After attending the World of Watson in Las Vegas at the end of October, here are a few of the highlights that can be anticipated in the IBM Cognos Analytics R5 release at the beginning of December.
As you may or may not know, the upgrade from IBM Cognos BI to Cognos Analytics will be fairly simple. Framework manager packages and data source connections will be intact. Reports and schedules will remain and it can be as simple as an upgrade. Additional tools like Life Cycle Manager can be used to help identify any report issues prior to upgrading the reports. One item to note is that the Portal tabs or Portal pages are not going to be supported in the new IBM Cognos Analytics versions.
New features that are going to be released will be:
- Multiple packages with a single report
- New out-of-the-box visualizations for dashboards
- Custom navigation groups
- Drill capability on navigation groups
- Direct input to Watson Analytics using Framework Manager models
Watson Analytics, a cloud-based application, is gaining momentum and is exciting to use given the little time needed to import data and start seeing trends within the data. It helps business users ask questions that might not have been thought of prior to using Watson Analytics.
