As I have mentioned before SAS are going to release a new set of Business Intelligence clients under the 4.3 umbrella sometime before the end of the year.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the new capability this week and one thing that really peeked my interest is the new integration with Microsoft Outlook.

We have been pushing the use of SAS Portal as the primary way of accessing our reporting content, but users have always gravitated towards using the Office Addin and access the data via Excel and Information Maps.

I think the integration with Outlook coming in 4.3 will move the majority of users off Excel and into outlook.  The key benefit is that this will move from some of the manually collated Excel content to the automated content we have created.

Why do I think this will happen?

Well because it removes the issue of having to login to the Portal or open Excel to access reports and data.  Users are permanently logged into Outlook, check there emails on a regular basis and therefore accessing their reporting content from there will just be easier.

The other thing I liked was the ability to embed BI Dashboard widgets into Outlook sidebars.  We have played around with creating desktop widgets for SAS but apart from being a cool demo I have never been convinced that people would use them in anger (and therefore we wouldn’t sell many

But if they are embedded in Outlook and therefore access is easy and ubiquitous then I think they may actually be used.

One thing I still think was lacking was the way the BI Dashboards are embedded in the SAS Portal, still some need for our !sasInct Flash Graph portlets for while yet.

But I do think the actual BI Dashboard application flash interface itself is pretty cool.

Anyway there is some details of whats coming in a paper done as SAS Forum 2010 – Better Decision Making with SAS® Enterprise Business Intelligence and Microsoft Outlook.

Also there is a pdf version of a presentation with some more details on the SAS BI 4.3 release and screenshots Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

The only thing it doesn’t tell us is when it will actually arrive.