The Ironside Group is excited to publicly offer both our Fundamentals and Advanced Framework Manager Training courses in back-to-back fashion for the first time. As with all of our course offerings, this curricula is lead by our veteran consultants who have decades of in-depth real-world technical experience with IBM Cognos software. Take advantage of this special combined offering and become a Framework Manager expert in a weeks time.

Course: IBM Cognos 8 Framework Manager Fundamentals (View Description)
When: November 15-17, 2010

Course: IBM Cognos 8 Framework Manager Advanced (View Description)
When: November 18-19, 2010

Where: IBM Innovation Center (Newport Room), Waltham, MA (Boston)
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The Ironside Group is excited to publicly offer both our Fundamentals and Advanced Report Studio Training courses in back-to-back fashion for the first time. As with all of our course offerings, this curricula is lead by our veteran consultants who have decades of in-depth applied technical experience with IBM Cognos software. Take advantage of this special combined offering and become a Report Studio guru in a weeks time.

Course: IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Fundamentals (View Description)
When: December 6-8, 2010

Course: IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Advanced (View Description)
When: December 9-10, 2010

Where: Ironside Group, Lexington, MA (Boston)
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Unburden your IT department by giving end users the ability to easily create and share their own Web-based Ad Hoc reports! Query Studio the easy-to-use tool that is designed for non-technical and business users who want self-service reporting without having to understand relational database schemas and concepts. This type of reporting is essential in allowing consumers to define and write secure reports that target a specific need, while still having the ability to share them with the entire organization.

Based on a proven training curriculum, the Ironside Group will provide instructor-led classes that highlight the report development techniques associated with IBM Cognos Query Studio.

Course: IBM Cognos 8 Query Studio (View Description)
When: September 23, 2010
Where: IBM Innovation Center (Newport Room), Waltham, MA (Boston)
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IBM Cognos Midsize Business Analytics Virtual Summit

Would you like to unlock your data, turn that data into insights, and drive business growth? Join The Ironside Group on September 15th, 2010 for the third quarterly IBM Cognos Mid-Size Business Analytics Virtual Summit.  The first two have been a huge success drawing thousands of participants.  Come see whats new with Cognos Express.  IBM will be unveiling the newest capabilities of their Cognos Express Reporting, Analytics, and Planning software, purpose built for small to mid-size companies. Read more

The New England Cognos Users Group is an amazing opportunity to network and collaborate with other IBM Cognos Professionals in the Northeast Region. Each event is packed with informative talks and demonstrations from local organizations that highlight their own applied experiences with IBM Cognos software. Experts from the Ironside Group are always in attendance more than happy to answer your toughest questions or help you down the path to resolving your most bothersome issues. Attendance is always free and open to the public.

This quarter’s upcoming meeting includes a presentation from Ironside Group CEO and Principal Consultant, Tim Kreytak and Mass Mutual’s own BI Guru, Isaac Stein, on the topic of Database Suitability Assessment and Framework Manager Best Practices.
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Most companies that invest in Business Intelligence technologies do so with high expectations of better decisions, more efficient processes and decreased cost. Others expect increased insight into spending, competition, and customer behavior or employee performance. The simple fact is that many BI implementations do not deliver on their expected value. Read more

In part one of our customizing Cognos URL objects article, we discussed how to create a new URL link in Cognos Connection and change its default action to be open in a new re-sizable window to demonstrate one method of extending the existing Cognos capabilities. When developing Cognos professional reports, often times we get similar requests from end users: Can you open the requested page in a new window when a hyperlink is clicked? Unfortunately unlike a drill through link which allows a report author to choose to open the new page in a new window, the default action of the Insertable object hyperlink is always to open in the current web browser window. Now the question becomes how to set a hyperlink to open in new window? Is this even possible? The answer is “Yes” and can be done by following the three easy steps described below: Read more

Editor’s Note:  This blog was originally posted on August 1, 2010 and has been reviewed and updated on 10/5/2020 with Cognos Analytics 11.1.7.  We find that these best practice tips about metadata modeling are still very useful to build solid data foundation for reports, especially cardinality settings and stich query controls as they are critical modeling techniques. These procedures are also applicable to Cognos new web based metadata modeling component – the Data Module, which is greatly adopted by self-service authors and when Cognos is hosted in cloud (no need to install Framework Manger tool).

Last month’s article described the overall approach for best practice model design using the 4 layer architecture. In this month’s article, I’ll describe some advanced issues which arise during model design, and how best to deal with them. Given the limitless and complex situations that can come up during modeling, these techniques may or may not apply to your specific situation. Read more