Will Cognos work for client-hosted product? other ideas?

[BoulderRidge]

My dept is building a data warehouse and evaluating web-based reporting tools to put on top of the data. Cognos is a leading contender but here's my concern: the DW/reporting product is not for our internal use--it is for our clients, and will be installed at our client sites because the data cannot leave their hands. So we need a tool in which we can create canned reports and also setup flexible reporting for the users to maximize the DW contents...but after we design and develop all this we will not be hosting or administering it, just supporting it like a good vendor would support what they sold. Any feedback or suggestions would be very helpful.

FYI the previous generation of this product used a custom web app to accept user selections and presented the reports in a Microsoft Report Viewer Control technology; it was a little clunky but it worked...hopefully there are better options available now but I don't know what they are.

THanks,
BoulderRidge B-)

 

[blom0344]

My firm is in the same business We have a canned DWH solution to our own main application and we used canned and specific reports within Cognos 8 for all our clients.
This all works pretty well, the pain starts with customers that have older/newer versions than our development standard. This is a VERY weak point with Cognos, there is no way to tell if reports keep working when you up/down grade!!

By the way ; building prompts (to cover user interactivity) is one of the best features in Cognos 8. It is well designed offering all the features that you may need (type of prompts, cascading prompts, calenders, auto-refresh, caching etc.)

Ties Blom

 

[BoulderRidge]

Thanks for the helpful response!

 

[MPW8]

I'd highly recommend MicroStrategy V9. Less admin, less bulk, more intuitive toolset. Plus it doesn't have this growing IBM monkey on it's back. Just a consideration...

 

[blom0344]

I'll have to second MPW8 on the admin part. It is not very pleasant or easy to work with in Cognos. On the other hand , nothing I have seen looks as good as Cognos output

Ties Blom