IBM Cognos Active Reports

One of the areas that Cognos has found difficult to compete in since introducing Cognos 8 is the area of disconnected reporting.  Cognos 8 has always been very strong in the area of Enterprise reporting but the nature of the tools has meant the user has had to be connected to the BI Server in some way to get the most out of the tools.  Of course the user can be sent PDF documents via email or they can be downloaded from the Cognos portal for later offline consumption but they lack the ability to interact with the report that the on-line experience enables.

With Cognos 10 IBM has provided Active Reports.  Any report generated within Cognos can now be saved as an Active report and consumed remotely with no connection to the BI Server.  The report is created in MHT format and the report and its data are saved in a single easily distributed document.  The recipient needs no access to the BI Server to consume the report, just a simple browser with MHTML support.