Posted by Shane Gibson on August 30, 2010
**** Update: Much better outline on the process for EG 4.3 over at Chris’s Blog http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/194-SAS-Enterprise-Guide-4.3-is-available.html ***
I do believe SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 has been released with a raft of new features!
A couple of presentations outlining what is new can be found here:
And the official doco is here:
Looks like the other 4.3 clients (i.e WRS, Portal, BI Dashboards) are still slated for October 2010 (the year is always as important as the month sometimes 
, but Chris and team delivered Enterprise Guide 4.3 as promised in August (well done Chris!)
Now it seems that to get hold of EG 4.3 you need to request it from your account manager.
However this SAS Discussion Forum post http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=10452 indicates that some people have got hold of it by updating their software depot.
Reading between the lines I think it looks like the process is to contact your account manager to get a new download order and then update your software depot to get the software. But as I said im guessing here.
Also it looks like there is some confusion about whether EG 4.3 will run on SAS 9.2 M2 or if SAS 9.2 M3 is a pre-requisite.
What I understand is that EG 4.3 requires SAS 9.2 M3 to be supported, but that it may work with M2.
If anybody has anymore info feel free to update SAS Discussion Forum post.
Oh and lastly reading the doco it seems that you need to migrate your EG projects to 4.3, even if they are currently 4.2. I wonder if this means that they are then incompatible with EG 4.2 after that (like the migration for EG 4.1 > EG 4.2). Think I need to contact my partner manager and get the new download order number and test a few things.
Posted by Shane Gibson on July 16, 2010
If you are using Dataflux as part of your SAS 9.2 Enterprise Data Integration (eDI) license then when you downlaod (or receive) your install depot you will have DF Studio 8.1 and Dataflux Integration Server 8.1.
The current Dataflux release is 8.2 and it is certified with SAS 9.2 so make sure you get a support login to the Dataflux website and download the 8.2 install executable and install that version.
Posted by Shane Gibson on July 14, 2010
Got a curly one from a customer yesterday, so thought I would throw it out to the wider community (and Chris from SAS to see if there is an answer.
So in Web Report Studio you can have the prompts that have been selected (i.e City = Auckland) automatically displayed on a report.
The customer is of course not using WRS but is using Enterprise Guide, Stored Processes and Office Addin.
They worked out a way to have Stored Processes that are delivered via Excel/AMO to display the selected prompts when executed, and we could use this concept in EG to effectively create two list reports (one for report content and one for selected prompts) and combine them in report.
But I was wondering if any knew of a way to have the prompts shown in a graph output etc?
Posted by Shane Gibson on July 9, 2010
So we have a few customers where we have installed SAS 9.2 M2 on either on a live or a test environment.
We wanted to test applying the M3 maintenance release before the 4.3 clients come out as there are dependent.
So the process is to apparently run the download manager again and the install depot will be updated.
But before you do this you will need to talk to your account manager to get a new license code, or the download manager wont update the install depot.
Is it me or just this seem like one extra unnecessary step to apply a maintenance release for software a customer has paid for?
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick on this one and this is not required?
And of course when searching for documentation on installing/applying the M3 release you get nada.
Posted by Shane Gibson on July 8, 2010
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.
Posted by Shane Gibson on May 19, 2010
We are doing some work to enable Channels and WRS report scheduling in our SAS 9.1.3 environment.
Its a complete mare!
One of the issues we have struck is the inability to delete any packages you have published to a channel. They just stay there forever.
In SAS 9.2 you get a utility that lets you delete these packages:
SAS 9.2 Using the Package Clean-Up Utility to Remove Packages
Luckily the friendly chaps at SAS tech Support mentioned that there is a SAS Toolpool entry for 9.1.3 that does teh same function.
So if you need to delete Archived Packages in SAS 9.1.3 channels, then as your friendly SAS dude for the toolpool entry.
Posted by Shane Gibson on May 7, 2010
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
Posted by Shane Gibson on May 3, 2010
I have been doing a bit more Solution Architecture work around SAS 9.2 lately, and I keep needing to validate what versions of Operating System works with what version of SAS etc.
So here are the links (please note I have only included links to SAS 9.2 TM2Mx, not TM1M0):
Posted by Shane Gibson on April 9, 2010
I have been doing a number of installations of SAS 9.2 eBI / eDI over the last week, to get a bit of practice in.
When I did installs on VM instances everything worked fine.
But when I did the install on a native machine, none of the Web Apps (SAS Portal, Web Report Studio etc) would deploy and I would just get an error when trying to access the url via a browser (i.e /SASPortal/).
Eventually I tracked it down to an issue with the IPv6 setting.
So I changed the setting in the wrapper.conf file under:
<sas-config-dir>/Lev1/Web/Applications/RemoteServices/
And changed the line:
wrapper.java.additional.6=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false -Dmulticast_udp_ip_ttl=0
to become
wrapper.java.additional.6=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=false -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=true -Dmulticast_udp_ip_ttl=0
So effectively switching from IPv4 to IPv6. Reboot the server and we are away.
No idea what IPv6 does so need to do some research.
Update: May 2010
There is some more detail on IPv4 vs IPv6 and SAS 9.2 in this tech support note:
Usage Note 37509: Using SAS® 9.2 successfully with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) in Microsoft Windows operating environments
