Having now been through two upgrades to Cognos Planning v 8.4, here are a few suggestions:

1. Stay with 32-bit servers. Cognos Planning is a 32-bit application and you won’t gain much of a performance edge with a 64-bit machine. I had some issues with IIS in the 64-bit environment.
2. Use physical servers, and avoid VMware (virtual servers). Cognos does not recommend these.
3. Consider doing a proof of concept in a development environment before upgrading directly to production. I experienced a number of technical issues with both upgrades along the way. Doing a proof of concept is alot of extra work, but at least you’ll know what to expect when you move from development to production.
4. In Cognos Planning 8.4, you can still use Access Manager for authentication. However, I would recommend using Active Directory.
5. Use the migration wizard to copy your models over. All of the data in the Analyst cubes as well as Contributor cubes will come over, along with the eLists. You will have to recreate the admin links. If you’re going from 7.1 to 8.4, you’ll need to move the models over manually. I can tell you how to do this.

Feel free to contact me directly with any questions. I look forward to reading your comments.

Mitch Paioff
(303) 807-6663

I am at the IBM training center in Dallas as I write this. It is Day Five of the Cognos TM1 developer class. The IBM instructor for this class is Steve Harris, and he has done an excellent job.

I must say that I am very impressed with the capabilities of TM1. It is very different from Cognos Planning, to say the least. Here are just a few of the differences:

1)      As you might already know, TM1 is memory-resident on the server. This technology enables developers to build gigantic cubes. It is not unheard of to have cube sizes in the billions. A cube in TM1 can have up to 256 dimensions. Updating or recalculating a cube is very quick.

2)      It is customary to have all cubes in a TM1 model as part of a single application (or “Server Instance”). This is quite a departure from Contributor, where I have seen as many as ten to fifteen applications that make up one overall model.

3)      There is no such thing as a “Synchronization” or “Go To Production” in TM1. Once you make a change to a cube, to a dimension, or change the rights, the user view is updated immediately.

Another big advantage that TM1 has over Cognos Planning is the “drag and drop” capability within dimensions. You can create hierarchies using this method, which means no more dealing with eLists stored in Excel.

One other difference is that the scripting of the rules and calculations in TM1 are done outside the basic user interface, which can be challenging for non-technical business users.

In summary, there are many compelling reasons to choose TM1 over Cognos Planning. Cognos Planning isn’t going away anytime soon. Both are great tools for budgeting and forecasting.

For more information on TM1, click here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25076.wss

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Mitch Paioff

I was thrilled to accept the Colorado Independent Publishers Association’s Merit Award at the 2009 EVVYs banquet on Saturday night at the Red Lion Hotel in Denver. “Getting Started as an Independent Computer Consultant” came in fourth place out of seven books submitted in the business category.

You can download a free excerpt of my book at http://www.cti-seminars.com/seminars.html. It is also available at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Independent-Computer-Consultant/dp/0981929702/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226186754&sr=8-1

One of my clients is thinking about doing the upgrade. I would like to get some feedback from those of you who have been through it. Here is one of the comments I received through one of my LinkedIn discussion groups:

“The most significant change is the new Contributor client which gives better visibility (for things like nested hierarchies, etc.). Then there are some differences in the way data extensions are created, which has some bugs that are not covered by knowledge base yet (at least for our applications). Overall I’d say it is more user friendly and more aligned with BI studios with regards to navigation. But you’d better test it out in a development environment first to make sure that everything works.”