When talking to users it was obvious that although we are providing a number of easy to use Web Report Studio reports, as we release more and more data and there applicable reports, easily finding the information they need becomes more and more of an issue.

We typically provide a small number of parameter driven WRS reports.  This reduces our development and maintenance efforts and also allows users to utilise a single report to answer multiple business questions.

In addition each report also has a number of Sections/Tabs (going to miss those when we upgrade to SAS 9.2) that provide different views of the data (i.e by location, by time, by product etc). We do this again to make it easy for users to quickly find the information they need.

But its not till you sit next to a new user that you see how they use (or don’t use) the information we provide.  In our case I see a lot of users struggle to workout which report and which tab they should use to answer their business question.

As a quick workaround we developed a sasInct! portlet that provides a drillable tree of business questions (need to add this to the website) and then used the sasInct WRS linkage tool to automatically open the relevant WRS report, on the relevant section/tab, with the relevant parameters predefined to answer the selected question.

But the next step we wanted to look at was using a Google search  appliance to index all our reports and metadata to take it one step closer.

A quick Google search on Google and SAS (that was weird) found a press release dated 2006 “SAS and Google Partner on BI Search Capabilities“.

Next I found a paper present to SAS Forum in 2007 but no copy of the paper was available so I emailed the author at SAS.

I got a very quick reply from Craig Rubendall @sas with a link to a presentation he co-presented at SAS Forum 2010. (Im always amazed at how accesable and helpful the SAS folk in Cary are, long may it continue)

The paper is at: Integrating the Power of SAS® with the Ease of Search across the Enterprise

He also provided links to download the SAS/Google Search Interface component for both  SAS Content 1.3 (SAS 9.1) and the SAS Content 1.4 (SAS 9.2)

So lots to read and then next step is to talk to our local Google reseller about options and pricing.  Ill post what I find out.

And of course if anybody has been through this already, feel free to get in touch, cause no doubt there will be some tricks for new players