Found two new SAS blogs in the interweb today, one when I was researching EG 4.3 doco from Susan Slaughter who has a great post titled “Top 10 Reasons to Use SAS Enterprise Guide”

And a blog from philihp which has some good SAS coding hints.

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:

• SAS® Programmer’s Paradise: New Goodies in SAS® Enterprise Guide® 4.3
• Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

And the official doco is here:

• http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/index.html

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.

http://www.sas.com/offices/asiapacific/sp/news/releases/SFANZ2010.html?utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=AustraliaNZ_PressRelease

Some of the peopl I talk to regular are telling me they are sometimes getting fixed in SAS 9.3 in response to issues now.

I came across this note today on the SAS Support site:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/openvms93.html

“Product Change Notifications from SAS

Statement of support for Windows on Itanium and Open VMS Itanium

April 2010 Due to changing market conditions, SAS 9.3 will drop support for Windows on Itanium (W64) and Open VMS Itanium (IVMS, VMI) operating systems. SAS will continue to assist customers in migrating to other operating systems. Note: SAS 9.2 will continue to support these operating systems.

Modified Technical Support

Upon release of SAS 9.4, Technical Support will be provided at Level B and will follow the schedule as outlined in the Technical Support Policies.”

So there you go SAS 9.3 and SAS 9.4!

But the good thing is that SAS are giving customers a good heads up on the future direction of the product and associated platform support and that is a good thing.

Well with SAP buying Sybase that gives them the database they needed.

They missed out on Analytics when you guys snapped SPSS.

So that leaves either a SAS/Teradata play (we could even through ESRI into it to make it spicy) or a SAS/SAP play.

Given the collaboration between SAS/Teradata via their in-database processing and Teradata’s sponsorship of SAS events (well in Australasia at least oh and while you are there scroll to the bottom and let me know what you think of the extra a in SaasInct, i’m not so sure i’m loving it) then a merger would technically be simple and there are not a lot of competing capability apart from Data Mining and Marketing Automation etc.

The SAS/SAP one is interesting cause it gives them a world leading Analytics capability, but competes with BO.  Then again buying multiple competing products never stopped Uncle Larry at Oracle.

The key is why would SAS offer themselves to SAP, as Dr Jim will obviously choose if and when he sells and also to whom.

The SAP/Teradata one would give SAP a form of Analytics, but with them buying Sybase (and paying so much) the value they would receive would be so much less than before.

And I still havent discounted HP buying some software capability to get into the game, but with the market convergence still happening then they are losing the ability to get enough pieces to compete I think.

One of the things I lost track of was the number of companies SAS has purchased since I left.  It wasn’t until I was doing some research around SAS solution for Risk that I started to see a whole raft of new companies and capability.  Need to find time to track them all down and blog them out of interest.

So anyway after all that no real answer or insight on who and what next, which I had that Octopus from the Soccer World Cup and then I could invest in shares and retire to blog full-time

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.

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?

But I do believe that Enterprise Guide might be out a little earlier than the other BI clients.

We will wait and see (not much else we can do

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.

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.