After careful consideration, we chose Cognos Series 7 as our winner. Series 7 beat out the competition, with top scores for its distribution, analysis and automation of data as well as its excellent data-access and application-access security.
Cognos Series 7 | Information Builders Webfocus 4.3.6 | Brio Intelligence 6.6 | Microstrategy 7i | Microsoft Data Analyzer
Cognos Series 7
The ease with which you can create and navigate through reports with Cognos Series 7 is amazing. With dozens of options and a Web interface whose functions are almost indistinguishable from the desktop client's, this product is the very definition of intuitive and robust. Cognos had us up and analyzing data within an hour.
Cognos uses your LDAP directory for data and application security and is certified for Netscape Directory Server and Microsoft Active Directory Services (we were surprised by the lack of support for Novell eDirectory). This security measure gives Cognos an advantage over the competition, especially Microsoft Data Analyzer and Brio Intelligence, which both depend on native database security to provide access control to data.
We installed a Netscape Directory Server for testing, and then connected the Cognos Server to our SQL 2000 database. Some metadata (table names, column names and descriptions, and relationships) is read from the database and stored locally for better overall performance. Any additional metadata (aliases, renaming of columns and so on) is stored locally on the server. In comparison, MicroStrategy 7i stores and manages metadata in the target database. Based on our tests, the products that store metadata locally perform better.
Cognos makes creating reports a snap and provides robust tools to manipulate the data in report format. The package even lets you change the view of the data--including report layout, data included and chart types--and save that personalized view for future use. No other vendor's product lets you personalize reports. We liked the flexibility this feature offers end users.
Cognos' pricing fell right in the middle of all the the products, at $130,000 for the scenario we used, including a 25 percent annual maintenance fee--the highest fee of any product in this review. Like Microsoft, Cognos offers a flat per-user fee. Such a pricing model is comparatively easy to calculate, and makes it simple to start small and grow as user demand increases.
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