Are you using Cognos BI seriously? Have you seen IBM SDK utilities? Keep in mind that link changes every now and then, I usually have to regoogle it. Some of them are really very good and I’ve used them a few times already. Slowly but surely, IBM is adding a few missing bits to the puzzle.

1. System Overview Diagnostic is very helpful in usual “works in dev environment, doesn’t work in the prod” find the missing tick box games. So when you need to quickly compare all the settings between 5-6 servers — use this tool and then just do file comparison of the output.
2. Dynamic Report Specification Updater (DRU) is a really handy tool to do mass search & replace in reports. I’ve recently inherited a system to support, whose original developers thought that data level security wasn’t strong enough, so they just build up 20 copies of every report with fixed security filters. Now every change has to be reflected in the whole set of reports and DRU does this beautifully. It uses regular expressions, which makes it both powerful and hard to use first time. Over last decade I’ve used regexps numerous times in numerous tools, but I always have to start with tutorial, it’s really unbelievable how you  forget all the syntax after a week. BSPs MetaManager has a lot better GUI for this, though, no need to edit XMLs or write regexps with “[CDATA]”. Not everybody has MM, sigh.
3. Take a look yourselves, there’s even a Copy Report between Servers utility (no need to create folders with only 1-2 report for deployment), Reports Validator and etc.

And while we’re at it, I didn’t notice in what version this cool function arrived into Framework Manager, but you now (in 10 at least) can easily see the reports using a column (query subject, filter, any FM object). You just select the object from FM, press Tools, Show Reports Using and you get the list! I was so sure DRU was the only way, still get goose bumps when I use FM for that now.