Version Control / Source Control / Check in and Check out issues with Cognos 8.3

There is an audit extension system that Cognos provides that provides some of what you're looking for, but not integrated (or to my knowledge, integratable) into any of the Rational stuff.  This package effectivley makes "copies" of the report specification into a special auditing database, and allows you to validate that the spec has or hasn't changed since its last run.  The only other tool you have is the package export/import which could be used with a file-based check-in/check-out system, but that'd be tricky.  

Cognos is extremely extensible; I can think of a myriad of ways of set up something, but it all requires a certain amount of SDK work (which is effectively what the Audit Extension package is, and effectively what the third-party vendors have done).  

Currently, the only "source control" that Cognos directly supports is at the FM level.

I see what you are saying RWrigley, but this cannot be the way that Configuration Management can only be set up for Cognos.  Currently how Cognos has it set up, it throws everything into a zip file from the DEV environment and then it imports that zip file (which has nothing but encrypted xml) into a TEST environment.  So if I wanted to make a change with a report I would have to recreate the zip file (content store and all)?  I lose all sense of granularity within my Configuration Management, definitely at the report level.  I know that there is one third party app that manages this kind of thing, and I see how c8AuditExtension extracts the information (thanks by the way, that was helpful).  But how do I actually check in Cognos's report source xml specs so that I don't have a versioning issue (because audit only produces a copy, I cant lock it up)?  Is there a query or anything that I can use to access that information?

Thanks for the help so far.  This has been a more involved question than I thought.

Well, keep in mind that a report isn't like programming code.  It isn't common to have multiple people working on the same report at the same time, so typically each report developer will work on their reports in their own area of the development environment, and once the report(s) are finsihed, they'll be moved to a staging areas on the development server.  This staging area will then get exported (just the folders), and imported into the QA and/or production environment.  Typically, no development work is ever done on these environments (and often the studios will be inaccessible).  

I agree, the lack of version control is a bit of a hole in the product, but given that this has been the case for as long as Cognos 8 (and ReportNet) have existed, I have to imagine that there just hasn't been that much interest in it.

There's a third party tool called MotioCI that does automated version control and regression testing for Cognos BI content.   Here's the link :

    http://www.inmotio.com/products/ci.do