Cognos 8 / Configuration Management / Best Practices

[DTV12345]

Greetings,

In advance, I apologize in case I am posting to the wrong forum. I need insight on best practise(s), a methodology to enable a multi-developers environment for F/M projects, package publishing and report development.

We installed Cognos 8.1 (MR2) a year ago and started designing several project (against our datamart) and published numerous packages. Now, we have 3 more developers in our team, more users and two more datamarts have been created for us.

In F/M, we created several projects against our datamart (call it CONUS) that we called CONUS_shipping, CONUS_billing, CONUS_suppliers etc...Each of these F/M projects have a published package (that contains cubes and reports).

Since our Cognos environment is growing, we are looking to come up with a hierarchy in publishing our packages to our Cognos connection server, for instance,

Code Select Expand

+CONUS (package that is based upon our CONUS datasource/datamart/Framework Manage project)
|
--------> shipping (sub-package?)
| |
| --------> reports/cubes...etc...
|
|
--------> billing (sub-package?)
| |
| --------> reports/cubes...etc...
|
|
--------> suppliers (you get the picture...)


+CANADA (package that is based upon our new CANADA datasource/datamart/Framework Manager project)
|
--------> shipping (sub-package?)
| |
| --------> reports/cubes...etc...
|
|
--------> billing (sub-package?)
| |
| --------> reports/cubes...etc...
|
|
--------> etc...


+SOUTHAMERICA (package that is based upon our new SOUTHAMERICA datasource/datamart/Framework Manager project)
|
--------> shipping (sub-package?)
| |
| --------> reports/cubes...etc...
|
--------> etc...

Is this possible? Is there a way to make report developer A publish report G18 to the `billing`sub-package of the +SOUTHAMERICA package...I can't figure out how....

I know that it is possible to nest packages in F/M: package A->B->C into package Z. Yet, nesting will not be reflected (as shown above) when the package is published to Cognos Connection.

I also know that developer A can create `+CANADA` package that contains folders for shipping, suppliers etc.  The challenge is that, to avoid overwriting A's work, developer B would have to create an identical package/folder structure to publish report V23 to the suppliers folder of the  `+CANADA` package.

Cognos Tech Support confirmed that publishing to a folder is currently not supported.


I have a white paper from Cognos on how to enable a multi-developer environment for modelers in Framework Manager...problem is that, it seems that it cannot be applied to Report Studio.


My apologies for this long post. I hope this all makes sense. :-[


Thanks in advance for helping,

Al.

[goose]

We have all our reports in hierarchical folder structures and this is working well for us. There is no reason that a report must exist in a package in CC, our reports live completely separate from packages. Your best bet is to have a development environment setup where report developers can create reports and publish packages and make sure things are all correct. You can then import signed off reports/packages to production, really report developers shouldn't even have write access to your production systems at all.

This is more of an admin issue I would say than a technical challenge.