Cognos 8.4 New Featuress

What's New in IBM Cognos 8?

IBM Cognos 8.4 consists of two major packages. One package includes IBM Cognos 8 BI PowerPlay and the other package includes all IBM Cognos 8 BI components except IBM Cognos PowerPlay. This new features guide is for the latter package.

The new features in IBM Cognos 8.4 BI provide benefits to business managers and analysts, business modelers, report authors, and system administrators. All studios include a new feature for suppressing rows and columns that contain zero values, missing values, or overflow values. A new lineage feature in Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio, and the report viewer, allows you to view life cycle information on each piece of data.

Business Managers and Analysts

In Query Studio, the addition of more user preferences and the enhancement of filtering and sorting options make it quicker for Business Analysts to set up and run reports. Also, because modelers can set default filters in a Framework Manager model, it is easier for users to set up and run reports.

Analysis Studio includes a new feature that makes it easier to apply suppression across multiple items. From within Analysis Studio, you can also display the date on which a cube was last updated.

Business Modelers

Business modelers using Transformer can now use fact data from SAP BW OLAP data sources. This means they can create Transformer models based on existing dimensional models. Transformer also supports Excel spreadsheets as data sources.

Report Authors

Report authors now have more drill-through capabilities, including the ability to pass filters from the source report to the target report. They can also conditionally style crosstab cells based on values in other cells.

More types of charts and more graphics are included with Report Studio for use in reports and dashboards.

Report Consumers

You can add additional information to a report by using comments. This information can include questions or explanations. Comments may include the original commentator's ID and the time the comments were added.

More User Preferences in Query Studio

You can now save more user preferences in Query Studio. New preferences include the following:

You can choose a data retrieval mode that allows you to run a report with all data, preview it with limited data, or preview it with no data

You can specify a default template for reports

You can select the type of filter dialog to use by default. Types include picklist, type-in, or select with search.

In addition, the sorting of data by member is enhanced. A member can appear sorted in the metadata tree and on the report without slowing performance. Also, members of a level are sorted in the context of their ancestor levels. This means that the hierarchical relationship of a level is considered when member sorting is applied.

New Features for Report Authors

Dashboards

A new dashboarding product lets you create and consume interactive dashboards.

You can also combine dashboards with third-party information sources, such as RSS feeds, to create enhanced performance management dashboards.

It is now easier to create personalized reports with a standardized appearance.

Crosstab Measures in Report Studio can be Formatted Based on a Another Crosstab Measure

You can now apply conditional styles to crosstab cells based on an adjacent value in the crosstab. For example, you can conditionally color the bubbles in a bubble chart based on any combination of the measures, and you can conditionally color an entire row of the crosstab based on any measure in the columns.

Drill Up and Down can be Synchronized for Multiple Queries in Report Studio Reports

You can now link groups of data items from different queries in a report so that when you drill up or down on one query, data items in the other query also drill up or down.

The dataItem Element in Report Studio Supports Calculated Members and Measures

The dataItem element is now extended to support calculated members and measures. This allows sorting by calculated members.

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