Actuate e.Report [EOL] Reviews

Conversion from one BI Technology to another is not an easy task. What makes it more difficult is determining where to start unless you have a proven methodology.

For starter’s let start with key technical aspects and key words used in the context of these two technologies namely Actuate and Cognos. I think understanding the jargon is an important prerequisites to begin thinking about conversion.

Actuate is an enterprise BI platform offering several products for various customer needs, however, the key products that are widely utilized or you are most likely to come across during a conversion project are Actuate eReports, Actuate iSever, Actuate IC or AP (Information Console in Actuate 11 or Active Portal in prior releases). Companies have started utilizing Actuate BIRT for report development lately, I would say somewhere in the past few years. But I doubt, you may be converting from BIRT to Cognos for various reasons I can discuss later.

Similarly the important technology products that you are trying to map to in the Cognos product suite are the Framework Manager Model, Reports and Query creation using Report Studio and Query Studio.

Now that we have acquainted ourselves briefly with both technologies, I think it is fair to break down the high level question “How do I convert form Actuate to Cognos?” into manageable next level questions such as 1) “How do we convert from “Actuate eReports/ iServer /IC to Cognos Package/Report Studio/Query Studio?”. There are other important aspects of an enterprise system listed below that come to mind which and are equally important as the converting the Reports. Usually, these aspects are evaluated during the evaluation process but the implementation details around these aspects have to dealt with during the conversion.

- Security
- Performance/Throughput
- Clustering/Fail Over
- Application Integration and Custom Application
- Upstream and Downstream systems your BI Platform may be subscribing or publishing