Cognos 11.1.6 New Features Demo

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Michael Peter
Sr. Offering Manager
IBM

With over 20 years of technical sales experience with Cognos and IBM, Michael has a deep understanding of the BI marketplace. Building on his varied roles as a field seller, competitive analyst, demo designer and new product evangelist, he now focuses on strengthening IBM’s partner ecosystem for the entire analytics portfolio.

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Q: Any idea which 11.1.x version will end up as the IBM long-term support release?
A: IBM is targeting an early Q3, 2020 release of 11.1.7 for long-term support.

Q: Is R supported in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes, the R runtime will just be another feature in the existing Jupyter support.

Q: Compared to Cognos 11.0.11, does 11.1.6 require more processing capacity?
A: The sizing used for Cognos 11.0.11 should still be relevant for sizing 11.1.6. Some of the new services are more memory intensive, so more memory is better on the report server instances.

Q: Is a Cognos mobile app on the horizon?
A: Yes, the mobile app is targeted for Cognos 11.1.7, which should be sometime in early Q3, 2020.

Q: Are the new table and cross tabs in Cognos 11.1.6 available in dashboards or reports or both?
A: The new table and cross tab controls are available in both reporting and dashboard.

Q: Is the expand and collapse feature available in Report Studio in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes

Q: Is it possible to export to Excel in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes, reports can be exported in Excel.

Q: Where do I access the data table, Excel or report?
A: In the demo we show a list control in a report; however, the data can come from any supported source.

Q: Is Salesforce as a data server supported in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Salesforce as a data source is supported on-premise today. It is targeted to be supported on Cloud in Q3, 2020.

Q: Am I able export to Excel using the data tables in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: No, the new data table doesn’t export to Excel or PDF in this initial release because it’s a JavaScript based object which requires a browser to render technically. Going forward, IBM has put server-side rendering of this data table as a high priority. This includes output to PDF and Excel and maintain expand/collapse that gets converted to a native Excel expand/collapse feature. It will be a large amount of work which may not fit within a single release.

Q: Does the browser side caching refer to the user’s local machine memory in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes, this means that the data set for the controls will be downloaded and cached on the client machine in the browser cache.

Q: We would like fast interactive dashboards, what would you recommend we use, data modules, Dynamic Cubes, Power Cubes or Active Reports?
A: IBM has no plans to drop support for Framework Manager; however, its investment is in data modules. Most modeling tasks can be done in data modules. IBM is working on closing the last few remaining gaps between FM and data modules. The browser side caching in the demo should help the responsiveness when you are interacting with the visualizations.

Q: Our vendors are suppling us APIs to get to our data. Cognos cannot create a connection to an API. Is there anything on the IBM roadmap to change this?
A: IBM is adding support to connect to a REST endpoint as a data source. This is targeted for Cognos 11.1.7.

Q: In the demo, is OLAP the cube source?
A: Yes.

Q: Does the expand/collapse in Cognos 11.1.6 work with Dynamic Cubes?
A: Yes, it will work for any supported OLAP source.

Q: Is the data table available in dashboard in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes.

Q: What is the release date for Cognos 11.1.7?
A: IBM is targeting the release for early Q3, 2020.

Q: When will it be possible to expand/collapse the navigation paths in data modules?
A: This will be available in Cognos 11.1.7.

Q: Are there any changes in the admin console or Framework Manager in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: There are no significant changes to Administration and there are no changes at all to Framework Manager.

Q: Does the AI assistant work for Power Cubes data source and packages CQM or DQM or only with data modules in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Currently, the conversation assistant works for relational packages and data modules. IBM is working on extending it to support OLAP and DMR sources as well.

Q: Does the AI assistant feature for create a dashboard in Cognos 11.1.6 look at a user’s access and present data that the user has access to?
A: Yes, the conversation assistant will always honor the permissions and access rights granted to the user.

Q: is it possible to apply conditional formatting (also hide) to a footer/header in the data table in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: This is possible in reporting, but not yet in dashboard.

Q: Are there new features for data modules when moving content between UAT and production in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: No, there are no new features moving content between UAT and production.

Q: On the Cognos 11.1.6 AI, if I log off and then log back in a week later will it display what I had when I logged out?
A: No, the ML is not session specific.

Q: Can data modules be created from SQL object (hand-written SQL)?
A: Yes, a table can be created in a module using a hand coded SQL statement.

Q: Can Cognos 11.1.6 use SPSS as a data source?
A: There is a capability in SPSS to export a table and generate a Framework Manager package. Beyond that, you could generate a CSV file of an output from SPSS and use that as an input to Cognos.

Q: Is Jupyter Notebooks supported on Microsoft servers?
A: Yes, Jupyter Notebooks are supported on Windows 10.

Q: Does Cognos 11.1.6 have integration with Infosphere IGC (similar to WKC)?
A: Yes, IBM still supports business glossary and lineage for reports.

Q: Are there plans to add more control of whitespace, text sizing and other formatting options to the existing widgets in dashboard in Cognos 11.1.6? We find that many of the widgets require a lot of space to be useful with our data.
A: Yes, IBM continues to improve the overall authoring experience in dashboard with every release.

Q: Have enrichment process improvements been made on Cognos 11.1.6 AI?
A: Yes, IBM continues to make ongoing performance improvements to the enrichment process.

Q: Can we add our own custom content in the IBM Knowledge Center besides what ships with Cognos 11.1.6?
A: This is not available in 11.1.6, but IBM is exploring this feature.

Q: Is it possible for me to see a report preview in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: There is a live authoring mode in report that will show what everything will look like as it is being built.

Q: Is there a predictive analytics tool in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: IBM added forecasting to dashboard in 11.1.4 so it is available in this version as well.

Q: What is the difference between the Users and Explore licenses?
A: The Explore license gives you reporting.

Q: Does Cognos 11.1.6 have parameterized filtering in dashboard?
A: No, phase one of parameterized prompts is coming to data modules in Cognos 11.1.7.

Q: How difficult is the upgrade from a prior Cognos 11.1 version to Cognos 11.1.6?
A: The move from 11.x to this 11.1.6 version should be very straightforward.

Q: Does the data table expand/collapse functionality in Cognos 11.1.6 support Excel format?
A: Currently this is not supported in Excel outputs. However, you can use Excel sheets as a data source for reports and dashboards.

Q: Are there any feature or support changes for Active Reports and Power Cubes in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: No, there are no changes for either Active Reports or Power Cubes.

Q: Is there a slider widget in the Active Reports dashboard of Cognos 11.1.6?
A: No. However, this has been logged as an enhancement request. IBM recommends you add your vote to the request so that the priority can be raised.

Q: Will the slides for this presentation be available on the Senturus website?
A: Yes, you can download the presentation from our website at https://senturus.com/resources/cognos-11-1-6-new-feature-demos/. You can also get the recording and answers to all the question on the same page.

Q: Is Red Hat 8 supported in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes.

Q: Are there any updates to printing a multi-tab dashboard in Cognos 11.1.6? Can dashboards be scheduled to update, saved as a PDF and be emailed?
A: No, dashboards are meant to be interactive, so there is no capability to schedule them. For cases where scheduled outputs are required, we would recommend using a report.

