Cognos improves usability, adds Microsoft integration

Recent releases from the major business intelligence vendors have focused on two areas of importance: integration with the Microsoft Office applications and adoption by the business user.

Cognos Inc. is no exception. Today, the Burlington, Mass.-based company announced shipped PowerPlay 7.3 and added suite-wide functionality improvements, including Microsoft SQL Server certification and integration with Office.

For more information Read about the launch of Cognos' ReportNet

PowerPlay 7.3, the company's OLAP application, features improved drag-and-drop capabilities that allow users to swap rows and columns and reorder them, all through a browser, said Mark Morton, product marketing manager. Users can drill through summarized reports to monthly and daily reports. The new functionality prevents large, ambiguous queries and allows users who are not statisticians to quickly access the data they need.

"The advantage is for IT resources," Morton said. "It protects the database from huge queries. You can guarantee the result set that comes back from the relational server is manageable."

The new suite-wide capabilities also expand on Cognos' integration with Microsoft Outlook through e-mailing reports. With the enhancements, users can now output reports directly to Microsoft Excel.

"Overall, what you're seeing with this release is this allows us to put forward a central, single portal with a single management structure across the enterprise," Morton said.