Go! Dashboard Install Fun

In a surprise twist I was successful at installing IBM Cognos Go! Dashboard. Why the surprise? Go! Dashboard is not one of the easiest installs from Cognos. Initially, here were the steps I followed:

• Install Cognos Go! Dashboard
• Change the portnumber from 8080 to 8085 in the system.xml
• Generated the WAR file
• Deployed it to the Tomcat server
• Changed the Gateway URI in Content Administration
• Generate a service

And Go! Dashboard replied: "The IBM Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0x0)."

With some persistent investigation I found the following workaround:

First, I added the JAVA_HOME environment variable in the ..\cognos\c8\dashboard\bin\services.bat:

set JAVA_HOME=C:/Program Files/cognos/c8/bin/jre/1.5.0

Next, instead of generating the service, start the startup.bat file in the C:\Program Files\cognos\c8\dashboard\bin directory (default file location). After this the Tomcat server windows are spawned and Go! Dashboard actually seems to work (and everyone is happy).

IBM is looking at Sun

There is breaking news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. This could be good news for the open source community especially with projects like Open Solaris. Also - IBM is heavily into Java and development of products using Java so I can see a real benefit in this area for them. Not sure what this does to Sun's recent cloud announcement...

Is $6 billion too much?