Reference book: IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

From the editorial review: Develop, deploy, and maintain a complete BI solution across your enterprise. IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence: The Official Guide shows you how to take full advantage of the robust service-oriented architecture and simplified role-based user interfaces. Learn how to create, share, and analyze data-rich reports that lead to increased productivity and better business decisions. Featuring real-world insight and expert tips, this is a must-have guide for IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence users of all levels, from administrators to end users.

Measure and monitor performance using dashboards and scorecards; Assign user roles and privileges; Provide complete and consistent access to a broad range of data sources via Cognos Connection; Use Cognos 8 Go! to extend BI to Office applications, mobile devices, and search engines; Enable business users to create reports with Query Studio; Develop new insights by exploring data in multiple dimensions and perspectives with Analysis Studio; Build Dimensional Reports with Report Studio; Use Event Studio to identify and deliver mission-critical information; Create, modify, organize, and publish a model from Cognos Framework Manager;
Implement sound security measures; Take advantage of the management tools in Cognos Administration to ensure maximum reliability and availability.

We'll review this book soon. You can purchase this book on Amazon or as an eBook.

Disclaimer: The author of this blog is not affiliated with the author or publisher of the above described book.

YouTube find: MB Dashboards for Cognos 8

A UK company called morgan benjamin (lower case on purpose) has developed a sharp looking dashboarding tool for Cognos 8 business intelligence. From the visuals, it seems to integrate nicely into the Cognos suite and is available for all Cognos 8 releases.



Key features:

• Data driven ticker
• Pop up & Transition facilities
• Zoom Functionality
• Links to other Studios (Report Studio, Analysis Studio, Query Studio)
• Animated KPI’s
• Content and functionality Rich Dashboards created in hours not weeks
• Compatible with all versions of Cognos 8
• Leverages your in house report studio skills
• Employs professionally designed graphical layout
• Multiple templates and colour schemes
• Simple to add corporate identity
• Allows users to add comments to dashboards
• Links seamlessly with existing reports, cubes and data sources

I'm most interested in the ability to add comments or annotations to reports although I have read that this type of functionality will be included when Cognos 8.4 is released.