Q: Is it possible to show/hide and customize the look of a filter dock in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: The filter dock will still be at the top of the screen, but you will have the option to hide it by default.  IBM is looking at ways to allow users to customize the look of the filter dock.

Q: Are there any changes in CAFE in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: No.

Q: Is Watson Explorer included in the Cognos 11.1.6 license?
A: No, IBM is not embedding Watson Explorer in this release.

Q: Is AI available for Framework Manager packages (including DMR) and not only for data modules in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: The AI conversation assistant will work with relational FM packages. DMR is coming along with OLAP.

Q: Can we conditionally render a column in the data table in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Not yet, this is targeted for the Cognos 11.1.7.

Q: Do AI features exist in languages other than English in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: The conversation assistant is English only at this point. IBM is working on extending this to additional languages. The natural language generation capabilities and predictive capabilities are available in all supported languages.

Q: Since Cognos 11.1.7 will be a lift-time support version does that mean the next version after that will be Cognos 11.2?
A: Yes, 11.1.7 will be the last release in the 11.1 stream. IBM hasn’t decided what the next version numbering will be.

Q: What are the pros and cons to upgrading to 11.1.6 if we’re on-prem compared to Cognos cloud?
A: All the new features shown in the webinar are available on-premise as well as on cloud. The best deployment option for your organization will depend on your use cases and requirements. Cloud is a great deployment option and can allow you to spin up new projects quickly.

Q: Will Framework Manager still be supported in Cognos 11.1.6 or will we need to migrate to data modules?
A: IBM has no plans to drop support for Framework Manager and your packages will still be supported.  For new projects, we recommend you use data modules.

Q: Are there any updates to the ability to use non-standard/custom maps in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: For geographical maps, the out-of-the-box Mapbox capabilities is what is supported. For non-geographical maps, or schematics, those are available in dashboard and reports as of Cognos 11.1.6.

Q: Do we need to migrate to data modules soon?
A: IBM has no plans to ask users to migrate their existing packages to data modules.

Q: Is there a way for us to automate a schedule refresh to uploaded Excel files using Jupyter Notebooks?
A: You can schedule a Jupyter Notebook to execute a project, but there is no way today to schedule the refresh of an uploaded file from a local workstation.

Q: When will it be possible to use report(s) or report queries as a data source in dashboards?
A: IBM would like to know there is a need, so let them know you are interested by logging an RFE.

Q: What version of Python and R package support is available in Cognos 11.1.6, can we update the packages?
A: A complete list of supported platforms and versions for Cognos 11.1.6 is at:
https://www.ibm.com/software/reports/compatibility/clarity-reports/report/html/prereqsForProduct?deliverableId=F01712C041ED11EA818B9B5C0D21C36D#sw-7

Q: Does Cognos 11.1.6 (or 11.1.7) install cleanly over 11.0.13?
A: Yes, you can install Cognos 11.1.6 over Cognos 11.0.13.

Q: Does data table in report in Cognos 11.1.6 support data modules?
A: Yes, you should be able to use any supported data source.

Q: Is object security available in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes.

Q: Can we add custom visualizations to the dashboard in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes, you can add custom visualizations to dashboards.

Q: Are there any improvements for downloading a dashboard to PDF?
A: Yes, IBM has made performance improvements to downloading a dashboard to PDF.

Q: Does Cognos 11.1.6 support report directly from a data set?
A: You would need to create a data module for the data set.

Q: Can we connect to Azure DevOps Server in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: A complete list of supported data sources for Cognos 11.1.6 is at:
https://www.ibm.com/software/reports/compatibility/clarity-reports/report/html/prereqsForProduct?deliverableId=F01712C041ED11EA818B9B5C0D21C36D#sw-7

Q: Can we do OData query as a data source in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Not yet, this is a roadmap item, so expect to see it in the future.

Q: Are there any enhancements for Active reports in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: There are no changes to Active Reports in this release.

Q: Is Event Studio still supported in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Yes, Event Studio is still supported.

Q: When will the navigation path be available for new crosstabs to expand/collapse nodes?
A: No date has been set yet, but it’s on the roadmap.

Q: Are there plans to decommission Dynamic Cubes?
A: Dynamic Cubes are still supported; IBM has no immediate plans to enhance them.

Q: Is Query Studio supported in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Query Studio is still supported. IBM plans to deprecate Query Studio at some point in the future and will provide plenty of notice before doing so.

Q: Are there plans to include the ability to export to Excel with Pivot tables in the future?
A: IBM recommends you log an RFE for this.

Q: Can we integrate Azure SQL Server with Cognos 11.1.6 integration?
A: A complete list of supported data sources for Cognos 11.1.6 is at:
https://www.ibm.com/software/reports/compatibility/clarity-reports/report/html/prereqsForProduct?deliverableId=F01712C041ED11EA818B9B5C0D21C36D#sw-7

Q: Is there a recommended amount of RAM or CPU for Cognos 11.1.6?
A: There is a sizing guide available for download from the Cognos Analytics community. In terms of memory, 16 GB is the minimum requirement, but 32 GB would be recommended for heavier workloads. With the exception of the client tools (Framework Manager) all of the capabilities in Cognos are accessed via the browser. Therefore, any standard workstation or laptop with a supported browser is sufficient to use Cognos. All processing is done on the server slide or at the database itself, not on the client side.

Q: Is Active Reports still available in 11.1.6? Will Active Reports be eventually deprecated?
A: Yes, Active Reports is still supported in 11.1.6. IBM is working on a replacement for Active Reports and the MHT file format.

Q: On which release we can expect web service as a data source?
A: IBM is adding support to connect to a REST endpoint as a data source, it is targeted for 11.1.7, Q3, 2020.

Q: Does the roadmap for Cognos 11.1.6 include bringing in data quality/score, like what we have in Watson Analytics?
A: Yes, this is on the roadmap.

Q: When will data sets become more robust to support multiple queries and filters?
A: IBM recommends logging an RFE for this to ensure it is aware of the desired use cases.

Q: Can custom visualizations be exported to PDF in Cognos 11.1.6?
A: Not currently, but this is planned for a future release.

Q: Is IBM planning to roll out a custom ML model that we can create and train our users for?
A: IBM has no immediate plans to let users bring their custom ML models directly into the Cognos. However, it will continue to strengthen the integration with Jupyter Notebooks and Watson Studio to allow users to use work they have done in those platforms.

Q: Is there support for editing a portlet (10.2) in future releases?
A: You can edit portal page portlets today using the legacy administration interface that is still in the box with Cognos 11.1.6. IBM has no plans to enhance that functionality as it is included strictly for backward compatibility purposes.

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Welcome to this latest installment of the Senturus Knowledge Series. Today, we’re pleased to be presenting to you on the topic of Cognos 11.1.6 new features including demos before we get into the heart of the presentation a few housekeeping items. You’ll notice that you have the GoToWebinar control panel there. You can minimize that and or restore it using the bright orange arrow. And while the microphones are muted.

