I seem to spend a fair bit of time searching for and finding SAS Articles and Papers to assist for projects we are on, whether it be how to reduce the size of your metadata repository or what does the SAS Grid capabilities provide.

When I first started the saasinct.com website one of my goals was to index these articles there so I could easily find them again.

I started out with a bang and a hiss but then of course I got busy and the bang whimpered and the hiss fizzled.

I have spent a little time lately setting off the gun powder again.

When I sat back and looked at what I needed, I worked out that sites like SAS Support.com and Lex Jansen have great capabilities in terms of storing all these articles and making them searchable.

But what they lacked for me was the context, and when im looking or more precisely browsing (because when im looking im searching using google)  I often don’t know exactly what im looking for.  So for example I might look for a list of articles on SAS Grid, or to do with SAS Administration.

So I have reorganised the way I catalogue the articles and papers, to do this by three components:

• SAS Role (i.e Administrator, Business Intelligence Developer)
• SAS Product (i.e Data Integration Server, Enterprise Guide, Metadata Server)
• Source (i.e SAS Forum, User Group, Blog)

And then added these as pull down menus throughout the site so people can navigate the articles in these components easily.  I have also added tag clouds to again make finding information easier if you are browsing, as well as the usual search function.

To make it manageable I also split it out to a sub-site http://sasarticles.saasinct.com/ rather than have it embedded in the SaasInct.com main site (which made it hard to manage).

Unfortunately I don’t have time to add and index all the articles and papers available in one go, but as I find them I will add them).  (Of course if there si anybody out there willing to help with the task let me know, many hands make light work and all that

And of course any comments of how to make it more usefull feel free to jot them down and leave a comment.