In some situations employees leave companies and the organization has not fully prepared for their exit. One specific scenario when an employee leaves that causes a great deal of extra work on IBM Cognos administrators involves the ex-employee’s scheduled jobs, reports, etc.
Let’s say that Ed has configured many scheduled jobs and reports that go out to a number of people, but he has left the company. Shortly after Ed’s last day, several of these people are not receiving their scheduled Cognos reports. These employees contact their administrator. The administrator investigates and sees that these specific failed reports are attempting to use Ed’s account and since he has left the company, his account in LDAP is inactive, causing the reports to fail.
In IBM Cognos, schedules are associated with a “credential,” which is a security token that is associated with a Cognos user. In this case, Ed’s schedules execute and authenticate through his credential. His stored credential passes to the authentication source (e.g. LDAP, Active Directory, etc.) to get logged in. After an employee leaves, their account becomes inactive in LDAP, AD, or the like, and all of their many scheduled jobs and reports will fail. The Cognos admin is then tasked with figuring out how to find and then reassign all of the ex-employee’s schedules.
In Cognos, there is no easy way to do this. There is no search feature that allows you to find all schedules that use a specific Cognos user’s credential. In this scenario, it would take all of the recipients of Ed’s schedules to contact the administrator when they didn’t receive their expected reports. But, this doesn’t allow the administrator to know for certain if they have found every schedule using Ed’s credential. Think about the schedules that run once a month, or once a quarter, and so on…the scheduled reports that aren’t top-of-mind. These schedules that run infrequently will create an ongoing project that could actually be resolved in less than 5 minutes with some handy software, which we’ll get to in a bit.
Additionally, the administrator now needs to change the credentials on all of Ed’s schedules in order for them to execute. But in Cognos, credentials on schedules can only be changed one at a time.
That handy software I mentioned is MotioPI Pro, which provides a much simpler and faster way to manage this headache. The steps below show how to do it in MotioPI Pro.
1. Open a Schedule Panel.
2. Select Edit Filters (We will need to add a filter to only search for schedules whose credential property is set to Ed, the ex-employee).
3. Double click the Property Value filter from the available filters list (or you can highlight it and press the Add button).
4. From the Property Filter window, select the Credential property from the drop down list.
5. Enter the credential property of the ex-employee in the Value text area. In this example, we will enter Ed’s credential.
6. Press OK to finish defining the credential property filter.
7. Press Apply to add this filter to the Schedule panel’s list of filters.
8. Then press Submit to issue the query to Cognos to find all scheduled items that match ex-employee Ed’s credentials.
9. Now that MotioPI Pro has located all of Ed’s schedules, use the Change Access Credentials action button to change the credentials of Ed’s schedules.
10. The Change Credentials Options dialog will open. Use the Browse button to find the person to reassign all of Ed’s schedules to.
11. In the Security Directory, expand the namespace and find the user’s name who will take over the schedules.
12. Press the OK button to update the Access Credentials.
13. Press Change Credentials to perform the action across all of Ed’s schedules.
Voila! We found all of Ed’s schedules and reassigned them in less time it takes to finish a cup of coffee!
See what else you can do in MotioPI Pro. {{cta(‘f9d45cca-c1cf-4f1e-b890-5f0720a510bf’)}}
