Good morning everyone!

I attended an Advanced Author Training class last week and was introduced to building Active Reports during those sessions. I have been a Cognos developer for ten years and had not really ever been given a good indication of what they are and how they work. I would like to start developing one or two proof of concept Active Reports in order to see how this data works within our package and our cloud based environments. 

I would like to reach out and see if I could get feedback from other users on your experience with these. I understand the output is the .mht file and I am going off the premise that the security would be based on the credentials of the user who runs and processes the output file. My curiosity is around successful and unsuccessful use cases you may have found, as well as seeing how performance and resourcing limitations are when using. Also, any major development advice or pitfalls to avoid. 

We have a number of clients who might be having us build them 'Dashboards' these days but the consumers of the dashboards are not licensed. They are sending them screenshots or Excel/PDF output of what we are building which 1) brings it's own challenges in formatting and time spent and 2) loses the ability for interactivity. 

I would appreciate any feedback to help prompt me to whether the juice is worth the squeeze to move this up my personal working priority list or not so much.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts! 
Jeff

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Jeff Stein
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#CognosAnalyticswithWatson

Hi Jeff,

if you have the right set up - Active Reports make sense and are a good way of giving report recipients a more interactive experience for their data. Keep in mind that each Active Report that gets sent directly to a recipient needs a license called "Cognos Analytics Viewer" for the recipient accordingly. It is not pricy but mandatory.

I created a few Active Reports in the last years and it turned out that they perform best for our

a) users who got long PDF list reports before and now get an interactive report where they can filter individually down to the LOD of their needs
b) colleagues at management level which need high level data with a few interactive options on their mobile phones when working offline

Both use cases are based on monthly or weekly reports. I wouldn't suggest to create an Active Reports on a daily basis. It's also necessary to keep the amount of data low. Otherwise, the report will not perform well with a heavily increased file size. In my opinion an Active Report is an offline version of a dashboard and therefore should show aggregated data at a higher level.

One of the most important things we've faced with this report type is to name all variables as practically as possible. Depending on how many data cards and links between them and data containers you have on your report it can get messy really quick.

Br
Robert

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Robert Dostal
Team Leader BI
GEMÜ
Ingelfingen
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Original Message:
Sent: Fri December 10, 2021 06:27 AM
From: Jeff Stein
Subject: Active Reports

Good morning everyone!

I attended an Advanced Author Training class last week and was introduced to building Active Reports during those sessions. I have been a Cognos developer for ten years and had not really ever been given a good indication of what they are and how they work. I would like to start developing one or two proof of concept Active Reports in order to see how this data works within our package and our cloud based environments. 

I would like to reach out and see if I could get feedback from other users on your experience with these. I understand the output is the .mht file and I am going off the premise that the security would be based on the credentials of the user who runs and processes the output file. My curiosity is around successful and unsuccessful use cases you may have found, as well as seeing how performance and resourcing limitations are when using. Also, any major development advice or pitfalls to avoid. 

We have a number of clients who might be having us build them 'Dashboards' these days but the consumers of the dashboards are not licensed. They are sending them screenshots or Excel/PDF output of what we are building which 1) brings it's own challenges in formatting and time spent and 2) loses the ability for interactivity. 

I would appreciate any feedback to help prompt me to whether the juice is worth the squeeze to move this up my personal working priority list or not so much.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts! 
Jeff

------------------------------
Jeff Stein
------------------------------

#CognosAnalyticswithWatson