Distributing Cognos Generated emails to unlicenced users

[cognosjon]

Morning,

We have been using C8 for about 15 months now and have recently seen a large increase in the number of users wishing to have reports delivered to their mailbox at specific times of the day either by directly scheduling reports or through users generating events within Event Studio.
Many of the recipients of these mails have no Cognos Licence so are  not able to receive mail directly from the Cognos Server for obvious Licencing implications (cost).

We therefore advise users to set up mail rules to route mails around to those users, I was wondering if any of you have found any other way of approaching this as some users are beginning to collect a huge ::) number of mail rules?



Jonathan

[goose]

Interesting, if you email the person the report as an attachment surely that would not require a license. You could even setup a distribution list is cognos connection and then email that which would in turn email a group of people.

[cognosjon]

Hi Angus,

I spoke to our acccount manager about this issue and was advised that any user that receives a mail direct from the Cognos server requires a licence, a licence type of 'BI remote distribution' was mentioned, This licence allows receipt of personalised pdf,csv, excel output via email or other means. Could be an expensive venture at approx £100 per user.

I asked about the ability to create contacts and distribution lists within Cognos Connection and the same applies here, if they are named and recieve the output, they should have a licence.  ???

Not sure how that would work if I decided to mail a pdf out to customers as part of a delivery service report?? is that their cost or mine?

Jonathan

[goose]

I would first confirm with Cognos directly this does sound a bit suspect. I asked the guy that looks after our license here and they said persons recieving emails from cognos did not require a license.

[cognosjon]

I've contacted Cognos direct as suggested and after confusing the hell out of a few people, they eventually decided that they didn't know.
I have been asked to send my query in by email, which i did yesterday. Hopefully they will then be able to pass this onto someone who has the correct answer, I'll post the definitive answer once I receive it.

[cognosjon]

Right,

I've received two replies from Cognos with the answer both are posted below.

Reply one
If a report is customised or personalised  for a  recipient then that individual needs Remote Recipient License  if the report  is sent by e-mail or paper or other media and needs a BI  Recipient  license.

Reply two
Assuming that report recipients are not able to use our software to drill into it or to  change it in any way then they do not need to be licensed.

Hope that helps anyone else

Jonathan

[MDXpressor]

Not sure how that would work if I decided to mail a pdf out to customers as part of a delivery service report?? is that their cost or mine?

Jonathan

I think that is a question best answered by you.  Would your customers pay you for a subscription to reporting concerning their relationship with you? 

I beleive there are cases of this subscription services in place.  I am certain I read that Schneider National Lease in the US was offering reporting subscriptions to their customers to get near-time tracking for their loads in transit.  I'll try and dig up the press release.

[jguevin]

cognosjon,

Did you have a support case with cognos on this issue?  If so, would you mind sharing the case number so that I might reference it when corresponding with them?

Many thanks
Jeff

[cognosjon]

Hi Jeff,

Apologies but no i didn't raise a case, i did think about it but decided to ring and eventually converse by email. I spoke to a helpful lady called Michelle within the UKcontracts department who sought the information out for me. I have as you will no doubt guess have kept these mails for later use.

Jonathan

[vsudaya]

Hai,

We have scenario like this. We want to distribute Cognos generated PDF/EXcel outputs to 1000 users  outside of Cognos enviornment through shared folder access or placing them in Intranet Portal.

As per the conversaton listed above is it comes under Second point which dont require any licence. But recently when saw Cognos Website which they comeout with a new role called Cognos 8 BI Remote Recipient.

Cognos 8 BI Remote Recipient
This role is aimed at users, who will receive reports generated by Cognos 8 via a mechanism outside the Cognos Connection portal (such as e-mail). It provides the rights to:

Access reports via email, wireless devices, paper or other media, where such reports have been customized or otherwise personalized for such user’s use, and distributed directly to the user by a delivery mechanism outside of the Cognos Connection Portal

Can anybody have idea on this.

Thanks in advance
vsud