Just noticed Chris has posted an entry outlining a new hotfix for Enterprise Guide 4.3.
Details are here: http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/C44.html#C44006
SAS Products
Postings about Individual SAS Products
How to add the Outlook addin 4.3 after the fact – thanks Angela!
Mar
04
04
I while ago I posted about remembering to tick the box for outlook integration when installing AMO 4.3.
Barry commented that you dont see that tick box option when you do an upgrade from a previous version of AMO.
Angela has just posted a way of adding it after the fact over here Super Important Tip on Upgrading from 4.2 to 4.2 Add-in to MS Office
(mental note to self, given this hidden executable and the EG migration wizard, really need to spend sometime one day clicking on all the .exe’s and see what else is hidden!)
Installing Enterprise Miner 6.2 Client – Use the install and config option!
Mar
03
03
Had a weird one this week.
SAS are installing a Grid environment at a customer site.
We had already installed the SAS 9.2 clients on a dedicated Citrix box, so the dev team could test the new SAS 9.2 clients / functionality.
We wanted to add a few clients, including the Enterprise Miner 6.2 client (we aren;t installing a websever so can’t use the web based java client).
So ran the install wizard, selected add additional software and then selected Enterprise Miner client. Install wizard went through ok and completed succesfully.
But there was no Enterprise Miner shortcut on the start menu, and if I clicked the em.exe I got nada.
After a bit of tooing and froing, the answer was to run the install wizard, do a planned deployment and only select the client tier and then Enterprise Miner.
Thing that is confusing is that Enterprise Guide, Management Console, DI Studio etc all installed ok via the add additional software option.
Just not Enterprise Miner (and no error messages of course).
I won’t rant about the fact that although a lot of the SAS products/client interfaces all finally share the same infrastructure components, user interfaces and functionality (im loving shared prompts), a number of them are stil orphans in this regard (why oh why doesnt EM use std metadata connection profiles like every other SAS client!)
But if you do find that you manually install Enterprise MIner client and it just doesn’t, try a planned deployment.
Enterprise Guide Addin’s Development Documentation
Feb
27
27
Chris posted earlier this month about the documentation that is available on the SAS Support site (http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/customtasks/) which outlines how to create addin’s for Enterprise Guide.
We showcased our first Enterprise Guide addin at the SUNZ conference last week, it allows users to kill their own SAS exe’s that have gone rogue on the SAS Server.
Ill post more on that baby later this week……
Calling Chris – How many ways does EG retrieve data?
Feb
17
17
Well if anybody else can answer this then give Chris a race for his money 
Based on my previous post it got me thinking about hoe EG retrieved the data.
It looked to me like EG retrieved the preview data into the EG project for the table selected, but failed to run the SAS query on the workspace server.
So from that I deduce that EG wasn’t using the workspace server to retrive the preview data.
Wonder if thats true or not?
Chris?
Documenting Information Maps
Feb
07
07
If you have ever wanted to pull a quick document out showing what is contained in a Information Map, then this post by Chris from last year will show you how.
It refers to the following tech support note Sample 39539: Creating a PDF that documents the contents of a SAS® Information Map.
Chris’s post also includes a link to some additional code he wrote that provides even more details of the infomap.
Not sure if Chris’s example will work in 9.1, as it uses the new SAS 9.2 Infomap libname engine.
But the original tech support code should work in SAS 9.1 as it uses the sasiome engine (slightly undocumented feature of SAS 9.1).
One of the talented guys that worked on a project with us a while ago wrote the equivalent capability to extract the information maps developed for the customer into static html pages (which we embedded in the client wiki) so that we could surface the infomation maps contents to the users. He apparently had to work around with some issues with XML tags and escape characters from memory, so im guessing he was parsing the XML.
As an aside a few years ago we developed a Metadata Web Service that dynamically queried the SAS metadata server and displayed the metadata as a webpage.
The goal was to dynamically display the metadata content for libnames, tables, users, etc without having to export it manually.
After a bit of effort we even were able to acces the Infomap content (Infomaps are no stored as standard metadata object on SAS 9.1)
The issue we struck was the client was running 32 bit windows and the Metadata repository was very large, so if we accessed the metadata via the web service it would run out of memory and crash (of course it worked on our small dev and test metadata instances!).
Havent retested now we have SAS 9.2 and can use 64 bit windows, so might have to resurrect it for a retest.
Installing SAS 9.2 AMO for Outlook (4.3) – Tick the box stupid!
When installing the Office Addin in for SAS 9.2 you get the old Excel/Word & Powerpoint options by default.
But the Outlook option is unticked by default, so if you want to use it, tick it!
(and yes you can imagine I keep forgetting hence my post!)
The ooutlook option turned up in the latest M3/4.3 release.
Of course that brings me to my theory that the Office Addin for Outlook component will actually overtake the SAS Portal and AMO/Excel interface as the preferred way of accessing predefined SAS content by end users.
And I could talk about how I think that by also offering Search (Google or Microsoft not the SAS portals … effort) and GIS as the visualisation interfaces to SAS content, that the concept of a Portal is effectively dead. But Ill blog about that later.
Is your Portal Content playing peek-a-boo in 9.2
Jan
19
19
Saw this interesting SAS Support note “Problem Note 36697: Group member cannot see shared group content in SAS® Information Delivery Portal“ referenced in a discussion on the SAS Support Discussion forums.
It seems a change has been made to make the SAS Portal pages load faster in SAS 9.2 (good!)
But the trick for your players is that the users Portal group membership is cached.
What this means is if you change the users groups, for example add them to a new group so they have access to additional content, the cache needs to be refreshed or they will never see the content.
The support note outlines a couple of options for refreshing the cache.
SAS Enterprise Miner, Delivers the goods but needs makeup (or makeover)
Jan
19
19
I was reading this interesting blog here from Jiangtang Hu, where he compares SAS Enterprise Miner with IBM’s Intelligent Miner and SPSS Clementine (interesting he didn’t compare Oracle’s Data Mining offering)
His outcome was SAS EM wins on most areas except the User Interface.
I must say that after doing an upgrade for a client to SAS 9.2 M3 and SAS Enterprise Miner 6.2 the other day, I logged straight into Enterprise Miner to see if it still looked as ugly as it always has, and the answer is yes.
Now I know look and feel doesn’t actually make that much of a difference to actual usability (just sales , and that SAS Enterprise Miner normally has a very limited set of users in an organisation (compared to Web Report Studio which looks damn sexy in 4.3).
But you would think that at some stage in the many upgrades and updates since SAS Enterprise Miner 4.1 the development team would have at least adopted the nice look and feel of DI Studio or the other good looking Studio interfaces.
SAS Enterprise Miner is starting to look very 80′s (especially those top buttons!) and not in a cool retro Miami Vice sort of way either!
Migrating from SAS BI Dashboards 4.2 to 4.3
Nov
30
30
There is a SAS note that will be very helpfull in understandong the differences between SAS BI Dashboards 4.2 and 4.3.
It also has links to other usage notes outlining some issues you might encounter.
Check out: Usage Note 40474: SAS® BI Dashboard 4.3 is completely new software
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