At PREDICTif Solutions, we have successfully migrated Cognos 8.4 to Cognos BI 10. The migration was pretty straight forward. We imported Cognos 8 content to Cognos BI 10 and verified it through Lifecycle Manager. We discovered that about 85% of the reports migrated successfully without any special attention and only a handful of reports required the same amount of attention as the most complex reports from a Cognos 7 to Cognos 8 migration.
By far, the most time consuming part of the migration process was verifying reports. We used Lifecycle Manager (Upgrade Manager in previous releases) to speed up this process. Lifecycle Manager allowed for a systematic way to compare original and updated reports automatically. If there were any differences between each version of Cognos, reports could be compared side-by-side and any discrepancies are marked in red.
Lifecycle Manager is an invaluable tool, but it does have its limitations that require some additional effort. Other than multiple report formats, it is not designed to verify a report on multiple scenarios. A user could run the report multiple times with different scenarios, but without history, there is no way to keep track of previous results. There is also a similar limitation in dealing with multiple data sources. Normally, if there were multiple data sources in Cognos BI, the user is prompted to choose which data source to use. However, Lifecycle Manager does not prompt the user. The only way to process the report in Lifecycle Manager would be to disable multiple data sources in Cognos Administration or manually set the report in Cognos BI to use a specific data source. Still, both of these limitations can be further minimized by having multiple projects Lifecycle Manager. Different reports scenarios or data sources can be accounted for by different projects.