Ability to link or access to other BI tools from TM1

[kiamkhai]

Dear Sir/Madam

Like to seek your view the capbility of TM1 in linking or accessing other BI tools. If yes what are the BI tools?

Thanks.

Regards and Cheers
Tee Kiam Khai

[jim wood]

TM1 can link in to any datasource that supports ODBC. It can also be addressed by any BI tool that contains an OLEDB interface. I know for example that both CorVu Quick Reports and Hyperion Financial Reports can interface with the data but there are plenty of others. (OLEDB is Microsoft standard interface, It is used by Analyis Services)

Jim.

[David Usherwood]

Jim, I'd like to hear more of your experiences with this.
We tried MS Analysis service as a source and that was reasonable, though in that case you could be better off taking from the underlying SQL tables. But having tried quite a bit to interface TM1 with another TM1 server I have my doubts it would work that well - though perhaps the (many) weaknesses there were TM1's rawness as a _server_ of ODBO. There have of course been various attempts to work with BW - but are they used? Most sites I know get custom ABAP extracts done. The whole area seems generally immature (not just TM1). I did find the Cognos 8.4 links into TM1 9.4 pretty good, but so they (*&(*^T*^& well should be.

[jim wood]

Hi David,

When I linked the CorVu product to TM1 I got decent result. I was of course were limited to 2 dimensions (Horizontal & Vertical) with no nesting, but other than that the data came out very well. I managed to obtain the same kind of result with Analysis services as well. (Due to working with OLAP before I got landed with testing the likes of OLE DB connections.)

The hyperion experience was rather different. It struggled with the dimensionality of the information. We put this down to the fact that when you call the dimension name in Essabse it gives you the total for that dimension. TM1 does not do this. We did however get some information in to a report of sorts.

I hope that's the detail you needed?

Jim.

[ScottW]

Not sure if you are talking about browsing other data sources with TM1 (which seems to be implied by your question) or browsing TM1 from other front ends (which seems to be suggested by the other responses.)

The attached document from Cognos might be useful although most of it is quite out of date but the same principles still apply as TM1 is a compliant OLAP source. I assume it is in the public domain.