SAS Platform

SAS BI 4.3 – Integrating with Outlook

Jul
08

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.

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Deleting Channel Content in SAS 9.1 – Begone damn spot!

May
19

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.

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Deploying Portlets in SAS 9.2

May
07

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



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Migrating Metadata Repositories from SAS 9.1.3 32 bit to SAS 9.2 64 bit

May
04

Problem Note 34886: An error might occur when migrating SAS® 9.1.3 from a Windows 32-bit platform to SAS® 9.2 on a Windows 64-bit platform

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SAS 9.2 Third Party Sofwtare Dependencies and Versions

May
03

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):

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SAS 9.2 Installation – SAS Portal – Nobody home

Apr
09

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

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SAS 9.2 / EG 4.2 – Multiple startup profiles

Apr
05

So if you want to make friends again with your users (after peeing them off by making the change in my last blog post) you can make it easier for them to connect to different Metadata environments, without having to change the connection details within Enterprise Guide.

If you run Production / UAT / Development environments you can make it easy for users to start choose which environment they want before starting EG and thus removing the need to go through the conneciton wizard each time to change environments.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/61192/HTML/default/a003280786.htm

Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Different Profiles

After you have created profiles, you can associate a profile with a shortcut on the Windows desktop. This capability enables you to start SAS Enterprise Guide with a specific profile by clicking on a specific shortcut. You can also start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile by using a desktop shortcut.

To associate a profile with a desktop shortcut, follow these steps:

  1. Create a shortcut for the file SEGuide.exe. By default, it will be in the directory C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2.
  2. Right-click on the shortcut that you created and select Properties.
  3. To start SAS Enterprise Guide by using a specific profile, add /profile:<profile name> at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /profile. If the profile name includes spaces, you must enclose the name in quotation marks: 
    "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /profile:"SAS Metadata"

    To start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile, add /noprofile at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /noprofile:

    "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /noprofile
  4. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
  5. You can now rename and move the shortcut to the desktop.
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SAS 9.2 Users Connection profiles

Apr
05

In SAS 9.2 two different typos of connection profiles are stored for each user, one for windows applications (AMO, EG etc) and the pother for Java applications (DI Studio, Info Map Studio etc).

Java Applications:

Connection profiles are stored on the hosts of the desktop applications at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles. In the Windows Vista operating environment, the path is C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles. The names of the profiles use the file extension.swa.

Windows Applications:

These profiles are stored in the ConfigurationV42.xml file in the users home directory C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles.

And of course recommended good practice is to only change these files via the profile editing capability provided within each of the SAS client applications.

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SAS EG 4.2 – I like it!

Mar
12

So after playing with EG 4.2 for a few days in anger I have to say I like it.

Things I like:

  • The new folder structure that 9.2 Metadata introduced, works a treat in EG to save projects, files etc
  • New layout is good, especially the window with folder view, server view, task view etc in one
  • The conditional logic is way cool!
  • The status bar that gives you more details on what is running is great
  • Function level security means its easier to roll out in a controlled way
  • The project auto recover has saved me a few times already
  • The prompting framework rocks
  • Use of SAS/Access for PC file formats (if licensed) makes things faster
  • Query wizard joins now clearly explain inner, left, right and outer joins
  • Raft of additions around querying aggregated values, as well as detailed records
  • Accessing Information Maps works fully, no more limited functionality
  • Task templates rock, you can create all your graphs automatically using your default corporate styles/themes
  • The kill button actually works, invaluable!

Things I still can’t get to grips with:

  • Double clicking on a node opens the result table , not the query, still haven’t got used to that
    (update from Chris @ SAS “hold the Ctrl key when you double-click on a task/query node and EG will open the task dialog instead of the results.”)
  • Tabs are gone and yes pulldown is better use of screen realestate (especially for big projects) but tabs were easy.
  • F4 to get back to process flow view is now only works dependent on what you are viewing
  • There is now a filter and sort option and a query options, almost got used to it though

Things that suck:

  • Dependent prompts don’t work (create a Stored processes and they do though)

The team from SAS NZ did a great preso on whats new in SAS EG 4.2 at SUNZ this year, copy of overview paper here:

http://www.slideshare.net/sunznz/sas-enterprise-guide-whats-new

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SAS 9.2 Migration – SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) 4.1 to 4.2 experiences

Mar
12

So after converting a few EG project from SAS 9.1/EG 4.1 to SAS 9.2/EG 4.2 I have found a few interesting experiences.

I have just posted my experience with the EG Migration Wizard

Once the EG project is in 4,2 format a few other things have surfaced:

  • When importing MS Access or Excel files in the project, the import function has seemed to fundamentally changed, this caused a number of issues, specifically around importing date fields
  • Also it changes the title of the import file node from the database or excel file name to the access table or excel sheet name.  A little frustrating when multiple excel spreadsheets are being imported and they are all based on sheet1!
  • The query wizard has changed the way it handles calculations on calculated items, not sure exactly how, but query nodes that worked fine in 4.1 error in 4.2.  However once we recreated these calcs manually it all worked fine.

Little niggles and all can be fixed, but again don’t under estimate the amount of effort to get these things converted.

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