IBM Cognos BI and SharePoint 2010 Collaboration

Collaboration between SharePoint 2010 and IBM® Cognos® BI facilitates information sharing among report users. Collaboration activities include publishing deployed IBM Cognos reports to a document library and creating and participating in discussion threads for a report.

You will want to manage the collaboration environment for maximum efficiency.

Publish reports

IBM Cognos reports that you deploy to a SharePoint portal and view in the IBM Cognos Viewer can be published to a SharePoint document library. The document library can be located on a website. You can publish reports within an IBM Cognos Workspace workspace, but you cannot publish the workspace itself.

To publish a Cognos report, you must run the report or open a saved report. The Publish > Run and publish command, lets you run the report interactively, and then publish. The Publish >Versions command lets you select a saved report output version to publish.

Create discussion threads

Adding a discussion thread to a report allows you to collaborate on the content of a report with other users. The comments added to a discussion thread provide other users viewing the same report with additional context or information about the report. Those users can respond with further comments about the report. For example, this type of collaboration is useful to add a reminder to investigate low sales figures for a particular product, or to explain an anomaly in the data that could be a cause for concern.

To create a discussion thread, you run or open a saved report in the IBM Cognos Viewer portlet and click Discuss. The Start a discussion command starts a discussion in the default location, if specified. Otherwise, you are prompted to select a location. Show related discussions shows a list of all the discussions that have been added to a discussion board for the report that you are viewing.

Manage the collaboration environment

There are various ways that you can manage the collaboration environment for maximum efficiency.

You can set the collaboration-related default settings on a Web Part using Edit preferences. The settings are available for the IBM Cognos Viewer portlet. They include

Publish Location. The location can be a document library or a document library folder, or a document library on website.
Do not prompt for location when the publish location is a document library or a folder. If the location is a website, the user is prompted for a location.
Discussion Board. The location can be a discussion list or a discussion board on a website.

In addition to specifying default collaboration settings, you can specify other Cognos Web Part preferences. For more information, see Configure Cognos Web Part preferences.

You can also customize the collaboration environment by editing the IBM Cognos Viewer connection settings. For more information, see Configure Cognos Web Part connection settings.