What’s New in IBM Cognos 10.2 (Now we can use it for Big Data too)

Cognos Workspace (Formerly Business Insight) It seems a little strange to say we’re glad that IBM Cognos 10.2 delivers fewer “insights”, but the renaming of Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced to Cognos Workspace and Cognos Workspace Advanced respectively, is a welcome change. Hopefully this will help to ease some of the confusion that’s arisen in recent years among a myriad of “insight” labeled components in within the IBM Business Analytics solution portfolio. Along with this re-branding, come a number of useful new features.
Multi Tabbed Workspaces A major enhancement to Cognos Workspace is the ability to easily create multi-tab workspaces enabling you to expand your workspace’s visual footprint without the need to scroll. With tabbed workspaces also comes a new control known as an Action Button which can be programed to trigger tab changes.
Freeze and Unfreeze Column and Row Headers Excel users rejoice, they’ve added the functionality to freeze and unfreeze crosstab column and row headers while scrolling. Data Visualization Guide As mentioned previously, the theme of applied data visualization theory is a recurring one in Cognos 10.2. The new Visual Recommender in Cognos Workspace will help you to select the appropriate chart type based on the data values in your workspace, along with some insightful rationale for that decision.
Graduated Capabilities Administrators can now assign graduated capabilities to the Cognos Workspace tool. Users can have the option of Authoring, Interacting or just Consuming any Cognos Workspace. This is useful in controlling the available Cognos Workspace feature set for governance purposes, or to even further simplify the experience to drive adoption in a user population of diverse skill sets.
Other Features Cognos workspace 10.2 also brings support for printing and use in Google Chrome and Safari.

Cognos Mobile Cognos Mobile was a major focus in the 10.1 (General) and 10.1.1 (Refresh Pack) releases, with outstanding functionality and support across a broad set of devices. In 10.2 Mobile sees a few minor, but noteworthy updates.

•  Push Notifications Cognos Mobile now supports push notifications to the status IOS status bar in the iPad app – users can now be notified when a new version of their report is available, further reducing the latency in decision making on the go. Improved Performance of Multi-page Reports Multi-page reports can now be streamed to devices, reducing the loading time. Users no longer have to wait for the entire report to download before viewing.
• Administrators Can Now Secure Mobile Access A new mobile capability in Cognos Administration allows administrators to govern access to Cognos via Mobile devices. This has benefits from a governance perspective for all organizations that deploy Cognos Mobile, especially those that employ a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy
• Report Studio Prompt API The new prompt API is a long overdue and welcome update to Professional Authors and Report Studio hackers everywhere. The API is 100% documented and supported, and like any good API can be expected to persist across future product renditions. The API provides a documented method for setting, reading, deleting and validating prompt values using JavaScript. The API is supported in Report Studio, Cognos Viewer, Cognos Workspace and Cognos Workspace Advanced. 
• Excel Improvements Expect improved Excel compatibility of Cognos report outputs with increased spreadsheet maximums to 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Cognos 10.2 also brings a brand new Excel output format called Excel 2007 Data which is perfect for lightweight data transfer to Excel without any report formatting. 
• Dynamic Cubes By far the most exciting new feature in Cognos 10.2 is the addition of a new OLAP technology to the IBM Cognos solution suite which in conjunction with pre-existing OLAP options provides developers with the option of the right tool for the job at hand.The Dynamic Cube solution builds upon existing Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) functionality to close a major gap that exists in many vendor OLAP offerings: the organization with a large or mature star or snowflake schema data warehouse that wants to provide an OLAP experience to their users without sacrificing data details or high performance. Here are a few highlights of this new feature:
• Big Data Support: Hadoop / Hive via JDBC Connector SQL Server and Analysis Services 2012 Salesforce.com (Native DQM) SAP ECC (R3) (Native DQM) Siebel (Native DQM) The big news here is native support for Big Data and seamless integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights (Hadoop). Additionally, native support for a number of ERP vendors has been added to Cognos via Dynamic Query Mode for increased performance and reduced implementation complexity. Prior to 10.2, support for data sources such as Saleforce.com, SAP ECC and Siebel required a connector via Virtual View Manager (VVM). We should also note that VVM 10.2 will be the final release of this solution, and while it will continue to be supported, developers should take note that it is now deprecated in favor of DQM. 100% 64 Bit These remaining 32 bit components of IBM Cognos 10 get an update for full 64 bit compatibility: BI Gateway, Metric Studio and Data Manager Multi-Tenant Support Cognos 10.2 now supports native multi-tenancy. While this feature may not have mass appeal, it will be incredibly valuable to certain IBM Cognos OEM partners as well as organizations that have deployed Cognos in a federated manner and are looking to more easily segment different business units or sub-organizations within their shared IBM Cognos platform architecture. 
• Content Archiving Last but not least, Cognos 10.2 now natively supports fully integrated content archiving to a file system. This feature will be coveted by organizations that have content retention and audit requirements that are looking to keep their Cognos content store free from large report outputs to maximize their environmental performance. This new feature has much of the same archival functionality that IBM FileNet customers have enjoyed since the 10.1.1 release.