Have you ever tried to change a Metric Studio chart? If you have, then you now it can be downright maddening and frustrating. Well, I am here to give you four tips that will save your sanity and just might stop you from throwing your hands up and losing all hope.

1. Metric Studio Charts are like crosstabs – I was given this little piece of advice and it has served me well.  In order to apply this little jewel, make sure you have a crosstab visible before you try to modify a chart. Normally when you try to troubleshoot a chart, you look at the tabular data -but that can be misleading because a chart shows the intersection of two points while tabular data is just a list.

2. Move to the top – sometimes when you add a new point on a chart, it doesn’t seem to show up. This can be so annoying because you can see the new data element on the crosstab and in the tabular data, but not on the stupid chart! It might sound strange, but just move the new point to the top of the chart. I know you might not want the element on the top, but once you can see it on the chart you can move it where ever you want.

3. Adjust the legend – ok … you have your new element, but you don’t see it in the legend. You have made the chart bigger, but still you don’t see it. All elements must appear on the legend in order for the chart to be correct. You might be thinking that this tip should go before two and in some cases you might be right, but at least you are getting the tip. Anyway, change the legend size so that you can see the new element on the chart.

4. Change the chart point size - if you have multiple values on a chart and two seem to have the exact same values, then it is possible you will only see one of them. By default all the elements on the chart are same size. The element that gets charted last is the one on top, which is often the last element on the chart axis. In order to see the see the other element, change the shape and its size to a larger point than the measure you can see.

All of these suggestions can be done in any order. I am pretty confident you will find at least one of them useful and I encourage you to pass on all the tips to another Metric Studio user.

IBM recently announced a major licensing change in their IBM Cognos Planning licensing. Clients that are on 8.4.1 of IBM Cognos Planning and own Contributor, will receive an equivalent license for IBM Cognos TM1 Contributor. This is great news for clients looking to complement Planning with TM1.

With this licensing change, they are requiring all IBM Cognos Planning clients to be on the latest Cognos Planning Enterprise Licensing Model to download 8.4.1. Clients who purchased Cognos Planning or Adaytum Planning prior to the IBM acquisition may be affected and be required to modify their IBM Cognos licensing.

For all older Planning clients, there are a lot of benefits to upgrading your licenses.

IBM recently announced a major licensing change in their Cognos Planning licensing. Clients that are on 8.4.1 of Cognos Planning and own Contributor, will receive an equivalent license for IBM Cognos TM1 Contributor. This is great news for clients looking to compliment Planning with TM1.

IBM Cognos Event Studio is often an underutilized Studio but has its place. I think it would be better to explain how you can use this Studio in your everyday duties instead of the traditional white paper approach. I will use a couple of examples that I think highlight how a business group (departments) can use Event Studio and how a database modeler can use Event Studio.

IBM Cognos recently announced a licensing change in IBM Cognos 8 Planning Version 8.4.1 . If you weren’t anxiously awaiting the news like Lodestar was, I’ll bet you missed it. Why were we anxious for the announcement? It paves the way for IBM Cognos clients to leverage both Enterprise Planning and TM1 to provide the Best of the Best Planning solution at a reasonable price.

So, hopefully you read my previous blog on Innovation.  It is essential to success in this market.
WHAT IS INNOVATION: A new way of doing something.
Let’s look at a great example of innovation.   In 1968 at the Olympics in Mexico, a man named Dick Fosbury set an Olympic record with a move that others called [...]

I recently attended the CFO Rising conference in Orlando, FL put on by CFO.com. At the conference it became clear that as the economy continues to challenge all of us, the companies and people that are thriving have something in common. THEY ARE INNOVATING! So what exactly are they innovating? Everything! From streamlining internal process that are time consuming and inefficient, saving man hours, to looking at new revenue opportunities for their products. I know not exactly ground breaking, but it made me think, “How do we get people in our organizations to INNOVATE?”

For those of us who come from the Cognos world and were just getting the hang of how to find answers to the most cryptic error messages known to man, I have news for you. Forget every trick you learned of navigating the Cognos Support system and welcome to the IBM Super Highway of Information a.k.a. IBM.com.
This is a much needed blog for two reasons:
1. To forewarn any IBM client; DO NOT WAIT on getting your IBM.com ID setup until you have a production down issue. This process takes about 5 business days to complete.

2. Provide you the quick and dirty steps to get setup painlessly and quickly (relatively speaking).

Your Mission: Complete the company presentation and merge data from 5 different places. And here’s the kicker, the numbers have to be CORRECT.

So, you put on your thinking cap, you fit more windows in your tiny computer screen than you can really read, and you begin the task you dread every month. You first make sure you have all the data that you need to compile. Check. Then you open last month’s presentation and start removing all the reports, graphs and data from last month. Check. You open your Excel spreadsheet that checks your numbers to make sure they are correct. Check. You are armed with the tools and ready to go to battle because that is really what this whole process is.

But does it really have to be that painful? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! Welcome to IBM Cognos Go! Office - you probably own it and aren’t using it.

This article is a Part 2 on how to save money on major software purchases. To view the first part of this blog, click here.
4. Support Renewal- Software Maintenance/Support renew fees are recurring, so when you negotiate your contract consider the support renewal. Software providers often state it’s a set percentage of the price. [...]