0:35

As a courtesy to our speaker. We encourage you to submit questions via the question section. We do answer as many questions as we can and try to answer them all live at the end of the presentation. So make sure you stick around until the end for that. There’s always a lot of great questions particularly in presentations like this one if however were unable to reply immediately. We will cover it in a written response document that we post on senturus.com along with the presentation.

1:05

We always get the question, can I get the presentation? The answer is an unequivocal yes, and if you go to senturus.com and select the resources tab and look in the Resources Library, you’ll be able to find not only today’s presentation. You’ll see a recording and the aforementioned question log. I also encourage you to bookmark that site as it is a very valuable resource with tons of valuable content addressing a wide variety.

1:35

So our agenda today, we’ll do some quick introductions will cover the meat of the presentation what’s new in Cognos 11.1.6 and then stick around while we do a brief Senturus overview, give you some additional generally free resources and the mentioned QA our specific agenda today will cover new features in 11.1.6 specifically in the areas reporting.

2:05

Adding geospatial mapping Jupiter notebook support data modules AI and advanced analytics and the learn panel.

2:16

I’m pleased to be joined today by Michael Peter who’s a senior offering manager of the partner ecosystem data science and business analytics at IBM Canada winning the award for longest job title in history with over 20 years of technical sales experience with cognizant IBM.

2:38

Michael has a deep understanding of the BI Marketplace building on his varied roles as a field seller competitive analyst it’s demo designer and new product you now focuses on strengthening IBM’s partner ecosystem for the entire analytics portfolio. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Michael for gosh. I only want to say how many years now but I think our respective photos belie our ages. My name is Mike Weinhauer, I’m a director at Senturus and I’ve been doing Business Analytics in some form or another for over 25 years now and I host these webinars.

3:13

So we generally like to get a feel for our audience and what their environment or their opinions are like. So we have a question for you today. And that question is what version of Cognos are you currently on? So if you could please vote and are you currently still on eight? Are you on a version of 10? Have you upgraded to version 11.0 or are you on one of the versions of 11.1 at this point?

3:44

So we’ll give you guys a few seconds to answer the question here. I got about two-thirds of you voting get those votes in and then we’ll close this out and share the results back with you all.

3:58

No account or getting up close to 3/4.

4:06

All right, we’ll close it out and then share the results of you so vast majority between a little over 1/2 are up on 11.1. Another quarter of you are back over on 11 and then 16% on 10 and not on 8 so I think that’s probably not too surprising. All righty, great. Thanks for sharing with us your invite information about your environment. And with that I’m going to hand it over to Mr.

4:35

Peter for the core of the presentation Michael the floor is yours. Thank you. Michael appreciate that very long introduction. My title doesn’t get to be a bit lengthy. I will mention I’m actually not in Canada though. I work with the team up in Canada, but I’m actually down in the New Orleans area myself, but I’m really excited to be here today. I love doing these sessions with you guys at Senturus and I am actually joined by somebody in Canada many of you may know Chris McPherson.

5:04

He is our senior offering manager the lead offering manager for the Cognos Analytics product. He is sitting behind the scenes with us here ready to answer all of those questions that we expect to come in. So he’ll be joining us vocally at the end of the session and will be tackling some of those as we go along. So as Michael introduced a lot of new features coming here and 11.1.6

5:29

hopefully most of you know where we are kind of on the journey of you know 11.1 was a very major release for us about 18 months ago and we have been continually about every quarter making a new release sometimes bigger ones, sometimes smaller ones different things going in but they also really have Senturus used around the themes that we built 11.1 to address.

5:55

So the things you’re seeing today keep them the sort of in line with the idea of infusing throughout the entire product looking at our reporting and board journey and how do we make or straddle that line of power and capability that you experience in reporting along with the ease of use that you need in dashboarding and we’re continuing to sort of move each of those toward a Senturus type of idea. So making reporting easier and making dashboarding more powerful. And so you’re going to see some examples of that today also some ideas extensibility. How do we make Cognos Analytics more available and open to use in?

6:36

Junction with other Technologies, so some ideas of that today, you’ll see with what we’re doing with Jupyter Notebooks as well as a couple other things. So with that I’m going to be bouncing back and forth between demonstration and the slides and since you’ve seen a lot of slides already, we’re going to go ahead and start with some demonstration in the reporting area to highlight some of the new capabilities that we put in there. Now as I mentioned, let me just go into full screen here.

7:06

Here as I mentioned and it’s like I’m just going to do a double check here to make sure I am okay. I am still logged in as I mention in reporting. We’re constantly trying to make things more functional and interactive.

7:21

So that reports don’t have to be necessarily static and one of the key things we’ve introduced in this release is something we call the data table and this is going to give you the report authors the ability to insert an object that allows a lot of nested interactivity. This is something that historically people have used maybe JavaScript or something to do well now it’s in a control right within the product and what makes this approach very unique and Powerful is that we are actually using browser side cashing to bring along all the data in so the responsiveness of the control and the data within it is quite good as quickly as I can scroll down or open and close things.

8:04

You’ll see the display change to see the things that you want to see so that gives you an idea just initially of how the performance is being addressed in this. So even with extremely large sets of data, it can handle the performance that you would expect up at the top the control has the ability to have inline filters like in very quickly change what I’m looking at on each of these, you know select the items that I want from a functional standpoint the end user can you know sighs columns to get the things that they need to see their you all?

8:36

Have the ability to include some custom indicators along with the numeric and categorical data that you have displayed. So very functional very interactive now will mention this is only in HTML right now. We do want to get it into PDFs but that is a little bit of a future item.

8:54

So what about creating these going to go into edit mode here and we will see that it’s really it’s nothing different from what you would expect normally if I open my Michael you know in sort of a objects window over here, you’ll see we now have the data container or excuse me data table within the data container folder. If I were to drag that on it looks pretty much like a list. I simply drag the items. I want from my available data sources and it will display as such now the thing that happens so to give the control really is over in the properties.

9:29

So let’s go ahead and select this properly here and we can see some of the individual properties that available to give you the control that you’ve seen me do. So first of all, the grouping in summary allows me to select which group I want to or which columns I want to be able to group and which ones are left over is details. So it automatically segregates what it can you need at least one detail category. So in this case it identified product line and then as I select one of these on and off you will see that it will take away those groupings of those particular elements. It would just simply do something like you see here.

10:06

Filters concern Independence, so I could still leave filter is on even though I don’t have the grouping on that so many of the capabilities you can see here. I just mentioned the ability to the column resizes or the filters as a controllable. Nice little items here the snap to row when I’ve got a big set like this you can see if I just start scrolling. I’ve got the ability maybe to end up with something along the top here that looks like that.

10:30

Well if I don’t want that to happen, just a matter of switching over to a yes, and now when I scroll if I try to stop it’s going to automatically adjust it for me. Just a nice little feature again from an ease of use standpoint a couple of other things to control. Like I have the ability to control what the indicator is are here for my collapse and expand very easy to do and you may notice I do have the ability to control the summary and or where I want these to appear whether as a footer or a summary in the summation.

