Configuring reporting

After you install or upgrade your reporting packages, you must configure your reporting installation.

For its reporting feature, IBM® EMM integrates with IBM Cognos®, a third-party business intelligence application. Reporting relies on the following components:

  • An installation of IBM Cognos
  • A set of IBM EMM components that integrate HCL Enterprise applications with the IBM Cognos installation
  • For several IBM EMM applications, reporting schemas that enable you to build reporting views or tables in the HCL system tables of the application
  • The example reports for the IBM EMM application, which is built with IBM Cognos Report Studio

When you install IBM EMM applications, each application registers itself with the Marketing Platform. During that registration process, it adds an entry for itself to the Analytics menu item.

After the report package for the application is configured:

  • The Analytics menu item for the application provides access to its cross-object reports.
  • The single object reports then appear on the Analysis tabs of the appropriate objects.
  • The dashboard reports for the application can be enabled and used in dashboards.

Typically, the reports packages for the IBM EMM products are installed when the IBM EMM applications are installed. Not all of the reports packages contain reporting schemas, but they all contain the following IBM Cognos BI components:

  • A customizable IBM Cognos reporting metadata model for the IBM EMM application reports
  • Customizable IBM EMM application reports built with IBM Cognos BI Report Studio
  • Reference documentation that describes the reporting data model and the reports

The IBM Cognos model references the reporting views (or tables) in the IBM EMM application database, making that data available to the IBM Cognos reports that are also delivered in IBM EMM Reports Packages.

Immediately after installation, the reports are in their default state and are to be considered example reports. Why? Because many IBM EMM applications have a set of objects, attributes, or metrics that can be added or customized. For example, Campaign allows you to add response types, custom campaign attributes, additional audience levels. After the data design of your system is implemented, you can revisit reporting to customize the example reports and create new reports.

How you configure the reports after the data design phase of your implementation depends on which IBM EMM applications are included in your IBM EMM system.

  • For Campaign and Interact, you customize the reporting schemas and then update the views or reporting tables that were created during installation. At that point, you synchronize the Cognos data model with the newly updated reporting views and publish the revised model to the Cognos content store. Now the new custom attributes are available in Report Studio and you can add them to the sample reports, or create new reports that display the attributes.
  • For the IBM EMM applications that do not provide reporting schemas and for eMessage (which provides schemas that cannot be customized), you configure the Cognos IBM reports only.

This section describes the security model, the schemas, the data models, and the reports.