The Tivoli Common Reporting product introduced about 3 years back now fills in the reporting requirements for various Tivoli products. It is tightly integrated with various Tivoli products such as Tivoli monitoring, Maximo, Tivoli Provisioning manager and access manager. A new version of this product is available now called Tivoli Common Reporting for Asset and Performance Management 1.3.
I personally think the version number increment is misleading. This product introduces a number of changes and features that should warrant a 2.x instead of 1.x. Anyway, here are few notes about this TCR product.
Report Engine
The TCR 1.3 product uses two report engines for report generation. The BIRT engine (2.2.1) used by the older TCR product is continue to be available in the newer version as well. The reports developed using TCR 1.1.x or 1.2 will work correctly. However, this version of TCR product also gives you additional choice to develop reports using Cognos. There are some very cool features available in Cognos reporting such as on-the-fly report creation by end users, browser based report studio to design reports, etc. While the Cognos reporting is powerful, it also introduces own complexities such as separate data modeling phase and additional components for report design and generation.
Distributed Installation
The new TCR product supports distributed installation meaning TCR components (especially Cognos related components) can be installed over multiple systems for better performance. If you have an existing Cognos setup, TCR can be integrated with your Cognos BI setup to leverage the expertise you already have.
Cognos Components
In addition, the Cognos piece introduces quite a few additional components such as Framework Manager for data modeling, Report and Query Studio for report and query design, Cognos Admin page for administering Cognos report packages, etc. Please stay tuned for an upcoming article on Cognos Reporting for more details on the Cognos BI Reporting terminology.
Report Emailing and Scheduling
While Report Scheduling feature is available in TCR 1.2, the new version provides a report emailing feature as well. However, the feature is limited to ONLY Cognos reports. With Cognos, you can even schedule AND email the reports periodically, a very powerful and useful feature. This feature is not available for BIRT reports but can be custom developed for BIRT reports using scripting.
Please stay tuned for more articles related to TCR 1.3 and Cognos.
2 comments:
Hopefully the ease of both creating and exporting reports will enable the "sharing of reports community" to rise up.
The time and effort needed to create a BIRT report was too large to allow me to polish one off enough to post publicly.
My customers don't look under the hood and see the kludge I've had to write sometimes ;)
Hai did any one worked on creating a Datasource using XMl string for creating a package ,which can be used to Tivoli common reporting.
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