10:59

So again, just a lot of capability right within this control is we’ve released it today, but also we’re going to continue Expand this to make it more functional as we go forward in the future. So that’s the first item within the new reporting capabilities. The next we’re going to introduce is the idea of drill up and drill down within OLAP sources. So if you’re working with a power Cube or TM one or some of the other multi-dimensional sources that Cognos reports, we now have the ability to do drill down and drill up similar to kind of what you may have seen in the past with products like power play.

11:34

That is I can simply within in the chart I have here if I wanted to drill down. Let’s say on America’s I can double click that. It’s going to drill down on to the next level of the hierarchy and give me the data there. What’s really neat about how we’ve implemented this though is you’ve got full granular level control. So I selected it down at the region level. I also have up here another the other dimension involved is my time Dimension and they intersect in the bars themselves.

12:03

So if I were to drill down for Babylon Q2 of United States, it’s not only going to take me to the next level here in terms of United States, but notice it also drilled down on the time dimension for me. So depending on where I select things. Let’s say I wanted to go back up a level I can drill up just on time while maintaining the drill down on my region Dimension.

12:26

So a lot of flexibility capability there and that automatically pretty much in books when you have a multi dimensional Source another capability we added in to report letting this go round was multi-dimensional our shoes me ability have multi measures on the same chart. So you’ve noticed over here on the right. I did create this from the same query that’s on the left. So as I did the drill Downs this kept in sync, but the key element here was the fact that I’ve got the revenue and sales Target both displayed on the same bar chart and this is available for excuse me column charts and bar charts in this case.

13:02

So introduced introduction real quick there for some of the things we In reporting. I’m going to drop back over to the slides a little bit now and we’re going to introduce some other things come back to demo in just a second. So let’s just go back into full screen mode and just to recap my mouse will find my screen here. We are data tables we talked about these like expanded should expand collapse again. The key thing there is to speed because of the browser side caching. But again, you can read some through.

13:36

Some of this in the deck when you get it talk a little bit about the visualizations multi measures drill up drill down next. We’re going to go take a look at dashboards. And I’m going to spend some time in slides here because in dashboards a lot of the changes we’ve made our little bit little bit more conceptual in some ways virtue of the specific features. Like I just showed you there and the key elements are round the improvements. We’ve made to the UI now, I mentioned that 11.1 release about 18 months ago and dashboards were a huge.

14:06

Part of that in terms of the overall flexibility and capabilities we built into them at the 11th at one level. But we’ve also learned a lot in the past 18 months in terms of the usability how we see users interacting with the original design and we’ve made some pretty significant changes in this release and it’s important to recognize these because when you first go into 1.6, you’re probably at first going to it’s going to be maybe a little foreign so just recognized but I think once you get used to them, you can see it’s definitely a move in the right direction.

14:34

So a couple of these or how we’ve now dock the toolbar at the top that is optional. I’ll show you that in a moment as well as changed how you interact with the visualizations on the chart. It doesn’t have to go in and out of focus mode. It’s going to be available to you on the right hand side of the screen and I can show you that as well in just a minute the other thing little more Funk focused in terms of authoring improvements is the Builder unit formatting.

15:03

Everybody should be familiar with the format capability or the Format dialog you’re on the left. Now. You’ve got the ability to some number labels. So it manifests itself as an additional label on the value the ability to on the consumption side. I mentioned that you don’t have to go into Focus mode when you’re doing the new authoring environment, but we also introduced Focus mode to the consumer.

15:31

So now if I’m on a dashboard that I’m not editing and I want to go in and see something Being in more detail I can do that wasn’t available before and then finally before we get into the demo the ability to handle a expand up expand and collapse in a crosstabs similar to what I just showed you on the data table, but built right into a crosstab in the dashboards. This does work only with OLAP sources at the moment. We do want to introduce with navigation paths, but for the moment again, only the OLAP sources. So let’s again I’m going to drop out of this.

16:06

For a moment and go show you some of these things live that I just mentioned. But again, hopefully that orientation will make it easier to understand what I’m getting ready to show. So let’s now go into our performance dashboard.

16:20

This is just one of the samples nothing fancy here, but as it launches here, you will see first of all a couple of key and on a couple of the specific items that I mentioned at the outset we can see for example, the drill up drill down capabilities here expand and collapse type of thing within the crosstab over here. You see a live example of that that points. I’ll also mention. It’s an upcoming slide. We also introduced the capability to do categorical colorization in your map. So previously our Maps only had a sort of a continuous distribution of colors sort of a heat map looking many cases now, I can use discrete values and change the colors of the map.

17:06

That’s accordingly. So again some of those specific features now with respect to those changes that I was just mentioning to the overall UI you’ll notice that I now have the focus or excuse me, the expand button here allowing me to go into focus and see that singular chart on my display. This would be is going to be very helpful if again if I’m a user needing to to take a closer look at a specific element on my dashboard.

17:35

I don’t Have to be an author or have edit rights should do that the capabilities that you would expect in terms of being able to change the visualization pinning it all of those sorts of things interaction with the filters. Those are now displayed here across the top so very common type of use case for that information.

17:55

Now if I do go into edit mode will be able to take a look at some of those other changes that I was mentioning. First of all notice that the bar up here. We’ve moved some of the things from the try to get rid of that.

18:09

There we are. We move some of the items that were somewhat distributed some were sitting up here in the menu bar as somewhere just hidden behind this made him a little clearer to see so I’ve got my filter pane here. I can turn off and on very easily properties pane still here like we would expect but now notice we’ve got the ability to go to the fields. And as I look at the fields, I’ve now given the specific fields for the visualization that I’ve selected.

18:39

And that allows me then to very easily construct the dashboard. If I open for example, my data sources here on the right. I could very easily drag things over to this without having to open up the focus mode of each individual chart. So I think this is going to make a huge difference in the authoring process make it a bit more streamlined and a lot faster in many cases. Now. We also added a couple of nice things over here in the filter pane.

19:03

If I go over any of the particular elements that I added here I can see sort of the Hierarchy of where this came from in the data sources, you know something like country may exist in multiple data sources that I have and just to be assured of I got it from the right one or if I’m using it in not sure where I picked it from originally. This gives me a clear path of understanding where that particular data element came from. Let’s see. Oh the toolbar as well. Let me close these things down just get rid of that and we’ll get rid of that.

19:36

Now if you remember previously When I clicked on a particular element within the dashboard I’d get a fly out toolbar click again, it goes away and sometimes that clicking. Can I get a little bit crazy? So what we’ve done again keeping sort of Industry standards a little bit more we’ve put the dashboard menu bar now here docked it along the top. So it’s always there as I change the particular chart it automatically adapts to the type of chart that I’m using and so that it’s dynamic in that way.

20:09

If I did like the old way though, it’s still available. I can undock it and it will now appear here again turn on and off depending on how I click but most of the people that we’ve worked with and I myself as well or finding to have it up here at the top is just more natural in the way that we’re using a lot of products. Now what hasn’t changed?

