Setting up virtual tenants to enable content sharing among tenants

When you set up virtual tenants, the objects in the content store can be accessed by users who belong to different tenants.

Virtual tenants contain real tenants that exist in the Cognos® BI environment. The virtual tenant ID includes tenant IDs of all the real tenants that you add to the virtual tenant. This does not change the fact that an object in the content store can have only a single tenant ID and objects with a public tenant ID can be shared by all tenants.

Before you begin

Multitenancy is enabled for IBM® Cognos BI and the tenants are created in IBM Cognos Administration on the Multitenancy tab. For more information, see Creating tenants in IBM Cognos Administration.

About this task

You create virtual tenants in IBM Cognos Administration, on the Multitenancy tab. When viewed on the Multitenancy tab, the entries for virtual tenants and real tenants look identical. To make it easier to identify virtual tenants, use meaningful names when creating them and specify screen tips and descriptions.

For example, you want to configure content sharing for tenants named North America, Central America, and South America. You create a virtual tenant named Americas and add the three tenants to this tenant. Users who belong to any of the three tenants can access content of their own tenant, content of the other two tenants, and public content.

If you delete a virtual tenant, all content that is associated with that tenant is also deleted.

For more information, see Advanced multitenancy features.

Procedure

Perform the following steps to create a virtual tenant and a folder for the virtual tenant content.

Log on to IBM Cognos Business Intelligence as a member of the System Administrators role.
In IBM Cognos Administration, click the Multitenancy tab.
On the toolbar, click the New Tenant icon .
Specify the Name and Tenant ID parameters, and click Finish.
Other parameters on this page are optional. However, you can specify a tool tip, such as Virtual tenant, and a description. This will help you to identify the tenant in Cognos BI.
For the virtual tenant that you created, from the tenant Actions drop-down menu, click Set properties.
On the Members tab, click the Add link.
Select the tenants that you want to add to the virtual tenant, and click OK.
Tip: You can add disabled tenants. However, users cannot access content of the disabled tenants until the tenants are enabled.

The virtual tenant name appears on the Multitenancy tab.
In IBM Cognos Connection, create a new folder. The folder name should be similar to the virtual tenant name for easier identification.
In the folder properties page, on the General tab, change the Tenant value to the tenant ID of the virtual tenant by selecting the ID from the list of available IDs. For example, if your virtual tenant ID is Americas, select this ID from the list and assign it to the folder.