Our partners at IBM have enhanced their BI solution with their latest Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.4 long-term release. This is the final release to include Cognos Query Studio, Cognos Analysis Studio and IBM Cognos Workspace. If you have been wondering about upgrading, now is a great time. The update –with improved visualisation reporting and performance improvements – has been well-received by our Cognos customers. So, let’s take a look at what makes IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.4 stand out from their previous releases and other BI solutions on the market.
What is Different about Cognos Analytics 11.2.4?
Microsoft Teams Functionality
In the Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.3 release, the most striking and exciting innovation was the ability to share content via Microsoft Teams. Building on this functionality, in the 11.2.4 release you can now add a tab with an embedded report from an external Cognos Analytics environment. On any platform, Teams users can then perform interactive analyses of the report without having to log in to Cognos Analytics themselves.
In Cognos Analytics 11.2.4, when you share a report or dashboard via Microsoft Teams, you can now send the content to up to 10 channels, group chats, or individual recipients. Each recipient receives their own Direct Message that contains the content you are sharing. With people checking their Microsoft Teams account more frequently than their overflowing email inboxes, this makes sharing and consuming data faster and easier for your entire organisation.
Natural language narrative insights
In this release, IBM has made it easier to access visualisation insights with their upgraded Natural Language processor. The CoreNLP suite was upgraded from version 3.7.0 to 4.5.1. The new auto-generated narrative insights are in natural language, making it easier to read and understand these insights. Now users can easily visualise insights that help them to explain the data, find outliers and key drivers that facilitate and accelerate data analysis.
Improved Dashboards Reporting
AI-assisted dashboard and visualisation creation make data exploration easier than ever, users at any expertise level can get the answers they need. Users will benefit from dashboard enhancements that will enable greater control and flexibility. One key improvement is the new zoom feature. This gives authors the ability to set a default zoom for the dashboard or let consumers adjust the zoom level themselves using Zoom to 50%, Fit to width or Fit to page.
With this release, the following new properties are also available:
- New Image service
The Image service allows Cognos Analytics reports to render maps and other visualisations into PDF and Excel formats. In previous releases, these visualisations were available only in HTML format. - Narrative insights in dashboard visualisations
IBM Cognos Analytics now displays narrative insights in dashboard visualisations that help you see meaningful aspects of the chart’s data in natural language. - Zoom levels on the dashboard canvas
In Cognos Analytics dashboards, you can specify a zoom level in which view the dashboard canvas. - Zoom bar in bubble, line and column, and scatter visualisations
The zoom bar allows for horizontal scrolling in a visualisation. - Showing value labels in visualisations
You can show value labels in line visualisations and line and column visualisations so that the data values are clearer. - Disabled part of top/bottom calculations
You can no longer create a top/bottom calculation that references a different fact table than the metadata items that are used in the visualisation.
Our Takeaway
We are excited by the future direction of IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.4 and especially look forward to the advances in the next 24 months as we continue to support our Cognos Analytics with Watson customers. As 11.2.4 is going to be their next long term supported version we highly recommend that you think about upgrade to this stable release to ensure that your ongoing data analysis & reporting solution remains reliable.
Learn more about Cognos Analytics
Cognos brings value to organisations of all sizes with ease of use, automation, and AI-infused capabilities. It’s easy to hit the ground running, and in no time, you’ll be getting all the answers you need in one place.
If you are interested in IBM or AI-powered BI, contact Tahola today.