How should I set up my Planning Content Store?

[cognos_guy]

Good morning,

The situation:
I have a development (dev) planning environment integrated with a dev BI environement.  Planning resides on one server and BI resides on another.  I have successfully built and deployed one simple Contributor app in Cognos Connection.  Planning is currently set up with its own content store and with a planning store.  BI has a seperate content store.

What I want to do:
I want to take this Planning development enviornment (server and application) and turn it into our production Planning component.

Questions I have:
- Will renaming the physical server have any irreparable damage?  Shouldn't I just be able to reflect the server name change in the UNC pathcs in Cognos Configuration?
- Is it a best practice to share a content store between Planning and BI?  If so how can I merge the two?  or for that matter do I need to merge them?
- I was able to point my Planning Cognos config to the dev Bi content store, restart both the BI and Planning services, and GTP my simple contributor app and everything seemingly worked fine.  I am not even sure what to ask here just need some insight on what is contained in the planning content store.  Is it just security info and macros? 

Any insight\advice would be greatly appreciated.

[ovo]

You can have a separate Planning Store, or it can be merged with your existing BI content store.  Simplest way is to merge them.

You can identify the Planning table in the content store because the table names will be prefixed "P_".  The contain the PAD (Planning Administration Domain) which describes the content of the planning environment and the relationships between those objects and who can access them as well as Admin Link and Macro definitions and run histories.

Use the deployments feature to move planning content around between dev and prod environments.  Note that the BI content store Import and Export feature does not move the planning content, you need to use planning deployments for that.

[SomeClown]

Renaming server: might break the crypto keys - don't have specifics to know for sure, but I think renaming the server would break the keys stored by the CM.  To fix, you'd need to delete folders csk, encryptkeypair, signedkeypair, then re-enter id/passwords in Cognos Configuration.  Otherwise, just point to the new boxname

Best to merge the BI/Planning - allows for Cognos groups to be shared, and integration (using packages, etc).  You can and should create a separate Planning store to isolate the planning tables to its own database (this is not the Content Store but an option under the Planning section).

Security is still based on CAMIDs stored in the main (BI) content store.

[cognos_guy]

Thanks to you both for the suggestion/recommendations.  I have successfully moved to a shared content store with a separate planning store.  I have not yet renamed my Planning server and am weighing the pros/cons of doing so.  Cognos support made the following recommendation...

1. Use the deployment wizard to export out all the app's, admin links, macros to ensure you have a backup of Planning along with backup of your libraries.

2. Use the deployment in cognos connection to deploy export your content manager.

3. Rename your Server

4. Edit all the cognos configurations to point to the new name as well any other configurations on the server.

5. Don't forget to modify the filesys.ini to reflect the new server name as well and even the libraries if they are using a server name as well.

Thanks