The new feature ‘Active Reports’ in the IBM COGNOS report
studio is amazing. The best part of it, the entire active report is saved as
.mht (MHTML --- MHTML, short for MIME HTML, is a web page
archive format used to combine resources that are typically represented by
external links (such as images, Flash animations, Java applets, audio files)
together with HTML code into a single file. ***source --- wikipidia)
Check out all the great
demos out there on youtube.
- Create a simple report, using all the sliding effects
- Run as an active report and save the mht file locally
- Now email this file to your iPad account
- If you have the IBM COGNOS app installed, then when you click the mht file in the email it will automatically open in the app
- Now play around with the report.
Unfortunately the ease of use with active reports is not
great. It is the same problem that I faced while creating COGNOS 8 reports for
the iPad; when you design for iPad on Active Report you need the report to be
designed at pixel level. I think we need these BI tools to scale automatically
for the mobile devices; I know it is tuff but we need to figure this out.
Anyways, I love the sliding effects; sliding prompts and the
new graphs. Awesome!!!!. I have written about this once before in 2010 when
COGNOS 10 was launched but implementing them in full fledge is altogether a
different thing.
Moving along with BI reporting; I believe everyone is behind
the buzz word ‘Big Data’. So am I :).
Should I start blogging about Big Data now????? The last couple
of weeks have been crazy and the brain is full of analysis and reports now; from
discussing data visualization, Big Data, SPSS, BI and ETL. “So much to learn in such a short time.”