Installing Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Server on Windows

April 23, 2008 · Filed Under Cognos 8 

This tutorial walks through the installation of IBM Cognos 8.3 Business Intelligence Server on Windows.

To start the installation, double click the issetup.exe in the win32 directory. On Windows Vista or Windows 2008 server, right click issetup.exe and select ‘Run as Administrator’.

Accept the license agreement and click Next.

Select a location for the install. By default, Cognos 8 will be installed in c:\program files\cognos\c8.

Expand the selection. Select Cognos Content Database if you need to install the Apache Derby content store. This is not checked by default, as it is only for stand-alone development or demo systems.

A Program Folder will be created in the Windows Start menu. You can change the name from Cognos 8 if you have other versions of Cognos 8 co-existing on this same server.

An installation summary page will appear. Click next to start the installation.

The installer will copy over the files.

When the files have been copied over, this page will appear. Check ‘Start Cognos Configuration’ and click the Finish button to open Cognos Configuration.

Cognos Configuration opens.

Under the file menu, select save, or click the save icon, to accept the default settings. Cognos Configuration will verify the settings and write to several configuration files. Close the dialogue window when the save is complete. If a red X or an exclamation mark appears, click the Details button to see the error or warning message.

Click the play button to apply the configuration and to start the Cognos 8 service. If a red X or an exclamation mark appears, click the Details button to see the error or warning message. As we did not configure a mail server, a warning will appear. Not having a mail server will only affect the notification services, so we can proceed with the installation and configure the mail server at another time.

Two Windows services will have been installed and started: Cognos 8 and Cognos Content Database.

To quickly test the installation, open up a web browser and type in the following URL to test the content manager: http://localhost:9300/p2pd/servlet. If it is running correctly, this message will appear.

To test the dispatcher, type in this URL: http://localhost:9300/p2pd/servlet/dispatch. The browser will be redirected to http://localhost:9300/p2pd/servlet/dispatch?b_action=xts.run&m=portal/cc.xts&gohome=, which will bring up Cognos Connection. The images and formatting will be absent because we are connecting directly to the Cognos servlet running on the default application server (Apache Tomcat).

At this point, the web server (usually IIS on Windows) is to be configured. However, for this tutorial we are installing Cognos as a stand-alone application independent of any third party products so we will skip the web server configuration. It can be configured at a later time. To see the graphics in Cognos Connection, copy the contents of the webcontent folder from c8/webcontent to c8/webapps/p2pd. Refresh the browser after the copy is complete.

This tutorial walked through the installation of Cognos 8.3 on Windows. By using the Cognos Content Database (Apache Derby) and Tomcat, it is a true stand alone installation, suitable for a demo or a small development environment. For a more robust system, it is highly recommended to use a web server gateway, which can be added at anytime.

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Comments

19 Responses to “Installing Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Server on Windows”

  1. muhammad aamir on June 17th, 2008 7:57 am

    hi,

    I want to learn cognos because it is needed at my office ,so kindly could you arrange some cognos related good tutorials like you have explained installation process.so it will help me to learn cognos.

  2. muhammad aamir on June 17th, 2008 7:58 am

    it good

  3. jack on July 1st, 2008 5:52 am

    it is very good

  4. RAJ allam on July 1st, 2008 7:16 pm

    could you please send me the cognos 8 material.

    Regards
    RAJ

  5. RAJ allam on July 1st, 2008 7:17 pm

    it ’s marvelous …Thanx

  6. satish challa on July 3rd, 2008 12:34 pm

    thanks for the information
    if u don’t mine can u send me the cognos FAQs

  7. robjack on July 28th, 2008 10:09 am

    This is an excellent and thorough tutorial. However, when I attempted to install a newer version of Cognos I ran into a problem. When I open cognos configuration, an error message pops up indicating that the JRE has changed and the current cryptographic information is not compatible with the new JRE. I’ve set JAVA_HOME to the cognos JRE and it still doesn’t work. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

  8. Nishant Shah on August 4th, 2008 8:50 am

    Hi,
    During cognos configuration i got an error like:
    1. [ ERROR ] The database connection failed.
    2. [ ERROR ] Content Manager is unable to access the content store. Verify your database connection parameters and then contact your database administrator

    So please guide me to what to do

  9. cognos08 on August 11th, 2008 12:49 pm

    So if i wanna install sample database, what do i need to do. Do i have to configure IIS8 (not iis7)) with SQL05 or Oracle 10G ? do i need vista business or home premium will do, I’d appreciate the reply,
    thanx.

  10. Uday on August 28th, 2008 3:55 pm

    When I install cognos 8.1 and during configuration I get error
    1. [ ERROR ] The database connection failed.
    2. [ ERROR ] Content Manager is unable to access the content store. Verify your database connection parameters and then contact your database administrator .
    In this eg. cognos 8.3 installation “cognos content database ” is installed by default where as in 8.1 its not there . Please advice

  11. esther on September 12th, 2008 12:44 pm

    When I install cognos 8.3 and during configuration I get error
    1. [ ERROR ] The database connection failed.
    2. [ ERROR ] Content Manager is unable to access the content store. Verify your database connection parameters and then contact your database administrator .
    In this eg. cognos 8.3 installation “cognos content database ” is installed by default where as in 8.1 its not there . Please advice

  12. Perla Fazio on September 26th, 2008 5:04 am

    Benissimo,
    grazie

  13. chakravarthy on October 4th, 2008 7:18 am

    this is very good. and could u please send about cognos business components.

  14. shravan on October 17th, 2008 6:25 am

    When I install cognos 8 and during configuration I get error
    1. [ ERROR ] The database connection failed.
    2. [ ERROR ] Content Manager is unable to access the content store. Verify your database connection parameters and then contact your database administrator .

    please help me

  15. Bharat on October 23rd, 2008 4:35 am

    Hi

    Its Amazing. The tutorial helped me a lot. It will be gr8 if u send me the cognos configuration settings with the Oracle HTTP server. ur help will be highly appreciated.

    Thanks

  16. Jaime on October 29th, 2008 12:45 am

    Hello
    I’m Mexican and I’m looking Cognos, you could teach me how to configure IIS 8.3 on Cognos 7, and since it installed and there are some sections that do not work if someone could show me any tutorial or guide, I would appreciate deeply.
    Thank you

    jaimedcj@hotmail.com

  17. gotiva on November 3rd, 2008 4:38 pm

    I just got a job at the company that is currently migrating from Cognos 7 to Cognos 8. Do you happen to have any good tutorial on how to use Cognos 8: Report Studio, Query Studio and Analysis Studio.
    Thanks,
    Gotiva

  18. venu on November 4th, 2008 1:37 am

    The information is very good.
    I have installed Cognos 8 in the system.
    But the graphics in Cognos site is still absent.
    Please advice.
    Thanks,
    Venu

  19. Vinod on November 8th, 2008 11:10 am

    Thanx for the information. How to set up the Cognos content store.

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