IBM® Cognos® 8 Planning - Contributor Administration Guide

Chapter 3: Security
30 Contributor
If you set up authentication for IBM Cognos 8, users must provide valid credentials, such as user
ID and password, at logon time. In IBM Cognos 8 environment, authentication providers are also
referred to as namespaces, and they are represented by namespace entries in the user interface.
IBM Cognos 8 does not replicate the users, groups, and roles defined in your authentication provider.
However, you can reference them in IBM Cognos 8 when you set access permissions to reports and
other content. They can also become members of Cognos groups and roles.
The following authentication providers are supported in this release:
● Active Directory Server
● IBM Cognos Series 7
● eTrust SiteMinder
● LDAP
● NTLM
● SAP
You configure authentication providers using IBM Cognos Configuration. For more information,
see the Installation and Configuration Guide.
Multiple Namespaces
If multiple namespaces are configured for your system, at the start of a session you must select one
namespace that you want to use. However, this does not prevent you from logging on to other
namespaces later in the session. For example, if you set access permissions, you may want to reference
entries from different namespaces. To log on to a different namespace, you do not have to log out
of the namespace you are currently using. You can be logged on to multiple namespaces simultan-
eously.
Your primary logon is the namespace and the credentials that you use to log on at the beginning
of the session. The namespaces that you log on to later in the session and the credentials that you
use become your secondary logons.
When you delete one of the namespaces, you can log on using another namespace. If you delete all
namespaces except for the Cognos namespace, you are not prompted to log on. If anonymous access
is enabled, you are automatically logged on as an anonymous user. If anonymous access is not
enabled, you cannot access the IBM Cognos Connection logon page. In this situation, use IBM
Cognos Configuration to enable anonymous access.
Hiding Namespaces
You can hide namespaces from users during logon. This lets you have trusted signon namespaces
without showing them on the namespace selection list that is presented when users log on.
For example, you may want to integrate single signon across systems, but maintain the ability for
customers to authenticate directly to IBM Cognos 8 without being prompted to choose a namespace.
You can hide Custom Java Provider and eTrust SiteMinder namespaces that you configured.
For more information, see the Installation and Configuration Guide.