20:28

So just be aware that the ability to interact with specific elements of a chart you still with the right Clique can get your toolbar there for those specific things that I to that one single element.

20:42

All right. Let’s see and we talked a little bit about Focus mode early earlier. I’m just trying to check my list here. Make sure I’m hitting everything. All right, so I think that covers most of the capabilities we talked about in dashboards and the next thing they’ll before I go back into the slides. I’m going to go ahead and go a little bit into the next section which is around some of the things that we’re doing with the AI changes.

21:08

So I mentioned at the outset that AI Making it really pervasive within the product is something we’re always doing and we’re always looking at ways that we can improve how it works. I’m going to go let’s use this data module. I’m going to create a new dashboard to start on this one and illustrates something that we’ve been wanting to talk about doing since the beginning of 11.1 and it is finally here and that is applying the machine learning models to individual users now.

21:42

When we introduced 11.1 we brought with it the concept of machine learning behind the visualization that is used when a user selects. Oops. Let me get both of those are when a user adds data. So I’m adding age and food and drink prep here fairly simple example, but what it’s doing now is using the built-in machine learning models to figure out that okay given the distribution of this data. I have lots of Ages.

22:09

This point chart is probably the Best way to display this so that’s the models that we built into the product making that decision. But what we’ve added here now is the ability to learn the user preferences. So if for example I decide that, you know what I really want to see this as a crosstab I can simply make that selection now, it’s already in the background started its learning process and it’s learn that I’ve got a preference now for crosstabs. It’s not going to apply it though just yet.

22:42

And I’m going to just show you how this works a little bit. I’m going to go ahead and add this again and you’ll see if I add this in a second time. It’s going to stick with this chart in the main reason is that I haven’t clicked save yet. So while it started picking up these cues, it hasn’t committed them in the reason we don’t want to commit it. Yes is because I might be continually changing things. So until the user says yes, I like this save it’s not going to apply the learning let’s do an undo real quick. I’m going to click save now and doing the same thing up. I got to give it a quick.

23:12

Name here. I’ll just leave it at new dashboard. And now that it’s saved if I click the age and the food and drink prep. I will bring that in and you’ll see it will bring it up now as a crosstab and it will do that. In fact with any data that it finds similar. So if I take for example, all of these are kind of similar is just take eating and drinking since that kind of goes with food and drink you’ll see it will bring this up also as a crosstab whereas previously it would have used the other one.

23:42

Now before you start thinking, oh, well is just picking up. The last one there actually is a lot of machine learning going on because when I was playing with this earlier the subtle it looks at the type of charts that I’m picking compared to the originals and starts making deductions. I found that while a crosstab for example will pick up after one save if I had selected a table instead, it actually took two instances to saves of that or to usages of that before we recognize L. Yeah. He probably wants this more often.

24:12

There’s it’s really kind of cool how it’s doing all of that to learn my preferences based on the models. We’ve built in now. I’ve got the control over that if I go into my preferences, you’ll see that I can let’s go to my personal settings into advanced. We’ve now got here at the bottom a i learning I can turn this on and off for myself also an administrator can turn this on and off for the entire environment. And if at any point I decide that this isn’t something that I like what it’s learned from.

24:42

I’m doing I want to start over I simply click the delete usage. And now if I were to add this again, it’s going to go ahead and give me the original point source chart. So AI learning finally coming in at the user level so you can just need a sip of water.

25:01

All right. Now the other area that we’ve been focused on the AI and hopefully everybody’s had a chance to play with this is the assistant. This was the natural language dialogue. We introduced in 11.1 that allows you to use just simple word questions to do things versus the construction affect approach that I use to create these crosstabs.

25:20

You see here one of the things we introduced in a couple releases ago if I can type is this command create – dashboard now the dashboard is created on its own is my typing is not good today. If the create a dashboard on its own what it would do is use all of the way I built into the load process that it will go in and determine the things are important and of correlations and it will try to adapt and create a dashboard for you based on those as best it can be and it would often reveal some interesting things.

25:57

But at the same time since it had really no guidance. It would sort of sometimes could bring up some things that maybe weren’t that useful. So what we’ve added in this release is the ability to get more specific.

26:09

So if I wanted for example to say, I want to see a dashboard for average earnings let’s add for people that are greater than 30 in age Oops. Why can’t I type today? There we are.

26:34

And let’s also add in another context. Let’s say for female so I can take this entire set of context from this dashboard this data set I have on time usage. It’s going to process that through the natural language. And first of all, make sure that it can determine it and it’s like yeah, I can do this.

26:53

It will create a dashboard that has what it found based on its machine learning in the models it ran on things that are interesting relevant important to understand our or things that were statistically significant around all of that context. So you’ll see that focusing on weekly earnings the age range notice it started at 30 if I were to look at the filter here, you can see that it’s only thought I should have picked up female.

27:20

Maybe it didn’t but normally it would and it will take that context in just give you a much more advanced and focus dashboard to start with and what Use the create dashboard on its own individually or with the context the key idea here is to start revealing things that you may not have thought of if you’re not sure where to start and that’s a huge Advantage with the product over other tools or even just an approach where I’m just putting things on the screen because again, it will reveal things that I often would not have considered in my analysis. So nice capability there the last thing I’m going to show you here. Let’s see.

28:03

What do I want to do I need to drop back out to the welcome Rich screen real quick going to use a different data set on this one. I’m going to use the Explorer actually with this one to show the last AI capability that we kind of introduced here.

28:19

And this capability is really around the idea of Time series analysis is you know, we’ve done a lot of work in the Explorer capability that is added the ability for it to offer you more guidance and information and let’s see. I’m just going to go in here and we get some data on the screen here real quick.

28:42

I’m going to use let’s just say a customer lifetime value and we’ll use this expiry date the drag that in and what this is going to do you given I’ve got a ton of data in this data set is give me a visualization looks like this and you can see how in this case customer lifetime value varies a lot and it’s in many ways, you know, Hard to make any significant sense of this with all the data points I have going on but with the AI capabilities built-in here notice what we’ve added or some capabilities like this. I can see that the values have a strong upward Trend. I may not have noticed that before I’ve got, you know, and certainly is not immediately visible from this and there’s an upward Trend built into this some of the other things here. There’s two data points on 11.9 and 11.3.

29:33

Kind of can see these two that are now showing to be statistically outliers based on this or unusually high but again given the normal flow of this data. I may not have really zoned in on that. So any time they can find time series insights like this. It’s going to start showing the part again of the AI that we built into this. I’m going to do a quick time check. I think I’m doing okay, but I think we’re going to pop back over to the slides now and take a look further at those and there we are.

30:03

Go to some other things now some of the things I’m going to show you today or we’re going to use some sort of inline recordings of the slides themselves. Just a little bit easier think we’re going to hit some of those as we go along now. So we talked about this the online collapse and expand in the dashboards. I showed you the new Geo spatial mapping capability with the categorical colors. We talked about that. These are some slides on the learning that we just mentioned in the AI.

