Conga Grid is a productivity tool within Salesforce that allows users to view, sort, and manage data batches from a single screen. It helps users to find and manage the information and insights needed with fewer clicks and less screen switching. Conga Grid helps its users to save time, improve data quality, get a clear view into needed data, and create a more productive workplace in Salesforce to drive growth across the organization. …
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IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 7.8 out of 10
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IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
If a user has to perform a specific update over many records, don't use a List view... use Grid. It allows users to quickly track their work, set additional formatting preferences and avoid constantly tracking work outside of Salesforce which leads data discrepencies and errors.
IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation
A specific strength of Conga is the ability to easily produce cross-object displays where you can take information like open Opportunities and layer on information such as Activities, Orders, Opportunity Products with all related information being accessible when individual lines are selected. The reading pane functionality is a huge timesaver for reps working lists of records.
Another strength is Conga's ability to allow mass edit/update - for example, you can have a list of leads assigned to you, check the ones you met at a conference, and update a field on their record or assign a task or do an email send right from the list. At the same time, you can select other records, and do the mass update or mass create of tasks that are relevant for them.
IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
In general, Conga is a strong company with a depth of talent in its support team. However, when new releases occur, the changes can be somewhat jarring to users as the interface does not offer the ability to hide or show messages related to the changes - all users get the same messaging from Conga around changes to their tool.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
I've only used Salesforce before and am now using Conga ActionGrid. Although Salesforce is great, it is only used to log candidate information and then log actions that have been performed. With Conga ActionGrid, we are able to log more specific details about candidates, activities and follow up items. Conga ActionGrid provides more tools that would benefit many departments
My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
