IBM Cognos Analytics 11.1.4 was released in October 2019.

Here is a list of new and changed features in this release:

Getting Started

Redesigned Welcome Page – Redesigned user interface introduces alerts banner and new welcome page.  Administrators can customize a message in alerts banner and new users can access walk through tours, videos, and embedded samples.  Users can control whether welcome page appears with a switch, which can be disabled by administrator.

List View in the Recent Folder – View contents of recent folder in list or tiles view and use icons to switch between views.

Support for The Weather Company data – Incorporate historical and forecast on-demand data from The Weather Company, an IBM business, into Cognos Analytics dashboards, stories, reports, explorations, and other content.

Dashboards

Custom Visualizations (also available in Reporting) – Create to meet your specific business needs. Allows developers to create and test custom visualizations locally, before making them available to other users.

Forecasting (also in Explorations) – Automated set of tools for modeling time dependent data. Leverages a popular class of exponential smoothing models to discover and model trend, seasonality and time dependence in the observed data. This makes it applicable to a broad range of time series encountered in business and industry. Automated model selection and tuning makes forecasting easy to use, even for users not familiar with time series modeling.

Improvements to visualization legends (also available in Reporting) – More compact design takes up less room in visualizations. Default position has changed, now above the visualization. Can adjust space that legend takes by dragging splitter in visualization.

Waterfall visualization available in dashboard (also in Explorations)

Context-based dashboard generation – From the embedded Assistant, you can now create a dashboard based on column data from your most recently generated charts.  If charts contain top or bottom aggregations, these modifiers are applied to the generated dashboard.

KPI visualization available in dashboard (also in Explorations)

Improvements to crosstab and table formatting – Formatting enhanced to improve usability and readability.

• Can resize column width and row height;
• White border replaces gray border;
• When you format the cells in a crosstab or table, main data cells are separate from summary cells;
• Text formatting such as font family, font size, text color, alignment, and styles available on an individual row or column;
• Wrap text on header rows and columns available from text formatting menu;
• Can drag data from Selected sources pane onto a crosstab or table.

Null suppression in a crosstab or table – enabled by default to make crosstab or table easier to read and to hide rows and columns that contain only null values.  If you want to show suppressed null values, disable suppression control toggle from table or crosstab properties.

Stories

Capability to export a story to PDF

Multipurpose widgets in scene templates – allow you to more easily customize the layout of the templates.

Capability to define exact entry and exit times in a timeline

Explorations

Improved experience for comparing two visualizations – A new How do you want to compare? page provides guidance for creating your own visualization and displays recommended comparisons.

Improvements to the starting points page – enhanced to get users started with a relationship diagram and suggested starting points.

Reporting

Navigation menu customization – Administrator can control items that appear in navigation menu and navigation drop-down by customizing properties of a role. Administrator can choose to show or hide pages, prompt pages, queries, classes, and variables items in navigation menu.

Modeling

Range Joins – When you create joins between tables in the relationship editor, you can specify ranges as values for the matched columns by using comparison operators, such as less than (<) or greater than (>).

New join optimization filters – Two new filters are available to optimize joins: Unique values in a subquery and Unique or range of values.

Numeric or text style for numeric data groups – When you create a data group for columns with numeric data types, such as measures, you can use either the numeric data group style (default) or the text style. You can continue switching between the two styles until the data group is created. The data group is saved in the style that you chose last.

New way to access the properties panel – from the application bar. Properties are displayed on the right side of the application page.

Administration

3 New capabilities –

• Manage Visualizations capability allows users to control access rights to extensible visualizations for individual users, groups, and roles.
• Develop Visualizations capability allows users to develop extensible visualizations.
• Dashboard > Create/Edit capability allows users to create and edit a dashboard or story.

Read our blog to get more details on the best of what’s new in this new release and to find out more about migrating to the latest and greatest version of Cognos Analytics.