30:34

As I mentioned that as I was talking about how in my own experience different charts learn faster or slower depending on how it related to our recommendations. So a lot of sophistication in that we talked about the new dashboard creation. We talked about the natural language insights and I didn’t show you this one. This one’s not great demo. So I’ll just mention it here. One of the things we added in this capability was a really new release.

31:04

Is a subtle change in the types of measures that we do address in a data module you’ve got the ability to have calculated measures inside a table component. But you also have the ability to create Standalone calculations that may span several tables. Those are all thin or will be represented. Typically at the top of the chart like Revenue existed here previously I would not use those stand-alone measures in this release.

31:33

They do so any place where any other measure typically would be used like in a relationship diagram that you see here. Now those can be applied those can be used and some of the other Advanced analytics features and things of that nature again, unless you specifically have these you’d never notice it was happening but it’s important to know that if you ever had hit that as a limit before you shouldn’t see it in the new release now data modules one significant change we’ve made in data modules.

32:04

This release is how we deal with new data elements that exist in the source data. So you can see the video is kind of going along here. It’s going to Loop through I’ll mention it. But previously, you know, if you wanted to add if you had new data it was no easy way to do it. You kind of had to add the entire table over it would then sort of resolve. Okay? Okay, here’s all the new things in now, we’ve got the ability to quickly see the elements that are new. I’ll let it cycle back around here in the video. It’s talking about the metadata here.

32:34

I’ll mention that in a moment. But as you go through the elements is where we getting into here, you know in this example countries not into in there so I can click the used items or unused items. It will highlight those whether it’s an individual data element or an entire table as we see here when product and allowing to move those over easily and on the left, you can see some of the things that examples of when it’s useful. But again, just a nice change to the overall UI.

33:04

As I mentioned earlier the other item on the screen, the reload metadata gives you the ability instead of having to do that a data connection level. I can now do that at a data module level. So it a lot of flexibility now exist for people that are maybe don’t have rights to do the types of management or administrative stuff at a data connection level now available for them here. All right. So let’s keep moving next thing.

33:28

We’re going to talk about our Jupiter notebooks and this is an area where we’re talking about the extensibility of Cognos analytics and you may be aware that in released thought to about a year ago. We introduced Jupiter notebooks to the on-premise and but it was limited to python in the new release. We are going to make available support for are so the same way you could go in and code in Python previously.

33:53

You can now use our code and get the same sort of interactivity and capabilities that exist here and if you’re not familiar with this, I do encourage you to go take a look because You’ve got data scientists on your in your environment and want them to get more integrated to the Cognos analytics activities. This is a great way to do it because you’re the notebooks can be used or can access data sources from the Cognos environment. They can act as a data source for the cognitive environment the charts like you see here with this scatter plot can be put right within dashboards. So that interactivity level brings a lot of power from your data science Community right into the Cognos.

34:34

The Cognos world. All right, keep moving here. Another extensibility that we’re having our is coming out in this release is the idea of the Watson analog excused it Watson knowledge catalog integration. Hopefully people are aware of Watson or adobe Casey keep it easy there. It’s a big part of our Cloud pack for data environment as well as a standalone, but this is a enterprise-class catalog.

35:04

Environment for managing all different types of data sources and connections and credentials and things like that. And what we’re doing now is by integrating it with Cognos. You can now leverage all of the dirt data server Connections in WKC directly.

35:20

That means I don’t one connection into the WKC environment will enable all of the connections it has defined so there I could have a hundred connections and WKC and with one Apple Action, I can now make all of those available along with all of their credentials immediately available in Cognos analytics. So I don’t have to go set them up individually. This is one of the first integration points. We’re going to see with Watson knowledge catalog some of you’ve been around for a while. We used to have into some of the predecessors of WKC, we had sort of lineage capability and things like that.

35:56

You’re going to see those sorts of things come coming in the future as well with this and I think we’ve got enough time to see I got this. This actually is a demo we can kind of walk through and this is showing the cloud pack for data and the catalogs you can see various catalogs available within this environment is scrolling down just to find one that he’s looking for and again, this isn’t WKC there’s a Teradata connection in here that I want to maybe want to make use of in Cognos analytics.

36:28

All the credentials are already in place the connection information to the database or all there. So now in Cognos analytics, all the administrator has to do is then connect to that particular Watson knowledge catalog now, you’ll see in addition to the list here. The external catalog option is now available simply giving it the URL to that particular server. Give it a new name here. He’s can provide some of the additional credential information while he doesn’t sign we take a sip of water.

37:05

And then as it goes along you’ve now with that connection been able to access any of the schemas that are available to in that particular catalog and you can see I think maybe using a slightly different one here because he’s got a bunch that are in that see a test. He’s looking for the one that has the Teradata connection. He’s going to load the metadata from that particular connection inside WKC, he’s looking down again.

37:30

This is the recording versus Live so in this case again, you can see all of those he’s found the one where its showing the load process happening and in a moment, you’ll be able to see all of the tables that that brought into the picture. So once I’ve got all of these tables available showing here as a connection, it’s available inside Cognos analytics as well. I’m going to go ahead and move forward. That’s just the last part of the video.

37:55

Alright, the last thing we’re going to talk about here is the learn panel and this is something to come back into the demonstration for real quick.

38:04

This is you know, when we talk about lots and I’ll issues in Cognos analytics the One of the key things that we’re always trying to do is increase the usability and obviously the way the product works is one aspect of it.

38:18

But also how a user gets information and guidance of how to use the product is an area that we’re constantly looking to improve we’re constantly getting new, you know readouts and data in terms of how people interact with the system to make changes in the thing that we’ve done differently in this release is improve what we have over here in terms of the learn panel now previously, you know if I clicked on the question mark is to forgot to take me out to the knowledge Senturus documentation or something like that now right here in line. It can give me access to things that are specific to where I am in the product. So I’m currently on the welcome screen. And in that context it gave me things like getting started with Cognos analytics. It may give me videos that it finds useful blog postings anything that is relevant to what I’m interested in you know, so this is what it shows for example at the High.

39:10

Level if I go into let’s go back over to our dashboard here. And if I now click on this you’re going to see it’s looking again, and now instead of you know, how do I get started? How do I create my first dashboard if I were to look for something specific say like calculations? It’s going to look for information. Not just on calculations put in calculations in the context of a dashboard. If I did this on a reporting screen, it’s going to look at it in the context of reporting.

39:39

So I think this is a huge step forward and making sure that the end user can find the type of information. They want having it in line, you know the ability to see it right here come over in the screen do what I need to do. All of that is really going to make it a lot easier for users to get started. And I think that is the last demo component the last piece of information I have before we want to turn it back over to Michael is on license.

40:10

Seeing and okay, that was the learn panel information. I think we covered all of that. And so finally this is not really a feature but I think a really important change that anyone that currently has analytics user licenses needs to go take a look at and that is you now have access to use the Explorer experience it get if you haven’t looked at this before.

40:36

Hopefully you have given it a spin out in the product for 18 months now personally, I think Explorer is the biggest piece of 11.1 the most important piece of 11.1 that we’ve actually released not to diminish the dashboard capabilities or all the things we’re doing reporting. But my point is that when you look at how AI is now being brought into the picture of allowing or enabling more users to do true data analytics. The Explorer experience is where that happens.

