IBM Cognos Administration

Cognos Administration is a central management interface that contains the administrative tasks for Cognos BI. Administrators for IBM Cognos environments are able to control user access to object such as reports, packages, and data sources, as well as access to functionality within the application. It provides easy access to the overall management of the IBM Cognos environment and is accessible through Cognos Connection. Users can access current activities, past activities, upcoming activities, and schedules on the Status tab in IBM Cognos Administration to monitor the server activities and manage schedules.You can use the scheduling capability to grant access to the scheduling functionality independently from the monitoring functionality.

Cognos Administration is organized into three sections:

• Status:Cognos administrator can use the links in this section to monitor activities, server status, and system metrics, and change some system settings.Here the system settings can be altered if needed and certain activities can be monitored and status of server can be monitored.

• Security:Cognos administrator can use the links in this section to define users, groups, and roles for security purposes, configure capabilities for the interfaces and studios, and set properties for the user interface profiles.The users can perform task according to the privileges they have.

• Configuration:Cognos administrator can use the links in this section to set up data source connections, deploy IBM Cognos BI content from one content store to another, create distribution and contact lists, add printers, set styles, manage portlets and portal layout, start or stop dispatchers and services, and change system settings.Here as the name indicates the administrator can configure the system settings,manage portal,configure printers,transfer BI content from one content store to another.

Apart from these tasks you can also perform the following,

• Automating/scheduling tasks
• configuring your database for multilingual reporting
• installing fonts
• adding and configuring printers
• configuring web browsers
• allowing user access to reports from IBM Cognos Connection
• restricting access to IBM Cognos software

Using IBM Cognos Administration,you can also customize the appearance & functionality of different IBM Cognos components.