Cognos 8 Business Intelligence installation and set up guide

This tutorial shows a few easy steps to get started with cognos 8 BI.
The easiest and quickest installation process goes as follows:

1. Install Cognos 8 BI Server and a service pack if available – this is the core of cognos BI system.
2. Choose a database server which will be used as a content store. Cognos 8 supports a wide range of database engines.
3. Start cognos configuration and set up a connection to the database which will serve as a content store. This is usually the most important option to set up.
   Configuration fom Microsoft SQL Server as Cognos content store:

4. Adjust other options if necessary, save configuration and test the content store connection.
5. Start the cognos 8 service using Cognos Configuration
6. Now it is required to configure the Web server. Microsoft IIS web server is used in the following tutorial.

1. Web server configuration steps
   • Create the following virtual directories:
     cognos8 - c8_location/webcontent with read permission
     cognos8/cgi-bin - c8_location/cgi-bin with execute permissions
   • It is recommended to use cognos8 as the alias name. Otherwise the Gateway URI option will need to be changed in cognos configuration.
   • A sample IIS configuration is depicted below:
     Configuration of Cognos 8 on Microsoft IIS:

A correctly installed and configured Cognos 8 BI installation shows the following welcome page in a web browser on the http://localhost/cognos8/ web address.
Properly configured Cognos 8 instance:
Once the screen shown above appears, the IBM Cognos 8 BI is set up correctly and ready to use.
We suggest you start with publishing some Cognos examples using Framework Manager (gosalesdw - great outdoors sales data warehouse) and then play around with Cognos Query Studio, Analysis Studio and then Report Studio.