41:05

You saw that time series analysis with all of that rich detail over on the right hand side, but guidance that explore gives you the fact that you can now make this available to far more users year environment without any additional costs. We used to have to upgrade to an analytics Explorer license this now opens up that capability to a much broader audience and I think it’s going to make a huge difference in how your users, you know, really get value out of the Cognos environment. So with that I think Michael I can turn the Baton back over to you and I’ll go to the next slide great. Thank you very much and stick around everyone. We’ve got a ton of great questions.

41:40

And continue definitely submitting those into the question pane a lot of exciting new functionality there. If you need help trying to harness that capability, there’s no one better to help you with that. Then the folks here at Senturus has whether it’s helping to create great effective dashboards or reports and leverage some of this new functionality whether it’s implementing new functionality like the data modules migrating from framework manager packages to data modules.

42:10

Including things like upgrades and migrations so we can help you with both quick starts as well as full implementation and then we can help train you on all of that great functionality both with public and or private courses all the way through to self-paced learning and mentoring with complete corporate programs and discounts. They are in real quickly about Senturus.

42:34

We concentrate our expertise solely on business intelligence with a depth of knowledge across the entire BI stack on the next slide our clients know as for providing clarity from the chaos of complex business requirements, Myriad ever-changing disparate data sources and constantly moving targets and changing regulatory environments. We’ve made a name for ourselves owing to our strength and Bridging the Gap between it and business users. And we deliver solutions that give you access to reliable analysis ready data across your organization enabling you to quickly and easily get answers at the point of impact.

43:10

In the form of the decisions you make and the actions you take on the next slide. Our consultants are leading experts in the field of analytics with years of pragmatic real-world experience and expertise advancing the state of the art. In fact, we’re so confident in our team and our methodology that we back our project with a 100% you industry unique money back guarantee.

43:37

On the next slide we’ve been at this for a while. We have been focused exclusively on business intelligence for nearly two decades at this point and we work across the spectrum from Fortune 500 down to mid-market companies solving business problems across many different Industries and functional areas, including the office of finance sales and marketing manufacturing operations. HR. Our team is both large enough to meet all of your business analytics needs it small enough to provide personalized attention.

44:06

A couple other great resources here that we encourage you to visits senturus.com/resources for hundreds literally of free resources from webinars all the way to our fabulous up-to-the-minute easily consumable blog. We talked about our complete training offerings as I mentioned before in the three major BI platforms Cognos Analytics as well as Power BI and Tableau are ideal for organizations. That might be running one or more of those platforms.

44:36

Both simultaneously or those moving from one to the other owing to our deep expertise in all three of these platforms. We can provide training in many different modes as you see here from personalized tailored group sessions to individual one to a few or one-on-one mentoring to instructor line courses and self-paced learning and we can bundle that all up for you and mix-and-match to suit the needs of your organization.

45:01

And then last one here before we get to the QA. If you on the last slide we encourage you to get in to visit our website. We have hundreds of different free resources on our website ranging from product reviews to tech tips to our fantastic easily digestible blog to product demos and of course a list of upcoming events with great webinars like this one.

45:23

And so with that we’ll go to the last slide here and we’ll get to the QA and as you can as I mentioned before we have a ton of questions, hopefully Michael and Chris. You’ve had a chance to kind of go through those and I’ll let you guys tag team here if you want.

45:45

Chris, I’ll let you start off on that. I really haven’t had a chance to look through them yet. Okay. Sure. So I mean we’ve had a lot of questions around when you know 11.1.6 is going to be released. You saw some great new features that Michael showed for the past hour. I’m pleased to say that we’re expecting to have it in market tomorrow. So something to look forward to for a Friday. You can go and download 11.1.6  tomorrow the webpage page should also be updated.

46:12

So you’ll be able to see the latest supported environments browsers and versions of data sources and so on so that should all be tomorrow.

46:21

Just on a topic of our releases and things like that. There’s also been a number of questions around long-term support release and whether this is going to be our long-term support release, so no 11.1.6 will not be the long-term support release, but we have decided that the next release 11.1.7 will be the long-term support lease. So we just finished planning out what will be in that release and the timing and we’re looking at an early Q3 target for that.

46:47

So sometime in the July timeframe, that’s what we’re targeting for that next long-term support release in terms of when 11.1.3 the existing LTS that’s in market when that will be kind of come out of support. We’re looking at end of March 2021, so that should give customers between six and nine months overlap and to be able to plan their migrations and get all of those things in order.

47:16

Just looking down the list. We’ve got some questions around our data science supports. So there’s a question around supporting our and whether this would require Docker like Jupyter.

47:25

So it will we were just be adding like today the notebook support that we have is supports python only and we’re extending that to be able to support our so you need to same infrastructure that you know, the same install and configuration that you would use today for Jupyter, but we will also support our Related to that. We have a question around notebooks being supported on Microsoft versus Linux. And yes, I believe it was as of 11.1.5 we supported the Jupyter notebooks running on Windows the version that we’re supporting today is Windows 10, but I think the team are looking at expanding that conformance to props cover off some Windows Server versions as well.

48:14

There was a question around 11.1.6 verses 11.0 and the memory and resource requirements. I know our current recommendation as a minimum is 16 gigs of memory for running that obviously more is better, but I wouldn’t expect to see wholesale changes in requirements for 11.1.6 versus our previous versions of 11.

48:39

We did, you know require more capacity and more memory moving from 2.11 but in terms of our sizing we haven’t changed our sizing guidelines significantly in the past in the past year.

48:54

There was a question around excuse me a mobile app. And is there a new mobile app on the horizon? So I’m pleased to say that there is I know some of you probably have seen prototypes of it or perhaps designs because we’ve had our design team in a number of customer partner events over the past year and a half getting feedback on the design. So we’re finally at a point where we’re ready to roll that out. We have, you know, kind of a limited beta going on starting I think end.

49:23

People are met first just literally a couple of customers and then the plan is to have it rolled out with our 11.1.7 release so early in Q3 sometime in the July timeframe. So this will be a brand-new. It’ll be new for those of you who haven’t heard or seen it. It’s a brand new mobile app designed from scratch. It’s completely different to the legacy mobile app that we have the market today.

49:49

It’ll really be focused on high interactivity and you know it have a lot of the same way. The capabilities that Michael talked about that are available in the using browser in the full product. So the conversation assistant will be there. You’ll be able to ask questions and generate visualizations and content using the mobile app will also be able to pin visualizations and create, you know favorites list that you’ll be able to track it will have alerting and thresholds and all kinds of other really cool things.

50:23

So Yeah, I’m pretty excited about it and can’t wait for Q3 to come along so that we can get it out there.

50:33

So there’s a question around Salesforce as a data server. So we do actually thought we did support that. So I did a quick check on our conformance page and we do support that today on premise. We don’t support it in our Cloud versions we are looking at supporting it on the cloud version as of 11.1.7 so that is something that has been targeted for that Q3 release that I just mentioned. So is available on-prem and coming soon to the cloud.

