Blogging about all things SAS

And my handwriting is crap, so I have decided to try tweeting all the stuff I need to remember (and yes got the idea from Angela at Zencos, thanks Angela)

You can follow my ramblings here:

http://twitter.com/optimalBI

(somebody already has sasInct, grrrrr)

When I worked briefly for Xero the office was full of very smart 20 ish olds who could tweet, icq, blog, drink coke, chat and code at the same time.

Lets see if I can do two things at once, i.e tweet and listen.  Of course being a man I can’t guarantee success.

Had a tipoff from a regular support.sas.com user that there is now a few SPM 5.1 guides and usage notes now on the site.

So is SPM 5.1 released?

I haven’t seen any announcements, but then again I might have missed it.

Here are the docs I have found so far:

• Installation Instructions–Release 5.1 of the SAS Performance Management Solutions
  Installation Instructions for Release 5.1 of the SAS® Performance Management Solutions Copyright Notice The correct bibliographic citation for this manual is as follows: SAS Institute Inc., Installation Instructions …

  http://support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/en/ikfmofrii/63034/PDF/default/install.pdf, 433KB
  

• 37794 – Post-migration steps required for SAS® Strategy Management
  The SAS Demo User account must be modified in the SASSDM in order for that user to be able to access SAS Strategy Management content.

  http://support.sas.com/kb/37/794.html, 18KB

Let me know if you know.

I have heard from a few SAS customers who have been using some of the SAS Toolpool entries in SAS 9.1 that they no longer work with SAS 9.2.

And as of course they are toolpool entries they are not officially supported by SAS so there may not be an immediate upgrade path to SAS 9.2.

But of course some of them are still providing additional functionality that is not available in SAS 9.2.

So I have been thinking of ways to keep the development team busy over Xmas, and recreating some of these might be the ticket.

So if you have one that you need, let us know what it does, and you will never know what Santa and his elves may deliver

Please don’t send us a copy (we write all our sasInct Portlets from scratch) but feel free to post here what it does, or create a support track at http://support.sasinct.com/login

And lastly we will post any that we develop on our website for the usual one off USD $1,000,  unlimited users/no expiration, (these elves are not cheap) and of course if it is a biggy (aka Metadata Explorer etc) then we probably wont.

Not a lot of blogging lately, because every now and again we get the privilege of doing some custom work for a customer, and we are flat out building a new replacement SPM 2.x portlet for them.

The customer needs the portlet to only show scorecards where values existed for the column sets selected (their scorecard hierarchy is quite volatile)

They also wanted to be able to provide some additional interactivity so we built it all in flash.

Gotta say (sorry flash portlet) that I have a new (portlet) love!

As you may know SPM doesn’t have any published API’s for portlets we could use so we extracted the SPM data into Oracle for this purpose. But I have been toying with creating some code in Mysql that would do exactly what we are dong in Oracle so it will work directly off SPM.

Any way (blowing our own trumpet) here is what the portlet does:

• Provide table and aggregated view in a single portlet as a edit portlet choice.
• Allows the users to tailor the portlet via flash based option pull down bar, even when published, including
  • Scorecard via a hierarchy tree
  • Measure group
  • Column Set
  • Date
  • Table vs aggregate
• Search for a scorecard based on its name
• Allows users to click on a measure and see the scorecards/measures below that make that value up
• Allows users to drag and drop columns
• Allows users to sort columns by clicking on them
• Doesn’t show scorecards with zero values
• Has a flash graph (line and bar) based pop up window for each measure (and you can select only one measure not default to all)
• Allows selection of default or specific date
• Uses our WRV/WRS linkages tool with Portal Single Sign On (SSO) to allow uses to dril down on a number and showsa context sensitive (i.e based on measure, scorecard, period etc) parameter based WRV/WRS report
• In aggregation mode allow users to select to show parent scorecard or not
• In aggregation mode show multiple columns under each scorecard (rather than the SPM version of a single column for each scorecard then the next column for each scorecard)
• Allows users to drill down on a scorecard in aggregation mode
• Breadcrumbs that shows the hierarchy of the scorecard you have selected (i.e Parent > Child > Child 1)

Its so beautiful …..