Cognos is IBM's Enterprise reporting suite of products aimed at both Users, Developers and Administrators.
User Products:These products are aimed at business users with limited technical skills.
Cognos Connection is a web portal which allows users to navigate Cognos BI content such as dashboards, reports, schedules, cubes and scorecards. This is the go to place for Cognos online Trainings users and developers, with most Cognos products being launced from within this portal.Query Studio is an ad-hoc reporting tool aimed at power users. It allows live querying of databases within the confines of a published Framework Manager package.
Business Insight Advanced is a report editing tool aimed at power users. It allows some customisation of Cognos online Trainings Connection objects to be made and saved on Business Insight dashboards.
Analysis Studio is a 'slice and dice' tool for querying OLAP cubes via drag and drop. Once created, views of cubes can be saved to Cognos Connection and shared. These views can be later opened with Report Studio.Cognos Business Insight is a dashboard tool which allows users to drag content from Cognos Connection into their own dashboards. These dashboards can then be saved and shared, however printing or exporting to PDF format is not supported in the current version
Contributor is installed as a browser add-on and allows users to enter budgets and forecasts into Enterprise Planning cubes. Support for workflow allows controlled collaboration around planning and forecasting.
Developer Products:These products are aimed at technical developers. Content developed in these tools can be published to Cognos Connection to be consumed by business users.
Framework Manager allows technical developers to model source systems and publish this model to Cognos Connection. A well developed framework will ease the use of other Cognos tools.Map Manager allows maps to be divided by territory and published to the Cognos environment for reporting purposes.Transformer is used to develop and build OLAP cubes. It can be run from a DOS command line in order to automate cube building, publishing and archiving.Report Studio is the most feature rich report development tool in the Cognos suite. A skilled developer can use this flexible software to deliver complex reporting requirements.Enterprise Planning allows development of Planning cubes and their associated workflows.Metric Studio allows business metrics to be developed and represented as traffic lights.
TM1 is a recently acquired application which offers similar functionality to Enterprise Planning. The current development path is merging the feature sets of Enterprise Planning with TM1. TM1 runs very quickly when compared to similar products due to an efficient rules engine and in-memory processing.