Collaborative But Complicated
Updated November 16, 2019

Collaborative But Complicated

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Report Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

We use Cognos throughout our university. It houses shared frequently used reports for areas such as student records, financial aid, and human resources. Cognos serves as our data warehouse. We have connected it to Tableau Server in order to regularly refresh our Tableau visualizations.
  • The prompts in Report Studio are easy for users to figure out.
  • Cognos allows us to publish reports with a live data connection side-by-side with reports that use day-old data.
  • The layout on the screen for changing the properties of a report is overwhelming. It's hard to remember where certain properties live.
  • It's time-consuming to construct a prompt page and to match the formatting/branding of our previous reports. These types of things should be faster and easier.
We used to use Crystal Reports but transitioned our reports to Cognos when Crystal was no longer supported in conjunction with PeopleSoft. Crystal is a more flexible report-building tool for unique needs, but Cognos has better prompts and is a better server-style report repository for many users.
We have struggled to merge data from our PeopleSoft data into a star schema data warehouse in Cognos. It is nice to easily choose whether a report draws data from our warehouse or real-time date.
The access control capabilities work well, and it's easy to share data across teams (commonly accessible reports). Report formatting is more complicated than it needs to be.
Cognos is good for reports that can be built by our data warehouse developers. Since Cognos is a time-consuming piece of software, we use another query tool for quick reporting needs.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
Drill-down analysis
Not Rated
Formatting capabilities
5
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
Not Rated
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated