Blogging about all things SAS

We have been working on an idea for a new portlet, and I was interested in any feedback from the SAS community.

The idea is to enable users and portal administrators to layout the portal page via standard drag and drop and resize capabilities that you would expect with any Web personalisation (aka portal) capability.

To do this we have built a prototype of a portlet that then allows you to select other portlets and then darg and drop them on the page.  Once you have done that the layout is saved.

As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a quick and dirty vid:

So what do you think?

• Nothing but eye candy?
• Pretty cool, id buy that!
• mmm nice try but no cigar

Feel free to post a comment if you have one!

The place you put your portlet files to automatically deploy them has changed in SAS 9.2.

In SAS 9.1 (windows) you used to place them here:

<sas-install-dir>\Program Files\SAS\Web\Portal2.0.1\DeployedPortlets

In SAS 92 (Windows) you need to place them here:

<sas-config-dir>\Lev1\Web\Applications\SASPortlets4.2\Deployed



So we have been busy over the last year building a few portlets, check out the list on the main sasInct.com site.

The things we are finishing off at the moment is our Mediawiki extension for dynamically surfacing SAS Metadata in a Wiki.

We are also working on testing everything on SAS 9.2.

After that we are trying to decide if we should extend our portlets further (i,e add more graph options to the Flash Graph portlet) or develop new ones.

Current suggestions for new capability include:

• A Report Usage auditing capability
• Sharepoint extension to surface SAS Metadata in Sharepoint
• A SPM portlet, that extends the current functionality
• A web based Metadata explorer
• A Management Console plugin to enable you to migrate Portal Pages across SAS instances

Is there anything else you need built?

Leave us a comment and let us know, you never know, we may just build it.

Ps. It doesnt have to be a portlet, we also DI Studio, SAS Management Console plugins and Enterprise Guide Addins, so if you have an idea shoot it our way!

We are eagerly awaiting the General Availability of SAS 9.2 install media.

Once we get our grubby hands on it we will beinstalling it toot sweet and then testing and releasing all our sasInct Portlets as both 9.1 and 9.2 version.

We are aiming for all our portlets to be avaiable on 9.2 within a month of the media being available.

Of course 9.2 delivers some of the capability out of the box (i.e flash graphs in the BIDashboards) but if youwant the functionality now in 9.1 or find something still missing in 9.2 let us know.

Out of the box SAS and specifically the SAS Business Intelligence Suite has some awesome capabilities. But as always we want more and so consultants (and SAS themselves) often develop custom extensions to do the specific things a customer requires.

One of the most common is the development of custom portletto provide additional functionality within the SAS Information Delivery Portal.

One of our goals at sasInct is to develop a number of prebuilt portlets, whic we can provide at a reasonable price.

One of the portlets I used the most in my SAS demo environments was a text portlet, where I could enter free form text. But it was more valuable than that because I also used it to enter HTML which enabled me to do deliver a raft of customised content for users.

So with that in mind we are have developed our first portlet, and you guessed it we have written from the ground up a text based portlet.

We are currently working through the installation and user guides and when these are finished we will announce it available for purchase and download.