I know of a few other large SAS sites that have built there own custom administration tools to help automate the administration of their SAS environments.

When talking to the smaller SAS sites they do not have the development time to build an equivalent solution specifically for their site, and there is not a lot of out-of-the-box capability from SAS.

So of course we thought tada opportunity for some SaasInct magic!

We have been working on a set fo utilities that will help SAS sites manage their SAS processes.  The first two components are:

• A server side admin script
• An Enteprise Guide addin

We are beta testing them at the moment, but they are designed to enable rouge SAS processes to be killed automatically by the admin script based on some parameters (i.e SS processes running for 4 days or more and of course exclude server processes such as object spawners etc).

It also allows EG users to kill their own processes via an EG plugin.  This removes the ned for users to have to ring a admin person to kill them when they have exited (in a not very nice way) from EG on their PC and the process is still running on the server.

EG Rogue SAS Session Kill - Addin

And importantly they can only see and kill their own processes:

EG Rogue SAS Session Kill - Running Processes

We are thinking about adding a monitoring and kill portlet (maybe useful for admin’s?) and a DI Studio addin.

Will post when it is all up on the site for sale of course ;-)

• 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 .

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!

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



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!

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.

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.