From John Croson's Blog Home - AllScripts Tiger to MS SQL to GoDaddy Hosting:
“The workstation running the reports must have a user logged in with the Cognos Scheduler application running in order to fire the reports off. It cannot run via the Windows Scheduled Tasks”
DOESN'T WORK, YOU GET A “FAILED TO INITIALIZE” MESSAGE FROM runmac32.exe
I ran into this same problem when trying to schedule an Impromptu macro with runmac32 under a normal user account. It seems that the problem is caused by the scheduled task not loading a full userprofile when executing. Unfortunately Impromptu seems to need a fully loaded profile to even start.
As I couldn't find a way to force the scheduled task to load a full userprofile, I worked around the problem by creating an encrypted job file with CPAU and then scheduling CPAU with the encrypted job file in a scheduled task with the -lwp option that forces the job that gets started by CPAU to load a full profile for the configured user.
Create encrypted job file to run command under the defined user:
CPAU.exe -u Domain\Macro -p password -ex "\"C:\Program Files\Cognos\cer5\bin\runmac32.exe\" \"\\fileserver.domain.local\software\Impromptu\Macro.mac\"" -enc -file macrojob.jb -lwp
Schedule the following command in a Windows scheduled task:
CPAU.exe -dec -file macrojob.jb -lwp -hide
Provide full paths to the .exe and .jb where appropriate.
DOESN'T WORK, YOU GET A “FAILED TO INITIALIZE” MESSAGE FROM runmac32.exe