Angela’s post on the changes in SAS Portal 4.2 (9.2) called Favorite things about SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 highlights the fact that the public kiosk is no longer available in the 9.2 SAS Portal.
A lot of the customers we have worked with have disabled the Public Kiosk page in 9.1.3
So I am wondering how much of an issue it disappearing is going to be?
So tell me do you use the public kiosk page and do you really need it?
Chris Hemedinger commented on my last article that EM6.1 is now released (thanks Chris)
You can see whats new in the latest release over at:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsnew/62435/HTML/default/emwhatsnew61.htm
Ive done a little bit of playing with EM, but leave the real work to the experts (to much stats hurts my head, although I now know what the answer should have been when I asked my stats teacher at school when would I ever use this in the ‘real world’ Doh!)
Anyway from an architecture point of view it is good to see Enterprise Miner is now an integral part of the SAS 9 architecture, rather than just an integrated component.
I like the fact it uses the SAS Metadata server and content repository for EM projects.
I also like the fact there is a direct upgrade path from 5.3 and a conversion path from 4.3. Should make upgrades much easier! ( I still remember the EM 4.1/4.3 to 5.1 days which werent so good)
In SAS eBI 9.1 and 9.2 there is no easy way to migrate Portal pages across SAS instances.
So if you follow what we call Optimal practice and do all development in a separate SAS Development environment, then promote it to a UAT environment and finally to Production, there is a lot of rework instore.
We were thinking about creating a sasInct module to assist in this task but thanks to a tip off (thanks Robin) we have found out that SAS are about to release a utility that enables you to migrate portal pages on both 9.1 and 9.2.
It is due in the next couple of weeks, so ask your friendly SAS Account Manager or Presales Dude/Dudette.
Once I have tested it I will let you know what I think.
So interesting articles over at the Microstrategy site, where they compare their software to other vendors, one being SAS.
First thing that tweaked my interest was the disclaimer you agree to before seeing the content:
“The recipient of this document agrees not to disclose its contents to any third party or otherwise to use this document for any purpose other than an evaluation of MicroStrategy’s business or its offerings. Reproduction or distribution of this document is prohibited without MicroStrategy’s advance written authorization. MicroStrategy does not guarantee the accuracy of any information presented in this document, and there is no commitment, express or implied, on the part of MicroStrategy to update or otherwise amend this document.”
So wonder if I am in breach by posting the link? Well its guaranteed to not be accurate anyway (oops got those words round the wrong way 
So they compare themselves to SAS, things I noted:
I could go on, but I won’t. I do wonder if they are going to update it now SAS 9.2 is available.
As an aside one of the interesting things when working for a vendor was whether you should mention the enemy or not. Some say by mentioning the competiton validates therm as a competitor and keeps them in the customers mind.
Most vendors have a “slag sheet” but normally you only get to see it if you are their coach within the customer trying to discredit the competition in a sales cycle. Interesting approach to publish it online.
Me I think they should concentrate on what they do well, which looks like producing a BI Reporting tool.
Chris Hemedinger has blogged a number of very good reasons why you would move fomr Base SAS to Enterprise Guide. He has also outlined the things you will loose.
In my experience most SAS programmers are forced by their cpmpanies to move to EG rather than do so willingly (but I amnot saying the move is a wrong one). There are a number of reasons that this move is enforced on them, including:
One of the area I find base SAS Programmers struggle with is the whole idea of Metadata vs Physical table data. So I would recommend spending a bit of time on this with them.
At the moment we would love to move our DI Studio code to EG for one of our projects. The reason?
In EG you can see the log file as the code run’s, in DI Studio you have to wait until it finishes (assuming it does finish).
DI Studio provides the ability to see where in the process flow your job is at, but for now we write our code in DI Studio, then grab it and run it in EG so we can keep up with what it is doing.
Well last I heard SAS 9.2 – Phase 2, was still due Q1 2009 (anybody heard otherwise?).
So one month and a bit to go.
The Team from SAS Australasia are doing SAS 9.2 overviews at the New Zealand User group conference on 27th Feburary (checkout the impressive sponsors, especially top right .
And Bill Gibson is doing the open session, should have a lot more insight on 9.2 after those.
There are rumours we might even see some 9.2 based solutions released this year, can’t wait!
So are you preparing to upgrade to SAS 9.2 this year? Leave a comment and let me know!
SAS ANZ ran a forum in Sydney this month, and had a great turn out with over 1,000 attendies. I didn’t manage to make it but heard it was a great event.
SAS ANZ have put up copies of the papers over on the SAS Forum Australia and New Zealand 2008 conference web site, check them out, there is some good info and highlights on whats comming in 9.2!
I have been doing a bit of research around SAS 9.2, whats coming and when.
There was an interesting presentation over at http://www.sascommunity.org/mwiki/images/3/3c/NewsCorner_SAS_Club_16.pdf which (apart from not being in English) was dated Nov 2007 and outlined a road map for the delivery of 9.2. It outlined:
Ignoring the dates (they have obviously slipped but no official news on how much that I could find) the phasing seems to still be true, with Phase 1 already released.
In trolling around I did manage to find some information on what is being delivered in Phase 2, so I have posted them over on our main site at :
Of course if you were lucky enough to attend SAS Forum 2008 and have anymore information feel free to post a comment with some juicy details.
If you ever need to change the passord for one of the SAS Administrator id’s (i.e. sasadm, sastrust, saswbadm, sassrv, sasdemo etc) then you will find that it is not a simple case of updating the hosts password and metadata passwords.
There are a few more places that you will need to edit.
SAS Tech Support have a document that explains what you need to do – TS736 – Changing Password for Default Users
The doc is orientated towards a solutions based install, but you will need to follow most of the steps, depending on what products you have installed (i.e. Business Intelligence Server, Data Integration Server etc)
As you will see lots of text edits required, but I wont rant about why this shouldn’t be so difficult, here’s hoping SAS 9.2 makes it a little easier…..
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