uninstall command.  Alternatively you can right click on the MSI file once it's on the end user system and select "Uninstall"

Hope this helps..