Running Reports On Your Research in Motion BlackBerry

Running Reports On Your Research in Motion BlackBerry

You can have reports appear on your mobile device under Recently run reports by doing any of the following:

·                 browsing to a report and then running it

·                 setting criteria to search for a report, choosing a report from the resulting list, and then running that report

·                 running a report to see a newer version

Tips:

·                 Reports that you have not viewed have a dark border around them.

·                 The circled number on the recently run reports tab is the number of unread reports.

Logging On To IBM Cognos Mobile (BlackBerry)

You must log on to IBM^® Cognos^® Mobile to access IBM Cognos reports that are not already on your device.

1.              On your device, navigate to the IBM Cognos Mobile icon.

2.              Select Log On.

3.              Type your user ID and password, and select Log On.

Browsing (BlackBerry)

1.              From your device, log on to IBM^® Cognos^® Mobile.

2.              On the tab bar, click the browse tab.

3.              Select Public Folders or My Folders.

4.              Navigate to the report that you want and select it.

5.              If the report contains prompts, select or enter the values that you want.

You must provide values for all mandatory prompts and send them to the server to receive the report.

Due to the small size of devices, prompts may appear differently on your screen than they do in IBM Cognos Connection.

6.              After the report starts running, you can wait for it to finish or, when you are prompted to wait or close to view the report later, click Close to run the report in the background. After it runs, you can view it online or offline.

If you wait for the report to finish running, it opens automatically. All reports appear on the Recently run reports screen.

You can repeat this process of choosing reports multiple times.

Searching (BlackBerry)

1.              From your device, log on to IBM^® Cognos^® Mobile.

2.              On the tab bar, select the search tab.

3.              Enter the search criteria, and select Search.

4.              From the list that appears, select the report that you want.

Note that you may see only a subset of the reports that would be available if you searched from your desktop computer. For example, reports, queries, and IBM Cognos Business Insight dashboards appear, but PowerPlay^® reports and agents do not.

5.              If the report contains prompts, select or enter the values that you want.

You must provide values for all mandatory prompts and send them to the server to receive the report on your device.

6.              From the menu, click Run report.

When the report finishes running, it appears automatically on your screen and also on the Recently run reports screen.

Rerunning a Report (BlackBerry)

1.              Navigate to the Recently run reports screen, and select a report.

2.              From the menu, select Run report.

The latest version of the report appears.

3.              From the menu, select Re-run report. To return to the Recently run reports window, from the menu, select Close.

The latest version of the report appears at the top of the list.

Tip: To rerun a report while you are viewing it, from the menu, select Re-run report.

Logging Off From IBM Cognos Mobile (BlackBerry)

·                 On any IBM^® Cognos^® Mobile screen on your device, from the menu, select Log Off.

 

IBM Cognos BI Reports on a Mobile Device

IBM^® Cognos^® Mobile enables you to run IBM Cognos Business Intelligence reports on your mobile device. Each report on the device is identical to the report that you would see on your desktop but formatted specifically for a device. The formatting is handled automatically.

Reports are run and delivered to your device. After you log on to IBM Cognos Mobile from your device, the reports that you run, or that are scheduled to run by your administrator, appear on your device. Each report presents the data that is current at the time that the report is run.

You can access a report in any of the following ways:

·                 From your desktop computer, in IBM Cognos Connection, you can use Run with options to run a report once.

·                 From your desktop computer, in IBM Cognos Connection, you can create a schedule or job to run a report periodically.

·                 From your device, you can browse and navigate to a report and then run it.

·                 From your device, you can search for a report, choose the one you want from the list of search results, and then run that report.

Reports can also be delivered in other ways:

·                 Your administrator can schedule reports to be delivered at specified intervals to your device.

·                 Your administrator can send a bursted report.

·                 Your administrator can run a number of different reports as a job and have them sent to your device.

·                 Defined events can trigger a report to run and then be delivered to your device.

If the report contains prompts, you can choose the specific data that you want.

If you are using a Research in Motion BlackBerry, Symbian, or Microsoft^® Windows^® Mobile device, you can work offline using the reports that are on your device. However, you must log on for a report to be synchronized to the latest version.

If your organization provides reports based on your current location, you can turn on the GPS capability on your phone and have these customized reports delivered to your device. For more information, see your Mobile administrator.

You can delete a report from your device. If you do this, you delete only the copy on your device, not the actual report.

You can view reports on your device and perform a number of actions on them, including

·                 focusing on one area of a report

·                 marking table cells for further analysis

·                 drilling through

·                 drilling up and drilling down

For more information about using IBM Cognos Connection, see the IBM Cognos Connection User Guide.

Connecting to the Server

The way you connect to the server from your mobile device depends on the device you are using:

·                 If you are using an iPhone, navigate to the server URL, and then bookmark it on your home screen.

·                 If you are using a BlackBerry, Symbian, or Microsoft Windows Mobile device, type the server URL on your device. Your Mobile administrator provides the URL.

 

Configuring IBM Cognos 8 for Oracle Portal

Oracle Portal uses a version of the Apache web server to serve Oracle web content. One feature of this web server provides the ability to “protect” external (non-Oracle) web resources by intercepting calls to these resources and forcing users to provide valid Oracle Portal authentication information in order to proceed. By including the IBM Cognos 8 gateways among these protected resources, attempts to access IBM Cognos 8 pages will be intercepted and unauthenticated users will be prompted with the Oracle Portal login page.

