Business Objects Reports
User Manual
Office of Research Informatics
School of Medicine
April 2015
Table of Contents
Preliminaries
Step-By-Step Guide to Access Reports
1.Business Objects Reports - New URL
2.Navigating to Reports
3.Running Reports
4.Exporting/Downloading Report Output
5.“Bookmarking” User Folder
Change History
Preliminaries
Cognos is a reporting software that extracts data, analyzes it, and assembles reports. Duke’s Cognos Enterprise license expired on March 31st, 2015.Cognos has been replaced by SAP Business Objects. In order to support this underlying technology change, we have converted existing Cognos reports into Business Objects.
Office of Research Informatics (ORI) managed Cognos reports have been converted to Business Objects. As of March 31, 2015, we have released 227 Business Objects reports to the School of Medicine business users.
We have also changed the data source for these Business Objectsreports. We created a Research Management Data Mart with a Business Objects Universe where we pull administrative research management data from several different sources on a nightly basis. The structured data in the data mart facilitates faster querying of data. Currently, these data sources include research management data elements from IRB (Institutional Review Board), eResearch, Maestro Care, Office of Information Technology (OIT), Office of Corporate Research Collaborations (Contracts), limited data elements from CITI training, and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).
For further assistance or additional questions about Report Migration, please contact AsbaTasneem in ORI.
Step-By-Step Guide to Access Reports
1.Business Objects Reports- New URL
Please use your Net ID and password to access Business Object Reportsvia following link:
URL:
Recommendation:Please bookmark this URL for easy access. Also see section 5 on ‘Bookmarking User Folder’
2.Navigating to Reports
After logging in, click on the ‘Documents’ tab on the top left corner (Figure 1)
Figure 1
On the next page, click on the ‘Folders’ link on the bottom right (Figure 2)
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Figure 2
Next, click on a series of subfolders under ‘Public Folders’ to navigate to the ‘Site Based Research’ folder which houses Business Objects reports managed by Office of Research Informatics (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Note: Security permissions will allow you to run only those reports that have been approved for you.
3.Running Reports
Reports are available in two formats: Excel and PDF. The format is indicated in the file name. Users can run reports by double-clicking on the green icon (Figure 4). Based on your requirementsfor report output, select an appropriate report. If you need to export report results in an Excel format then start with an Excel report; for PDF output, start with the PDF report.
Figure 4
Figure 4 is an example report taken from DOCR folder. After you double-click on the green icon (Figure 4) the system will prompt you to fill in the selection criteria (e.g. date range or protocol number etc.). Please note that it could take up to a few minutes to get the output of these reports.
4.Exporting/Downloading Report Output
The default report output on the screen is inCrystal Reports format. You may see overlapping texts in some rows which will be fixed when report results are downloaded.In order to export (download)report output, please click on the export button in the header menu (Figure 5).
Figure 5
In the pop up menu select an appropriate format for downloading the report output (e.g. Excel format for Excel report or PDF format if you ran the PDF report) Figure6.
Figure 6
5.“Bookmarking”User Folder
When you log into your account, on the top right corner, click on the Preferences link.
On general tab, uncheck the Use Default Settings (Administrative defined) checkbox.
Then choose Documents tab radio button, Folders and Select Public Folder and then click on the Browse Folder button. Choose the appropriate folder where all the reports are located at based on your user group. Click on the Open button.
Once you are done, click on the Save & Close button.
Change History
Version / Summary of Change / Authors / DateInitial release / -- / AsbaTasneem / 03-31-15
Version 1 / Revised Preliminaries and Step-By-Step Guide to Access Reports. Added PROD url. / AsbaTasneem / 04-21-15
Version 2 / Added Change History section / AsbaTasneem / 05-06-15
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