Cognos 8 Business Intelligence applications overview

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence combines the features of all previous products and applications and provides a complete and scalable BI solution for corporate business information management and reporting.

Cognos 8 has a completely different architecture than the previous versions, every component is integrated and in one place and the main and most significant idea is to use one common metadata for all components.

Cognos BI 8 components

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence applications:

· Query Studio - a tool to create basic ad-hoc reports and a lighter version of Report Studio. It allows users to create one 1-page report at a time. Application used by Query Authors and Report Authors.

· Report Studio - used to create and manage more advanced reports, which are very often standarized and recreated periodically and distributed to people in various departments in an organization. Reports designs created in Query Studio can be read and edited in Report Studio (not the opposite way). Report Studio is used by Report Authors.

· Analysis Studio - an application to analyze cubes and explore business data in a multidimensional manner. Mainly used by business analysts.

· Metrics Studio - used for the scorecarding. The idea behind it is to put performance indicators next to the organization's key performance measures (red, orange, green status notation).

· Event Studio - a process (an agent) which runs in the background and monitors the data and reacts when ocurrs something which may be cause a problem in the future in the business. For instance, if quantity of product X on stock is less than a given value, event manager can send an email to the responsible person which will contain a warning with problem description and a cognos report attached.

· Cognos Connection - it is a Web portal for Cognos 8 and a component which interracts with the Content Store. It is a frontend to publish, find, manage, organize, and view organization’s business intelligence data.

· PowerPlay Transformer and PowerPlay Client - the default cognos 8 installation comes with the PowerPlay Transformer 7.3. By including PowerPlay in Cognos 8 suite, Cognos shows that they still have no complete replacement for this strategic product.

· Content Store is a database where the metadata for all the Cognos 8 component is stored and managed centrally.

Content store can be accessed directly from the Framework Manager. Framework Manager is the Cognos 8 modeling tool for creating and managing business-related metadata for use in Cognos 8 analysis and reporting.

The main users of Framework manager are data warehouse developers and data modelers. Report authors base on the metadata information set up using Framework manager when creating new reports.