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

Tags: cognos planning

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under 5 Things to Consider When Upgrading to Cognos Planning v 8.4. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.