Archive for September, 2010

A new take on indexing SAS Articles and Papers (and one I hope is helpfull)

Sep
10

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.

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You can’t schedule SAS 9.2/4.2 EG projects on windows x64

Sep
09

### Update from Chris @ SAS via comment “We did fix this issue for Enterprise Guide 4.2 maintenance 2 (4.22, released around Sept 2009) — so that EG will add a reference to the correct version of cscript. And of course, it’s correct in 4.3.” ###

Customer picked up an issue with not being able to schedule EG 4,2 projects successfully on Windows 64 bit operating systems.

SAS Support have posted a note:

http://support.sas.com/kb/35/654.html

Which outlines a workaround to manually create a .bat file to run the scheduled projects.

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Enabling users via Excel, SAS adds even more power to business users!

Sep
09

SAS have announced do-it-yourself predictive analytics for business users in the form of SAS® Rapid Predictive Modeler.

It is bundled in the licenses for Enterprise Miner 6.2 and lets people easily build complete Enterprise Miner processes from within Excel or Enterprise Guide. There is a demo over at Youtube.

At one customer we have rolled out the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office to all the 1200+ people in the organisation.  This has allowed users to access all the data in the Data Warehouse (they are constrained to only access data via trusted Information Maps) and therefore enabled self service reporting to those who need it.

Its interesting to see over at this BI Scorecard blog post BI Platforms – Still a World of Differences that SAS came out top in Office Integration!

And we all know that no matter what we try and do users want to access the data in what they are comfortable using (and use all the time) and that is Microsoft Office for the majority of business users.  So good to see SAS recognising the value in focusing on providing easy access to this capability.

By providing the ability for users to build Data Mining models via the Excel interface, SAS have taken one step closer to enabling Business Analytics for the masses.

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SAS ITRM 9.2/3.2 is here – tada!

Sep
08

We have been waiting for the release of ITRM 3.2 (the SAS 9.2 compatible version) so we can evaluate it for a customer.

As I have mentioned before we were a little disappointed in the fact that most of the great out-of-the-box content that was in ITRM 2.7 (SAS 8), didn’t seem to make it into ITRM 3.1 (SAS 9.1).

ITRM 3.2 is going to fix all that and wahoo it has been released, doco available at :

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/itsv/index.html

One  of our other requirements was integration with Microsoft SCOM logging, which again is available in the new release.

So we have ordered the download order number, we will install it and see.

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Long time no blog stranger

Sep
08

Its been a while since I posted a entry (well I have posted a couple in the last few days but there was a big gap before that;-), so I thought I would do a quick post about what I have been up to.

  • As you may have noted I now have an extra a in saasinct, so I have spent quite a bit of time updating my blog, website, web store etc.
  • I was in Australia a few weeks ago for the SAS Australia and New Zealand forum, where I presented a paper outlining some of the steps I would recommend when undertaking any SAS Data Warehouse development.  I also managed to attend a number of other great presentations and the papers for these are available for download at:http://www.sasforum.com/anz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=106&Itemid=4
  • I have also been working on an Information Strategy for a customer and have been making extensive use of an Open Source methodology for Information Management called MIKE 2.0 (http://mike2.openmethodology.org/).  Weird name but great content, ill blog more about it when I get a chance.
  • We have done a complete rewrite on our Flash Graph Portlet and as part of this we have moved away from hand coding the graphing engine and OEM’d a flex based graphing engine from AmCharts.  It means we can release new graphing capabilities faster and easier and they look cool to!
  • We have also finally got around to adding a web store to our site so you can now buy our portlets online via a secure credit card facility and then download the portlet install file (.par) straight away.
  • We were also getting a lot of request for trial copies of our portlets so we have created a demo server that enables potential customers to try portlets before purchasing them.  we are know working on demo content that makes them shine so will let you know when we are done
  • I have been involved in a new project building an Accountability Reporting software suite called Comet4.  Not really SAS related but fun none the less.
  • We have been looking to move to SAS Grid for one customer, so again will post on that experience soon
  • We have also been developing a set of capabilities to manage (i.e Kill) rogue SAS processes, and should have the last bit finished off soon, and open for sale (hint hint ;-) .
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