Cognos Support Portal and Technote Search Best Practices

Getting access to support related knowledge is easier than ever for two main reasons:

1. The masthead search (seen in the top right corner of every page on ibm.com) has been greatly improved.
   Your searches will still go against everything on ibm.com, so it helps to add "Cognos" or some other Cognos specific reference to the search query. You should notice significant improvements to the relevance of search results returned.
   
2. The new IBM Support Portal has all the links on a single page, and your searches go against only the products you configure
   With Portal, you are able to configure up to 10 products across all of IBM's offerings and select which of those products you want to filter/focus your search on - all from a single page. 99% of the information on ibm.com is unrelated to Cognos, and Portal makes sure you only see content related to the products of interest to you.
   
   Quickstart links to pre-configured Support Portal pages:
   
   Cognos Business Intelligence
Cognos TM1
Cognos Business Viewpoint
Cognos Controller
Cognos 8 Go!
Cognos Planning
Cognos Consolidator
Cognos Content Analytics
Cognos Express
Cognos Finance
Cognos Financial Statement Reporting
Cognos Now!
Cognos Real-Time Monitoring
Cognos Statistics
Cognos Mobile
Cognos Insight
Cognos Analysis for Microsoft Excel
Cognos Performance Applications
Cognos Analytic Applications
Cognos Application Development Tools
Cognos Series 7
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Cognos Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management (ALL Cognos products)


Once there, you can add more products afterwards as seen in the screenshot below.

Please refer to the multimedia videos attached at the bottom of this document for a tour of the new Support Portal from a Cognos point of view, and an overview of Search Best Practices using both the masthead and the Portal search

Consider the following scenario, as shown in the example below, where a Cognos customer has the following mix of IBM products configured in their personalized Portal.

If they de-select the products that are not of immediate concern, and enter their search criteria in the search box above, they will get back results related only to those products that are still enabled. In this case, let's assume the issue is with accessing the Cognos Business Intelligence portal in an environment where Websphere Application Server is used.

On the search results page that follows, we can do a number of things to refine the search results. As seen in the screenshot below, we can:

1. modify the search query
2. filter the results by checking or unchecking the various product boxes
3. filter the results by selecting one or more document types
4. filter the results by selecting one or more functional tasks associated with the documents
5. sort the results by date if preferred over the default relevancy scoring
6. there are even links to take the same basic search query and run it through other popular search engines (without the filtering options)

TIP: If you follow the links to Google etc to perform the same search outside of the IBM website, it is advised to use a site filter to limit the results to documents and pages found on ibm.com. For example: site:ibm.com cannot access portal


The following screenshot illustrates how a number of these filtering options can get us closer to the information we are seeking. In this example, the following was done to narrow the scope after the initial search returned 269 results:

• the search query was modified to include the exact string "Cognos Connection" instead of the more ambiguous term portal
• in the Search for box, the query was further modified to add CAM-* which is the root of all Cognos Access Manager (CAM) errors. By using the root along with a * wildcard, we will only get back documents that also contain CAM errors.
  

The end result is a much more reasonable set of 13 Technote knowledge base documents to work with.

The steps above represent some of the best practices in searching for knowledge base documents in the new Portal environment. Click here for more search tips (the same link is found on the search results page within the right-hand navbar, as seen above).

More about the IBM Support Portal

The Support Portal brings together all IBM online support resources and tools for hardware, software and services in a consistent interface that is tuned to your specific needs. It provides powerful features that make it fast and easy to find the exact information or tool you need. Learn more and try it today by clicking on any of the following links:

1. Visit the Business Analytics Support site
2. View the IBM eSupport video tours on youtube
3. Learn more about the Support Portal on the IBM eSupport site
4. Portal site assistance (how to do everything on Portal)
5. Start using Support Portal now

Lastly, if there is anything about Portal you would like to see improved or implemented, please click the Support feedback link in the right navbar and reach out to us with your comments or suggestions.