Posted by Shane Gibson on July 8, 2010
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.
Posted by Shane Gibson on December 2, 2009
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.
Posted by Shane Gibson on April 2, 2009
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!
Posted by Shane Gibson on May 9, 2008
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?
