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Security in Cognos 8.3.

Christmas present for us — Cognos EP 8.3 is out.

A question for me now is: What will happen to Access Manager, what’s his future? I’ve heard rumors about discontinuation of development\support in near future, I know that some readers have better internal access, so could you please clarify the issue somehow?

So we can now use Cognos namespace to capture planning specific user groups and roles and link group members directly into company’s Active Directory (not via OS Signons). That’d ease security system. We can do it since EP 8.2, but it was buggy and 8.3 beat some of our bugs.

But we need to migrate lot’s of existing customer AM namespaces to Cognos group and such. On current project we’ve had a task of doing things the other way (Cognos namespace -> AM) and it turned to be rather easy with SDK for exporting from Cognos namespace and VBS for importing them into AM. Usual disclaimer: if you want these scripts, drop me a line.

It’s easily done — will Cognos automate it (that’s second question for people with internal access) or we’ll be writing it ourself?  Not a big deal, a day’s work, but why redoing it anyway?

PS: they store user SearchPath in nodestate these days instead of guid ). And write corresponding names in P_REFERENCEDCAMOBJECT table. No more need for view publish to get usernames!

  • Pablo

    Why Cognos didn´t created a replacement of Access Manager to Cognos 8 namespaces if they want to discontinue Series 7 ?

  • http://ykud.com ykud

    Hi, Pablo.
    You can use Cognos 8 BI built-in cognos namespace for replacing User Classes and whole AM functionality.
    You’d need a connection to a LDAP provider (think Active Directory) for users and them organize them into group and define security using these groups.
    And you can use Cognos 7 Namespace (Acess Manager) as a user details source, but you’d better use Active Directory direcly.

  • Pablo

    Hi Ykud,

    With Access Manager it is very ease to navigate on user lists, userclasses, copy permissions between users.
    Now with cognos namespace it is very difficult to do the same without using SDK. Using the cognos connection interface to do security maintenance is a hard work.

    That’s why I claim for an Access Manager version for Cognos 8 Namespace.

  • http://ykud.com ykud

    Hi Pablo.

    I totally agree with you, that it’s easier to administer users via Access Manager than via Connection Web Interface. But that’s mostly about web-browser client vs local application. On the other side, with Cognos Namespace you can forget about necessity to import AD users or add new manually — it’s all managed by ldap provider.

    Yet I’ve received some emails on the topic showing that people are developing thick clients (like AM) for Cognos Namespace, using SDK. So maybe Cognos’d better write an sdk connection from AM to cognos namespace and it’ll be a win-win for all.

  • Sachin

    Hello Yuri,

    I have posted this question at Cognoise http://www.cognoise.com/community/index.php/topic,6455.new.html#new

    I am trying to join 2 tables P_REFERENCEDCAMOBJECT with NODESTATE to derive something. However the camobject ids in P_REFERENCEDCAMOBJECT does not match with any of the columns in nodestate (statechangerguid or dataownerguid or editinguserguid)

    The camids for the same person is different in these 2 tables. Would you happen to know if there is any translation involved? Thanks.

  • L Subramani

    Hi,
    In my current project,we are upgrading from 7.3 to 8.4, so we are confused of how to migrate the current users. I think the steps you have mentioned will be useful and if you can send me the scripts it will be useful.
    Thanks.

  • Omar J

    Hi,
    In my current project, we are upgrading to Cognos 8.4 (64-Bit). Access manager will not work and we need to migrate all users. There are two thoughts; one to use Active Directory and create user groups there and the second is to use Cognos Default LDAP for user groups and use Active Directory for users to get into cognos.
    I need suggestion to what is the best solution?

    Thanks

  • ykud

    Hi Omar.

    Thanks for stopping by.
    I wrote about these 2 thoughts in this post.

    In my opinion — you should try store (or use) as much information as possible in Active Directory because it will be single source of security and it will ease BI admin’s burden. It’s just that Active Directory admins are almost always against this approach. But there are some solutions such as Active Directory Application Mode that can be used.

    - Yuri.

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