How do users update the email distribution list themselves?

[asvirdi88]

Hello,

This is for anybody who may have done some Admin work in Cognos. In our company we schedule a lot of reports daily to about 100 plus users. I have scheduled jobs and reports linked to these jobs. The reports have prompts so I select the respective sales rep and email them the list. Also sometimes people in company who are not on the prompts need access to reports, I manually go and type in their email address.

What we really need is a way for the users to go update these lists themselves if something changes. Because we get a lot of tickets for these little email changes and gets overwhelming. Has anybody came across this? Or any suggestions on how to approach this one? Would really appreciate the help.

Thanks
AJ

[cognostechie]

The only thing the users would need to accomplish this is the access to that feature (admin). My experience tells me to do this when I have already made my resume, gone thru the interviews and accepted another company's offer.  You might want to think thru the strategic part of this and try to streamline your environment. How about putting the user groups in the distro list instead of individual email addresses ? That way, when a new employee joins the company and his access is granted to certain groups he/she would automatically start receiving the reports?

[Andrew Weiss]

AJ,

We built a really nice custom solution for one of our customers using the MetaManager Server API.  In a nutshell we added some additional screens directly in Cognos Connection so that user's could unsubscribe or subscribe to reports.  In addition we were able to support an Unsubscribe Me link in the footer of emailed reports.  This way the users could handle their subscriptions without intervention.  You need to have proper licensing in place, but that doesn't mean that the users have to have write access to the reports.  That's part of the custom solution, we were able to provide the users with very specific write access, e.g. they could unsubscribe themselves, but not other people.  I would love to show you the solution that we built if you're interested in this approach.

Thanks,
-Andy

[cognostechie]

That's a nice solution Andrew ! What about the security? If a user should not have access to a particular set of data ( ex: a salesrep should only see his/her region's sales and not other region's sales) , would that user be prevented to subscribe to the report which shows all region's sales? 

[cognostechie]

I recently started my company and I have a Cognos solution for Oracle EBS ERP system. These kind of features could complement my solution and it would be nice to know about  these in case our customers ask for something like this.

[Andrew Weiss]

The solution was designed with security in mind.  Basically the user has to have Read and Execute permission on the report to be allowed to subscribe to it.  They don't need (and we don't want them to have) Write access.  The Cognos Write access is too broad of a stroke.  So our custom solution provides custom screens where the user can only do what we want to allow them to do and then that work is done using elevated credentials. 

If you want to see it email me directly at Andrew.Weiss@Avnet.com and we can schedule some time together.

Good luck with your new company, is that http://pervisol.com? 

-Andy

[cognostechie]

Thanks for the good wishes Andy. Yes indeed, it's http://www.pervisol.com .

Currently, we have a BI solution for Oracle EBS customers and we deliver the solution to them with a guarantee. They can actually test it out before buying it so there is no risk of having a bad experience, saves the IT the grief from their business users and also millions of dollars ! We will continue to build solutions for other source systems and offer those with the same business model.