Cognos Inc. on Tuesday will announce the first update to its ReportNet enterprise reporting tool, a product launched to much fanfare last fall.
The product, designed to give Cognos a stronger presence in the high-volume enterprise reporting space, contains a number of new enhancements in this 1.1 version, including tighter integration with the rest of Cognos business intelligence applications.
The initial release of ReportNet, which was built on a Web-based architecture different from the rest of the Cognos product portfolio, integrated with other Cognos products only at the sign-on and portal interface layers. This release supports shared metadata with other Cognos products, through integration of Cognos DecisionStream product. Cognoss Visualizer component also can be used within ReportNet for the first time in this release.
Integration with third-party products also has been enhanced in this release, including native support for SAP AGs Business Warehouse, IBM WebSphere application server, WebSphere Portal, IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner, Information Integrator, DB2 Universal Database and DB2 Cube Views.
Mold-Masters Ltd. is taking advantage of ReportNets capabilities to generate reports from multiple data sources, including SAP Business Warehouse and Microsoft Corp. SQL Server.
“Before, wed have to run separate reports from each data source or dump everything into [Microsoft] Excel,” said Val Swift, Mold-Masters IT manager, in Georgetown, Ontario.
Swift said ReportNet allows Mold-Masters to get the information it needs by asking one question, rather than querying separate data sources. ReportNets tight integration with SAP Business Warehouse was also a big selling point for Mold-Masters, Swift said.
ReportNet 1.1 also supports improved integration with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, including the ability to output reports in Excel format. This version also supports improved charting capabilities, including support for waterfall, or progressive, charts. Also, the ReportNet portal can be customized in this release.
Language support also has been increased in Version 1.1, with support added for six new languages, for a total of 10. Reports can be generated in at least 25 languages.
Cognos ReportNet 1.1 is available now. It has been benchmarked for up to 190,000 named users.