I tried setting up Cognos (Business Intelligence tool mainly used for reporting) on a test machine for Lakshmi to play around with. After going through the install, I can say with confidence that Cognos has some of the worst documentation 
. Here are some quick tips that you won’t find in the official documentation for someone trying to configure Cognos BI 8.x on a Win2k3 server running MS SQL 2005 and IIS 6.0.
- After installing Cognos, run the “Cognos Configuration” tool and change the “Gateway URI” setting to “http://servername:portnumber/cognos8/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll” in the environment section.
- Edit the default.htm and index.htm file in the “< cognos install directory >\cognos\c8\webcontent” directory and replace cognos.cgi with cognosisapi.dll
- Open ISS manager and go to Web Service Extension. Add a new web service extension called isapi and add cognosisapi.dll as a required file. Make sure to set the extension status to Allowed.
This should enable you to launch cognos and log into the web interface.
I agree, the Cognos 8 documentation is surprisingly basic. They really should go into more detail for each operating system they support.
Anyway, thanks for documenting this. It works a treat.
-John.
Comment by John Fallon — June 22, 2007 @ 6:52 am