 

Upon successfully logging in via the Oracle Portal login page, the Oracle/Apache server will populate the REMOTE_USER CGI variable and pass the user directly to the requested IBM Cognos resource. IBM Cognos 8 can use the REMOTE_USER variable to determine the users’ identity, thereby negating the need for an IBM Cognos-specific login. Similarly, any user who has successfully logged directly into the Oracle portal will not be presented with an IBM Cognos login page when accessing an IBM Cognos 8 resource.

 

In order to force Oracle to protect the IBM Cognos resources, the IBM Cognos gateways must be installed on the Oracle Portal Server (Apache) machine. On this machine (and any others that may contain distributed components of the IBM Cognos 8 installation) you must set the gateway port to 7777 (the default Oracle Portal port) as below. Change localhost to match the gateway and dispatcher server names as needed.

 

In order to secure IBM Cognos roles, groups, and content to OID users and groups, you must create an LDAP authentication source in Cognos Configuration that references the Oracle Portal OID. To connect to your OID server, enter a logical ID for your OID directory, the host and port of the OID server, and the Base DN of the OID directory. These settings will vary between installations, so check with your Directory Administrator to verify the settings, or to create a bind user if no suitable user exists. To enable SSO, set the User Lookup, Use External Identity, and External Identity Mapping

properties. Use parentheses and brackets as shown. To enable user and group lookups, set the Folder and Group Mappings as below. Again, these settings may change between installations, so verify all changes with your directory administrator.

 

In order to serve IBM Cognos pages from the Apache web server, you must create Aliases within Apache. Per the IBM Cognos documentation, add the IBM Cognos Gateway directory locations to the Apache httpd.conf file by inserting the following lines to the “Aliases:” section (about row 774). This file should reside at ORACLE_HOME\Apache\Apache\conf\httpd.conf. This document assumes the use of the CGI gateways. See the IBM Cognos documentation for information on using the Apache Mod gateways.

 

The mod_osso file provides information about which resources are “protected” by Oracle Portal Security. It also configures Oracle Portal to pass the REMOTE_USER variable to these resources for authentication. To Configure Oracle to protect IBM Cognos 8, add these lines to the mod_osso.conf file in the section labeled “Insert Protected Resources:” (about line 10). This file should be at

ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf/mod_osso.conf. This syntax tells Oracle to intercept any requests for Cognos resources and invokes the Oracle SSO process. Authenticated users will be passed transparently to the requested Cognos resource. Unauthenticated users will be prompted with the Oracle portal login screen and, upon successfully entering OID credentials, be passed to the requested Cognos resource.

 

Restart the Apache instance and the IBM Cognos 8 services.

Configure 3rd Party CA for IBM Cognos 8 BI

The process of configuring IBM Cognos 8 for a 3rd party CA involves the

following steps:

 

• Generate certificate signing requests (CSR) for the signing keypair and the ecryption keypair
• Sign the CSRs with your 3rd party CA
• Import the signed certificates into IBM Cognos 8 keystores
• Import the CA root certificate into IBM Cognos 8 truststore
• Adjust IBM Cognos 8 configuration

 

 

Cognos 8 Security PKI CA

IBM Cognos 8 BI makes use of public key infrastructure (PKI) technique. This concept for symmetric encryption implies the use of a large key which is broken in half to form a key pair. Whatever one of them encodes, the other can decode and vice versa. One key of each pair becomes public the other remains private. Those which get public need to get “signed” by some higher (more trustworthy) entity, which for PKI is called Certifying Authority (CA).

 

The process of signing involves submitting a special request, the certificate signing requests (CSR) to a CA. The response to such a request will be a certificate, which is basically nothing else but the public key “rubber stamped“ by the CA.

 

IBM Cognos 8 uses certificates for various purposes including internal SSL communication.

 

IBM Cognos 8 incorporates a service for signing certificates out of the box.  The “AutoCA” service implements a scaled down Certifying Authority (CA).  This service is part of the Content Manager component and is sufficiently complete to service all the functionality needed by IBM Cognos 8 in context of certificates.  It is not possible to use this service to sign non-cognos certificates.

In a default install of IBM Cognos 8 the CSRs for keys will be created automatically and sent to the AutoCA service which will sign them with the AutoCA’s CA certificate. The certificate is then saved in a file called keystore next to the keys it was issued for.  However in some enterprises there may be a company CA or some external CA provider already, which an IBM Cognos 8 administrator would like to Leverage

 

IBM Cognos 8 supports using those 3rd party CAs for signing IBM Cognos 8 internal certificates but several additional configuration steps are required.

 

IBM Cognos 8 incorporates a java based command line tool called “ThirdPartyCertificateTool” which is used for all operations around the IBM Cognos 8 keystores. It’s located in the /bin subfolder and is called through a script file called ThirdPartyCertificateTool.sh on UNIX/LINUX and ThirdPartyCertificateTool.bat on Windows.

 

The tool will pick up the configured JAVA_HOME so if you didn’t specify it before just set it before calling this tool.

 

 

OLAP

Today's business term is:  online analytical processing (OLAP)

Software that allows a user to interact with a very large online database (data warehouse) and request and receive practically any report in the desired format.

New Cognos Job

http://c8jobs.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-cognos-job.html

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BI CENTRE
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