What is Costpoint/Cognos?

April 16, 2009 2:05 PM

At my day job, I've recently been giving a pile of new tasks related to Deltek Costpoint and Cognos. I am sooooooo lost. Help. Please help?

Thanks to corporate "right sizing" our large company is now down to one person handling all Cognos and Costpoint duties. I've been given the task of becoming his backup. I have only minimal idea of what these are and how I need to get up to speed. The person I'm a backup for isn't very good at walking me through things, and even if they were they don't have time for hand holding.

My question is - Is there a good (meaning effective) way for me to quickly get up to speed? Classes? Which ones are best? Book? Will those really help, or just suck away my time? Websites? I already have a full workload, so time is limited.

One of the problems I have is the forest of applications I've been handed to learn. Cognos8, Report Studio, Framework Manager, Time & Expense, Costpoint, Oracle, PL/SQL......

Until now my job has been writing web applications for our corporate intranet, all of them database driven. Basically taking people's random spreadsheets and email blackholes and building an application to better use the data/process. So I can program, I know my way around databases, but I don't have much functional knowledge of Costpoint, Cognos, Oracle & PL/SQL, etc.

My tasks will, I've been told, include administration, report writing, frameworks, new applications, data translations, custom exports and interfaces, and other things I can'tunderstand. I think I can pick up PL/SQL but I suspect it would take way too long to master it by myself.

Part of the problem, perhaps the biggest problem, is that I don't know what I don't know. If I'm asking the wrong questions, please let me know and I'll clarify.

posted by y6y6y6 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Not much of an answer but I worked at Cognos on contract for 6 months in R&D and I can certainly sympathize. I was lost. It's layers upon layers of legacy code, Cognos 8 was an irritation, the Oracle database structure is a mess, the UNIX side of things is a little better but that's likely due to being handled by the UK office who have some competent developers that I was working with. So, it's not just you, good luck.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 2:20 PM on April 16, 2009

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/
select Information Management as your brand. Then find a Cognos selection.

Also google
+publib +cognos

I love publib.
posted by andreap at 3:47 PM on April 17, 2009