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Cognos gets at Domino data

Last week, Cognos beefed up its support for IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino messaging platform, announcing a Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Data Modeler for Domino.

It's a potentially important deliverable. Domino Designer uses a script-based language called LotusScript, which many Notes and Domino developers compare to Visual Basic for its simplicity and rapid application development capabilities.

There's canned support for workflow management in the base Domino Designer IDE, and IBM offers a standalone Lotus Workflow product, a graphical design tool and workflow engine that sits on top of Domino and speeds the creation and deployment of apps that have sophisticated workflows.

For Domino users who are also invested in Cognos' BI stack, the new Business Intelligence Data Modeler for Domino could be a godsend. It's a wizard-based tool that lets users parse Domino data sources, tables and columns and also tag them with names that are meaningful to them--without changing the underlying applications. The BI Data Modeler also optimizes Domino data for fast access and generates a metadata model that's compatible with the Cognos 8 BI suite. More importantly, for data integrators, the new Cognos tool makes Domino look like any other data source--which means Data from Domino can easily be joined with other (non-Domino) data sources.

About the Author

Stephen Swoyer is a contributing editor for Enterprise Systems. He can be reached at [email protected].