51:02

So there’s a question around browser side caching. And does this refer to the local machine? So yes, it does the interactivity that you’re seeing.

51:09

It’s we’re actually downloading some of the data to hold into the browser cache locally on the client machine so that you have that snappy responsiveness that Michael showed so that you can you know expand and collapse and apply filters and reorder things and so on without having to make continuing making calls back to the server which will introduce latency and so on so yes that is being process locally on the client machine They’re never questions around data modules and framework manager and whether you know everything needs to be done in data modules or whether we’re you know, what our plans are really around supporting framework manager moving forward. So what I would say to that is framework manager still 100% supported. We have no plans to deprecated or and supporting it works very well. And you know, I know customers have a lot of investment in it.

52:04

We do we are trying to gradually enhance how we some of these news AI capabilities for an example, you know, it’s a struggle with DMR models for example, so we are looking to close some of those gaps and do a better job of supporting framework manager packages. Now having said that the new features that we introduced and The Innovation that will be we coming up with that will go into data modules as I mentioned Framework Manager’s a very pretty mature product.

52:32

It does what it does very well and it’s the right absolutely the right tool for certain scenarios, but you know gradually over the past several releases been closing the gaps between data modules of framework manager. And I think that we’re at a point where you know, most use cases could be some decided or excuse me address using data modules.

52:53

I know there’s still a couple of gaps there, you know, one being multilingual support and some Advanced parameter maps and so and so on but, you know, the majority of these cases I think can be satisfied using data modules and I think we were there a year ago, but I feel like we’re at that point now.

53:14

So there’s a question around exposing data via APIs and whether we have anything on the road map to create a connection to an API, so an 11.1.7 we will be we are targeting supporting mark logic and as the data source and we will be expanding our support for web services as a data source from there. We had to start with one. So that’s the one we’re starting with but that will be sort of the first step in, you know in a longer Journey around supporting those types of data sources.

53:44

There was a question, which I imagine was around some of the machine learning that Michael showed but it wondering whether this was you know, Watson machine learning or one of those Watson APIs. We have developed all of this machine learning in the house the smarts that Michael showed, excuse me, the smarts that Michael showed were all developed by us.

54:07

We always do look at the various other APIs that are available through IBM whether it be lots of guys are elsewhere in the research organization. And you know, we will take advantage of those when it makes sense to but much of the smarts that you’re seeing were all developed by the Cognos team internally.

54:27

So there was a question around the AI assistant working for power Cube sources and packages with either C am R DQ M. So as I mentioned earlier, we do support framework manager packages for the AI conversation assistant. This really does work quite well with relational packages.

54:44

I know we have some work yet to do in supporting OLAP sources both through the conversation assistant and in the Explorer, I know the capabilities there are fairly limited today with with OLAP and dimensional sources, but we are In hard on addressing that you know, one of the first things we’re going to be doing around a lot supporting making the whole experience. They’re better for the smarts. He’s around extending the forecasting and predict new drivers to support will have sources so that will make you know drive a lot of value in both dash-boarding and in the Explorer Studio.

55:20

So lots more to come there we are, you know doing a lot of work in general around having a better support for OLAP sources, you know, the major sort of breakthroughs or enhancements we’ve done in the past couple of releases have been around the table control that Michael showed and the crosstab so that you have a much more responsive much more flexible much more robust table and crosstab that will give you a much better analysis experience.

55:46

So, you know, we have done a lot of work there but we Is that we need to do more in the smarts area to bring that level of support up to where it is with relational sources.

55:59

There was a question around the AI system feature that we have around creating dashboard. This was something that we introduced 11.1 for and we’ve been continually making it better. But for those of you are not familiar with it in addition to just asking questions of the AI assistant and then generating visualizations, you can actually say generate dashboard and what it’ll do is it’ll look at you know, the data source that you’re currently interacting with in the assistant it’ll look at the columns and things that you’ve been using and it’ll lay out a multi-tap dashboard for you based on.

56:28

That data source in some of those selection criteria. All of this is done with respecting your user permissions and your access. So, you know everything we do in everything we ever adjust your we do in the product security and access is of Paramount importance. So we will always check to see what assets whether the user has access to these assets or whether these filters should be applied because of the, you know processor level security that’s in place, you know that rest.

56:58

Sure, that that will always be the case. So there’s no chance that someone will be able to generate content using data assets that do not supposed to see.

57:12

So there’s a question around dash-boarding. So largely wondering about making the layout options more granular and the ability to limit the amount of white space between controls, you know, they pointed out a an example where the KPI widget for an example is a great, you know, they’re useful widget, you know looks great works great, but there seems to be a lot of wasted white space around it. So we are definitely continuing to work on making the dashboard way more flexible in terms of formatting.

57:42

Pulling the size of fonts. We’re looking at adding additional fonts. Just you know the ability to lay things out better and control the amount of real estate that’s used by the Legends and things like that. So we are, you know working on doing that and we try to get better a little better every release. I think you’ll find that 11.1.6 will be better than what you had in 11.1.5.0 and I know there are a number of items targeted for 11.1.7 that will make it even better.

58:06

So, yes, we definitely know that we have some things we can still improve in that area and we’ll be doing that in the coming releases Discord on those are the ones that I had highlighted but I see a number of them coming in. There was a question around upgrade and you know, whether the move to 11.1.1.6 would be you know, or eleven one would be more difficult. If you’re moving from any version of 11 to any other version of 11. I mean, of course you need to go up rather than back but moving from one version of 11 to another version 11 is very straightforward.

58:40

I’ve talked to customers about this all the time and I know there’s a mix of folks who some install Hot which you can do now and 11 but others still like to stand up a new environment, excuse me next to it and then gradually move their content over, you know, like they’ve always done so, you know, both approaches are perfectly fine, but I wouldn’t expect you to have any issue moving from one version of 11 to another moving from 10.2 to 11, you know, we did make a lot of changes so I would you know, there may be a little more involved in moving from 10.22 to 11. You don’t have that installed over top, you know, we’re talking.

59:15

Talking about a new report viewer in some cases. You keep moving your reports from static to interactive in some cases. So maybe a few more things to consider maybe a little more testing required moving from 10 to 11. But anyhow, as I said any eleven to eleven upgrade should be very smooth.

59:37

Now, I know we’re at the top of the hour Michael. Yeah, maybe all of these questions are going to be recorded and we’ll get back to these unanswered ones individually, right? Yeah. I think that sounds that sounds fine. So I’ll get that over to you. So I’m going to advance the last slide first.

59:54

I want to thank both of you for taking time out of your identity busy schedules to provide our audience with a great presentation and some valuable information when I think everyone in attendance today for taking some time out of your day to learn a little bit from Senturus, and we hope you’ll visit us over at our website at senturus.com. Give us a call at the triple-eight number there or email us at [email protected] if we can be of any assistance with your analytics needs. So we hope to see you on another event soon. Hope you’re all taking care of yourselves and surviving various forms of quarantining and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Bye now.

 

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