Upgrading Cognos from 8.4 to 10.1

Hi Guys

Will update this with the things to consider later.

Step 1

If you are new to migration.Be sure that you understand each and every option under the Export tab.Usually most developer have only migrated reports from dev to production so are not fully aware of all the options.

Below are the steps that i found from IT toolbox.They are pretty straight forward

Development Phase:

1.Always setup a development or parallel environment first.
2.When you have the products installed create a blank content store.
3.Perform an Entire Content Store export in Cognos Administration.
4.Copy your Deployment file from the current environment to the development environment.
5.Perform an import of the deployment file that you copied over.
6.Check in your new environment that the data sources exist in Cognos Administration. I have seen them not come over before. If not then you need to manually create them.
7.Try running a small sample of reports to compare the output.
8.I usually create a test plan and divide the reports up in the user community. Log any issues that you find and correct them one by one.
9.Once you are happy that all issues are resolved you can move to the production phase of the upgrade.

Production Phase:

1.Export your configuration from Cognos Configuration including the encrypted data to an xml file in the \Program Files\Cognos directory.
2.Perform your vanilla installation of C10. Don't perform configuration tasks yet. If you are leaving C8 in place remember to change the port references from 9300, 9362 and 9399.
3.Once all installation tasks are complete, take the xml created in step 1 and overwrite the file cogstartup.xml in the configuration directory. Beware the C10 installation location is very different from the C8 one.
4.Open Cognos Configuration, save the configuration, test it and then start it. It should have remembered all your settings.
5.On your development environment, perform an entire content store export and copy the deployment file to the production deployment location.
6.Perform the entire content store import and check data sources as above.
7.Check to see if the everyone group is a system administrator, if so then remove them.

Testing or report in Cognos10 once they are migrated

1.You can check the reports manually by dividing it among user groups or tester groups.This task takes long time.You can use Life cycle Manager

Below is the extract from IBM site about Lifecycle manager

Lifecycle Manager connects to the source and target environments, validates and executes reports in both environments, and then compares them. The results of the comparison are presented in a dashboard.

In a benchmark project , you are working in a single IBM Cognos environment. Consider Run 1 as the source environment and Run 2 as the target environment when working in a benchmark project.

VIMP for those guys who have never seen lifecycle manager


" Lifecycle Manager is a Microsoft? Windows? operating system-based application ..."

"Lifecycle Manager is a standalone single-user application that you can install on any computer..."

"Note: Because Lifecycle Manager is a single-user application, there should be only one Web browser session connected to the Lifecycle Manager server at a given time. Multiple browser sessions can lead to loss of data."

Lifecycle Manager is a web application and you access it via the browser. However, don't let that fool you. I do not think Cognos intends for you to install this on a server. I think it is intended to be installed on a user's desktop more like a client side application


Lifecycle Manager

1.tests report output only by comparing results from one release (the source) to another (the target)

2.tests reports created in IBM Cognos Report Studio, IBM Cognos Query Studio, or IBM Cognos Analysis Studio

3.The studios are not used in the testing, only saved report specifications.

4.Analysis Studio reports are tested only when upgrading from IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 8.2 to 8.3, 8.4, or 10.1.0.

5.does not test any other aspects of the upgrade such as configuration, the studios, IBM Cognos Connection, skins, and customizations

6.tests only Public Folders content

7.does not perform the actual product or report upgrade

8.Upgrade is performed using the standard upgrade mechanisms documented for IBM Cognos BI.

9.does not test embedded HTML items except when they are used to control prompts and parameters

10.HTML items are not rendered in PDF output.

11.does not test embedded JavaScript™ item

12.JavaScript items are not rendered in PDF output.

13.does not test interactive functionality such as drill up, drill down, drill through, HTML links to external content, and bookmarks

14.runs as a single user application, so security by value and similar user dependent items are not tested

15.does not test report views, bursting, and performance or scalability differences

16.does not compare prompt pages