SDK and third-party tools for Cognos

As IBM Cognos provides a very open structure and easy access to contents and components through SDK and CMS, there are many products built over it. They use Cognos as the powerful application engine to generate contents, and then these tools present the contents in a visually appealing manner. When just Cognos Report Studio cannot meet your business requirement, you can consider using such third-party tools to enhance Cognos services and extract more values out of the investment made in Cognos.

There is one interesting third-party tool called MotioADF (www.motio.com) which provides a simple programming method than raw Cognos SDK. It has predefined routines/toolkits to provide a level of abstraction and ease of writing code to perform tasks on Cognos, such as executing reports, passing prompt values, and browsing contents.

By using such tools on top of Cognos, you can leverage the power of Cognos BI and extend/embed it into portals and websites very easily.