Addin for Office

SAS Addin for Microsoft Office

SAS Addin for Microsoft Office – Requires WRS to be installed

SAS Addin for Microsoft Office – Requires WRS to be installed
Apr
15
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I was doing some testing of the new Addin to Microsoft Office (AMO) 4.3/M3 a week or two ago and specifically the addin for Outlook.

When trying to open a SAS Report (.srx) in Outlook we got this error.

Looks like the SAS AMO 4.3 plugin relies on the Web Report Studio web services that automatically  get installed when you install the Web tier.

The issue of course is this customer is only using AMO and has not deployed any of the web tier, but in good optimal practice are using Information Maps and .srx reports (created via Enterprise Guide).

So looks like using Outlook to access these .srx is out.

Now I know Kiwi’s (New Zealanders) are known for their number 8 wire approaches and also being frugal (a large number are of course descended from the Scots ;-) , so a number of NZ customers have purchased BI Server and only implemented the SAS Server, Enterprise Guide and AMO, as that meets their current needs.  In these cases it looks like using the Outlook version is out of the question.

And with SAS announcing an AMO/EG only offering again use of .srx reports is out im guessing.

Anyway one positive is after playing briefly with the Outlook capability on my test server, I can actually see the Outlook capability taking over from the Portal eventually.  Why would users want to login to the Portal to get their reports when they can access them directly from within Outlook where they spend so much of their time?

 

 

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AMO 5.1/9.3 – Some nice features comming

Apr
07

Stopped by the AMO stand at SAS Global Forum 2011 and had a quick look at the new features coming out.

Things that took my interest:

  • AMO 5.1 will work with SAS 9.2 & 9.3, wahoo that will make upgrades easier
    (although any new feature that requires 9.3 will be grayed out if you are accessing a 9.2 backend)
  • In excel you can make a excel cell the basis for a Stored Process prompt, so that means you can setup custom drop downs in the Excel sheet that drives what the STP brings back (i.e month, region etc).  Think about the flexibility that will allow in building excel frontends to SAS
  • AMO 4.3 supports Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 & 2010, AMO 5.1 will only support Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010.  The main reason is the major use of ribbons in AMO 5.1.
    (and before you complain Office 2003 is over 8 years old remember!)

Bring on Q3 – 2011!

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Allowing user to publish content that everyone can automatically see in the portal

Mar
15

Doing some research on the new SAS Addin for Microsoft Outlook 4.3, to trouble shout an issue at a customer site (more on that later) when I came across this post on the SAS Support site.

Sample 36921: Using the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office to publish documents that can be accessed from the SAS® Information Delivery Portal

It describes a way to change the default content storage options so that when a user saves a document vis the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office, the conent is automatically available via the SAS portal.

I am a great fan of creating content once and making it easily available to as many users as is useful, via their preferred channel. This is a great technique to help with that approach.

 

 

 

 

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How to add the Outlook addin 4.3 after the fact – thanks Angela!

Mar
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!)

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Installing SAS 9.2 AMO for Outlook (4.3) – Tick the box stupid!

Installing SAS 9.2 AMO for Outlook (4.3) – Tick the box stupid!
Feb
04
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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.

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Enabling users via Excel, SAS adds even more power to business users!

Sep
09

SAS have announced do-it-yourself predictive analytics for business users in the form of SAS® Rapid Predictive Modeler.

It is bundled in the licenses for Enterprise Miner 6.2 and lets people easily build complete Enterprise Miner processes from within Excel or Enterprise Guide. There is a demo over at Youtube.

At one customer we have rolled out the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office to all the 1200+ people in the organisation.  This has allowed users to access all the data in the Data Warehouse (they are constrained to only access data via trusted Information Maps) and therefore enabled self service reporting to those who need it.

Its interesting to see over at this BI Scorecard blog post BI Platforms – Still a World of Differences that SAS came out top in Office Integration!

And we all know that no matter what we try and do users want to access the data in what they are comfortable using (and use all the time) and that is Microsoft Office for the majority of business users.  So good to see SAS recognising the value in focusing on providing easy access to this capability.

By providing the ability for users to build Data Mining models via the Excel interface, SAS have taken one step closer to enabling Business Analytics for the masses.

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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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SAS 9.2 Private OLAP Server (playing nice with others and their toys)

Dec
02

Enterprise Guide 4.2 and Office Addin 4.2 now have the ability to access OLAP cubes that are not registered in SAS Metadata.

Effectively this allows you to use the SAS tools to access non SAS cubes (assuming you have the OLEDB connector installed)

These are called Private OLAP Servers.

Following extract  from 051-2009: What’s New in SAS® Add-In 4.2 for Microsoft Office explains it well.

 

PRIVATE OLAP SERVERS

 

Also new in 4.2 of the SAS add-in is the ability to define private OLAP servers. A private OLAP server is a direct connection to an OLAP server, rather than choosing one that is defined in metadata. The SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office now supports connecting to third-party OLAP providers, such as Microsoft Analysis Services or SAP BW, or any other vendor that defines an OLE DB compatible provider.

This is useful for users who have already invested in an OLE DB provider for OLAP. Now it is possible to use SAS to view and analyze that data. In SAS Add-In 2.1 for Microsoft Office, this was not allowed; the SAS add-in was able to connect to only a metadata-defined OLAP provider.

 

Once the user has opened the cube into the PivotTable, it works the same as any other PivotTable. The user has the full breadth of functionality available to them, such as drill-through, and adding calculated measures and members.

 

 

 

 

 

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Help! – Accessing Informaps and securing Libnames/Tables

Apr
02

So looking for some help from the SAS community.

On a project we have focused on delivering content via Web Report Studio and Infomaps.

We now want to allow users to access the content via Office Addin and Enterprise Guide.

But (there is always a butt ;-) we only want users to access data via Information Map, we don’t want them to access the base libnames or tables.

Why you ask, because we have all the business rules embedded in the Information Maps so we don’t want users bypassing these and defining there own business rules on the base data.

Of course if we deny access to the libname then the Infomaps will fail. We can’t restrict access to all data types (i.e tables) in AMO or EG.

So any ideas out there?

Things we are going to try:

  • Implement workspace server pooling (grant access to tables trusted user, but not actual use)
  • Create a workspace server for WRS reports with full rights inherited and a workspace server for AMO/EG users with linbame rights restricted

But we are pretty sure that neither of these will work.

As the title says, Help!

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I wish the SAS Addin for Microsoft had amnesia

May
09

I have talked to a number of customers that are having a problem with the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office (AMO) remembering a users password and then locking them out of their account.

When a user configures their connection to the SAS Server in AMO they can save their password, so they effectively gain a form of single sign on. (The password is stored as an encrypted text string in an XML file).

A number of customers I talked to also have some form of LDAP authentication setup (i.e. Active Directory), Unfortunately when a user changes their password on the LDAP server, AMO doesn’t know about it. It keeps trying to authenticate the user with their old password until the users account gets locked.

SAS Enterprise Guide also enables the user to store their connection credentials, but it seems to prompt the user to re-enter their credentials if the authentication with the server fails, therefore the users account doesn’t get locked.

We are working through some work arounds for this to see if we can fix the AMO issue, but has anybody else struck this?

Anybody else fixed it?

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