Have you ever tried to do a nested IF THEN ELSE statement inside IBM Cognos Report Studio? If you have, you might run screaming because you can’t get the syntax just right. Granted, you could read the tips at the bottom as you build the syntax but shoot yourself in the head if you are not a programmer. You probably could pickup Chinese faster.

I have you thinking about another environment for testing, development, and patches which is separate from your production environment, now we can talk about the process of deploying to production from development. In Cognos, you can move content from one environment/server to another environment by using import and export within the Cognos Administration. You can schedule import or export entries from a deployment archive to a separate server….see the topic Schedule Management in Cognos Connection Help for more details.

Report writing is difficult for most people. It requires a level of detail and skill that most people simply don’t have the patience to learn let alone apply. Historically, most report writers are primarily Information Technology (IT) people with very little business experience which makes it impossible to explain why a transaction must be a debit instead of a credit. The language gap between report writers and users can be the difference between speaking English and Spanglish. The report writer might understand basic information about the business but not enough to optimize a report or the user doesn’t understand real constrains such as data quality, database design, or application limitations to understand why a report can’t be written just like their excel spreadsheet.

Report writer I have two words for you … Analysis Studio learn it, love it, use it. Business user I have the same two words… wait for it … Analysis Studio. Let’s assume that you have the groundwork covered such as a multidimensional Framework Package and you have Analysis Studio deployed, you can use Analysis Studio drop and drag functionality to bridge the gap between report writer and business user.