Cognos BI Software Tutorial and PDF training guides

What is COGNOS?

Cognos is IBMs business intelligence and performance management software suites. This software helps the business users without any technical knowledge to compile corporate data, analyse them and to finally give it for reporting. As this Cognos is built in open standards, the software product can be used in both relational and multidimentional data sources which includes Microsoft, SAP, ORACLE etc. After reading the basic introduction check its advantages, disadvantages and PDF tutorials about Cognos Software.

What is Cognos

Cognos was created by IBM to be used as a performance management and business intelligence software suite. It was created to help business personnel who lack technical knowledge in big enterprises to source corporate data, analyze it and produce reports that can enable the business make concrete decisions.

Cognos is made up of about thirty six (36) software products. It can be used with relational as well as multidimensional data sources from multiple vendors, including NCR Teradata Microsoft, Oracle and SAP because it is built on open standards.

The software suite is a web-based, composite business intelligence suite that supplies a very effective toolset for mining, analyzing, score carding and monitoring of data, events and metrics. It enables a business to be high performing and analytics based, making it able to forecast or discover movements in the market and subsequently react to them with well grounded decisions.

The software suite contains the following basic components:

Cognos Connection – this is also known as Cognos Web Portal, the beginning of all functions supplied in the suite
Query Studio – this allows for easy queries and self-service reports that answer all basic business questions.
Report Studio – used to create reports on management, which comprise charts, lists, maps and repeat functions
Analysis Studio – used for analyzing and understanding information about a business event or action, identifies trends and helps users understand anomalies and deviations, also contains OLAP functionalities, among others.
Event Studio – a notification tool which reports on enterprise events in real-time.

IBM released Cognos 10 in October 2010, which fits Cognos with other IBM products, such as Lotus Connect and SPSS Predictive Analytics. Cognos 10 has mobile capability, letting users access a full version of Cognos from mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets.

There is also Cognos Express in the market, which is created for small to mid-sized firms. This edition allows firms to make use of the functions of Cognos 8 BI, and also include budgeting, planning and forecasting functions.

Over 23,000 companies around the world use Cognos products and it is being consistently rated in Gartner Magic Quadrants for Business Intelligence in the “leaders” category.

Cognos Unit testing includes:

Checking of the data. You need to match the data that is required.
Checking on the format of the data. Checking of decimal places, time and date format etc.
Checking on the font size as each software testing font size plays a role as for the software or the system to understand.
Check the alignment of columns. Only when it is typed with clear alignment only it will be easy to read and interpret.
Check on whether the page breaks and set ups are put in order or not.
Check whether conditional formatting is applied correctly or not.

Cognos process is basically putting things in order to get the data content in the correct format for the software can be readable and extracted.

Advantages:

This offers a wide range of benefits to business organization which helps the employees to perform their tasks at optimum level.

An Increase to Revenue Streams: Incoming revenue increases once the organization chooses to embed the IBM software through streamlined functionalities and when proper resource allocation is being applied. By using this software, an organization can cut down the cost fir software developments.
Facility to explore information: in cases of large companies, they get large data where certain managers and officials don’t know which data is accurate and how to process them when that data is required. Even they want to access the required data, they may not use the required tools for accessing. Cognos software is helpful in that case for providing the business users to access the information that they require. This allows them to get the data that they want, assemble them in an order and personalize them accordingly in the way they want for viewing the data for their purposes.
Great Understanding of the Situation: when a data is given, the business users should understand them as they have to understand and analyze them that gives them a better insight of the current situation and a better understanding of the overall business solutions and functions. This understanding will help in building better report and which can help in supporting the decision making for improving the business and also in achieving the goals of the organization effectively.
Comprehensive Analysis: This software helps the organization in getting the entire scenario being aware and also with tools that they have to be aware on with great understanding, the most importantly the bottom line employees. It also helps the business users to analyze them on the impact of the scenario.
An Enhanced Decision making: Decision making is done in an organization where it runs in crisis or to improve the quality of business of the employees. It is crucial that the management have the access to right tools and accurate information. This software provides all that is available allowing the organization to make more elaborate decision making to improve the efficiency for attaining competitive advantage.

Disadvantages:

Excel format is not supported by this software. So in this case host names has to be changed from the gateway.
Multi dimensional analysis cannot be supported.

Cognos PDF tutorials and Training Guides

Also check Cognos Interview Questions.

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