As if by magic… 
Personally I prefer Business Objects but there are bits of Cognos that I like better.
Tool by tool, you’ve got the same basic three piece set up - admin tool, semantic layer tool and reporting tool. Please note that I’m comparing Cognos 10 to BOXI3.1 as they’re the ones that I’ve had most recent experience with (I’ve not used IDT yet but have used BO4.1 Webi a fair bit)
Webi v Report Studio
Webi is far more intuitive for a complete novice with a half day session to get going on. Both will take a long time to master but Webi easier to get the basics up and running on. The hardest part to get your head round in my opinion on Webi is the calculation contexts. However, this is fairly advanced and wouldn’t stop a user creating reasonable reports with breaks, sections, totals, charts, etc.
On Report Studio, selecting what you want can be painful, i.e. selecting the table cell versus the column, versus the table, etc. The query interface isn’t as logical either, especially when you’re looking at prompts, queries within queries, etc.
Designer v Framework Manager
Both simple enough to use but Cognos can be painful from the point of view of having to validate everything you do before moving on to the next bit. After working on many models, you’re confident about what you’re developing but still have to validate, validate, validate. The big plus on Cognos over BO on this is that you can publish several packages from one model. In BO terms, that’s like having one universe and being able to publish different sets of classes as sub-universes. If you have a corporate data warehouse, you could just wire it all in and publish different parts to different packages and manage security. On the flip side of that, contexts make Designer a much more powerful tool to use from the point of view of understanding what your queries will become when you drag objects into a query panel. You can even use the in-built query panel to see what is generated. Aggregate awareness is another massive advantage, as is the ability to annotate the canvas.
Admin tools - all pretty similar. I’ve not done extensive work on Cognos security models but there’s only so many ways you can go with it. Neither are perfect but both do the job well enough as far as I can tell.
One of the biggest differences for me though isn’t controlled by SAP or IBM. It’s the end-user peer support. I’m not just saying it because I’m posting here but BOB is far better than Cognoise for getting an answer. If you don’t like the answer that you’re given, that’s up to you, but it’s probably the correct one! If you look how long a lot of the people on here have been posting, many have been around for over a decade and have the enthusiasm for the product, despite the occasionally hiccups (Polestar anyone?), to keep coming back and promoting BO through helping others.
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(BOB member since 2005-01-06)
But at the same time would like to ensure that I have the proper analysis done before that
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
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