Integrate Cognos with Portal

My colleague Mike Porter blogged recently about Integrating OBIEE with Portal.  This inspired me to take a look at how to integrate Cognos with Portal.  I spoke with another Perficient colleague, Dave Jones, about his experience with Cognos and Portal.  Dave provided some useful options that I’ve published below.

I think one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is almost always Single Sign On (SSO).  Too often the Cognos and Portal are implemented by completely different groups and don’t share a common vision.  So sharing user directories or even making sure user IDs are the same across both systems becomes the first of many problem encountered.

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Cognos provides for SSO even then a common directory is not available.  It uses the concept of a shared secret that can be embedded in the connection set up.  This shared secret along with a with a user id will provide access to the Cognos server without prompting for a log in.

We always recommend solving the SSO problem at an enterprise level using standard out of the box security systems like Tivoli Access Manager, CA SiteMinder, or RSA ClearTrust to name a few.  Once the SSO issue is solved, the other integration options become much easier to implement for your particular environment.

Here are some of our ideas on melding Cognos with Portal.

• Out-of-the-box Cognos portlets
  • OK for the basics
  • Good for reports on a portal dashboard
• Roll-your-own with calls to Cognos web services
  • This is where many projects usually end up
  • It’s not trivial work.
• IBM Dashboard Accelerator
  • It has builders that call the Cognos services
  • Accelerator helps walk you through drill-down scenarios, etc.
• IFrames
  • This is one of the easier options
  • It is very useful when you have lots (thousands) of reports to expose
  • It provides loose-coupling between Portal and Cognos so as reports change the Portal doesn’t need to change
  • Requires little or no integration skills

  WSRP

  • You can expose Cognos portlets running on a WebSphere server as a WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) producer.
  • In your portal, you can consume the Cognos portlets via the WSRP portlet.
  • This provides a good level of decoupling because the Cognos portlets can run on a separate WAS server from your Portal server