Rob’s Higher Ed BI Blog

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in Australian Higher Education

Archive for the ‘Cognos’ category

Cognos on a Mac

September 9th, 2008

Big Problem - I want to use a Mac to administer Cognos but under v8 some tools, such as Report Studio, simply don’t work on anything other than IE6+ which doeosn’t exist for Mac. The Firefox v3 plugin for IE doesn’t work on the Mac version, and I’ve tried Parallels and BootCamp all with mixed results so I’d pretty much given up and resigned myself to using Citrix which works OK but isn’t quite as good as the real thing.

So why not just use a PC? Well I used to but being a university, half our clients have Mac’s and call me sensitive but surely it helps bridge the IT-Client gulf if you turn up with something familar, even if you just click away doing stuff they have no interest in, plus of course not having the instability issues is a plus.

Today was an Ephiphany, and I have to thank Cognos support who told me about the idea at the 2008 Forum. I downloaded a 30-day evaluation of VMware Fusion and installed Windows XP Pro in a 512MB VM. It took around 2GB of disk to get the basics in there and the end result is just great. I now have IE7 in a window that I can dock just like all my other Mac windows, that I can make full-screen for presentations and as an added bonus, even SharePoint looks ‘normal’ again. For under $100 I’m pleased.

Of course now I need to install anti-virus software on the VM but I can live with that for the convenience.

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Posted in Cognos, Mac, VMware

Here we go…

September 4th, 2008

There I was sitting quite unobtrusively (or so I thought) at the side of the room when someone suggested that Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing people from Australian and New Zealand tertiary institutions needed to communicate better and share the common details of their BI/DW journeys.

I’m at the 2008 Cognos Asia Pacific conference, this is my third such event and certainly the largest. Its the first one since IBM purchased Cognos at the end of last year for a reported USD$5bn.

There is without doubt a lot of commonality with basic HR, Finance, Student and other system reporting that universities currently have or want to have. Sharing approaches that do and don’t work in my view is not trading corporate IP, it’s helping peer organisations get the basics in place and not waste time reinventing things. This way we can turn our valuable and limited resources to developing capabilities that truly differentiate us and help to push the BI/DW game along a little further.