Resource constraints require Enterprise software customers to pick appropriate upgrade candidates from the stream of new versions that software vendors generate. We advise our clients to select upgrade candidates carefully, and only when a version contains either significant new features with business impact or a substantial body of fixes that improves user productivity and rationalizes the cost of the upgrade cycle. From time to time, a version stands out and warrants our strongest recommendation for consideration as an immediate upgrade candidate. Cognos 11.1.7 is such a version.
New or Improved Features
A short list of the new or improved features that we have judged to have the greatest potential impact to our customers is covered below. As with any new version, there are too many new features to cover here. If you see something that interests you and would like to explore how it might help you please contact us for a deeper dive. Click Here for the Full Listing of What’s New.
Top Reasons Cognos 11.1.7 Deserves Special Consideration for Immediate Upgrade
Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 contains a rare combination of fixes and new features with a cumulative business impact that we don’t often see and is why it garners our strongest recommendation as an immediate upgrade candidate.
- Fixes and Improvements to Report Authoring that Address Longstanding Complaints and are Terrific Enhancements to Developer Productivity
- Run a Single Report Page in a Multi-Page Report – Restored Functionality 11.1.7
- Add a Baseline to a Visualization – New Feature 11.1.7
- Addition of Drop Zones on Visualization Templates to Speed Viz Creation – New Feature 11.1.7
- Many More Visualization Types Allow Comparison of Multiple Measures – Feature Improvement 11.1.7
- Most Visualization Properties Synchronized between Dashboarding and Reporting – Feature Improvement 11.1.7
- New Features with Significant Business Impact
- Use the Query Editor to Create a Data Set – New Feature 11.1.7 – Game Changing Functionality
- New Capabilities to Control Ability to Attach Reporting Content to Email – New Feature 11.1.7
- Disable the On-Demand Tool Bar by Role or on an Individual Report – New Feature 11.1.7
- Logarithmic Scale in Visualizations – New Feature 11.1.7
- Use Search in Visualization Data Fields to Rapidly Find Data Items – New Feature 11.1.7
Data Set Creation Improvements – A Game Changer
The Data Set feature added a potentially very powerful aggregation management utility into Cognos Analytics, but in earlier versions the create/edit capability was constrained by the absence of exposure of the underlying data set query, or the presence of any way to edit the query using the query editor tools available in report authoring.
That has been solved in version 11.1.7 by exposing the data set query and making the query editor tools available. You now may construct multiple queries and use the various advanced query editor tools (join, union, SQL, etc.) for data set creation, functionality that until now had only been available for report authoring.
This means that now users can create data sets (managed aggregates) of far greater complexity, which is game changing functionality.
What to Do?
Contact our team to get a full featured demonstration and draw your own conclusions. We are experts at helping manage the upgrade cycle, including installation, configuration, and training.
In addition to features and fixes, upgrades are a great time to deal with content issues like portal reorganization, unused content removal, security model analysis and modification, etc. that you may want to address at the same time. We have decades of experience with tools that can help streamline the upgrade content migration process.
