The SEGUS web site was rolled out on September 1, 2004. The web site is intended to serve as the central resource for information related to SAS Enterprise Guide and other SAS Business Intelligence products such as Add-In for Microsoft Office and Web Report Studio.

Visitors are encouraged to sign up for a free SEGUS membership. Benefits of SEGUS membership:

• Technical information, tips, news and updates.
• Access to SAS Business Intelligence papers, presentations and tutorials.
• Access to SEGUS newsletter archives.

The first issue of the SEGUS newsletter features an interview with Chris Hemedinger, Enterprise Guide Development Manager, SAS Institute. Chris has kindly agreed to answer our questions about the recently released Enterprise Guide 3.0 and plans for the future releases of this great product. We began with general questions and, at the end, asked three technical questions submitted by Enterprise Guide users.

SEGUS: Congratulations on the recent release of Enterprise Guide 3.0! How does it feel to be finally done with this major release?

Chris: Thank you! It feels great to have Enterprise Guide 3.0 finally in the hands of customers. We spent a lot of time working on it and we're pleased with the features we were able to add. The feedback we've received from customers so far has been very positive.

When was Enterprise Guide 3.0 officially released?

It began shipping around the middle of July 2004.

Enterprise Guide will be bundled free with any PC license of SAS 9.1. When should PC SAS users expect to receive Enterprise Guide 3.0?

Any customer who receives the 9.1.3 distribution of SAS for Windows (Workstation license) should have it in their package. Customers who received earlier distributions of SAS 9.1 should expect to receive Enterprise Guide 3.0 automatically. (I should point out that distribution procedures may vary by region; if you expect to receive Enterprise Guide 3.0 but haven't, you might want to call your SAS account representative and ask about it.)

Could you tell us a bit more about what was going on behind the scenes during the Enterprise Guide 3.0 development? Is it true that you had to rewrite the product virtually from scratch?

We did rewrite virtually the entire product, taking advantage of the latest advances in the Microsoft Windows operating system and the .NET development platform. However, much of the logic and approach remains unchanged from when we first released the product in 1998. The goal of Enterprise Guide is to help our customers take full advantage of the powerful SAS software that companies rely on for analysis, reporting, and business intelligence. This new implementation puts us in a great position to expand Enterprise Guide as SAS offers new solutions and capabilities.

Was all of this done to make Enterprise Guide more compatible with the new release of the SAS software (SAS 9)?

Enterprise Guide 3.0 is designed to work well with some of the great new features in SAS 9. We also worked hard to keep compatibility with SAS 8.2, so that customers do not have to wait for a SAS 9 installation to use it.

One of the biggest benefits of this new implementation is the ability to share the SAS tasks -- the user-friendly dialogs that let you point and click to generate SAS code for analysis and reporting -- with the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. As a result, most of the tasks that you see in Enterprise Guide can also be accessed in Microsoft Excel or Word, via this new product.

Can you provide a brief description of new features in Enterprise Guide 3.0?

First, the user interface has received an "extreme makeover". The process flow diagram has become the primary metaphor for working with your project. This allows you to see the flow of your project much easier: a great benefit for new users and experienced SAS programmers.

The integrated OLAP Analyzer is a feature-rich OLAP viewer, capable of viewing SAS OLAP cubes as well as any OLAP data source that supports the OLEDB for OLAP standard. A mainstay in Enterprise Guide, this interface has also been completely revamped to make its powerful features easier to use.

Enterprise Guide can now be a "one-stop shop" for creating, modifying, and running SAS stored processes. Stored processes are a great way to take SAS programs/processes and share them among a variety of environments. With Enterprise Guide, you can create the program that does just what you want, then turn it into a stored process that can be run from the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, a web service, the SAS Information Delivery Portal, and more.

There is much, much more, of course. The Enterprise Guide page has all of the details.

There was a recent discussion in the SAS-L forum about SAS -- was it growing linearly or exponentially? There have been quite a few changes in Enterprise Guide since Version 2.0, enough to call it an "exponential" change. Are you planning to continue expanding Enterprise Guide at an exponential rate?

Enterprise Guide 3.0 represents a big change--no doubt about that. Thanks to this achievement we now have a lot more room to grow. With this as our base going forward, we are excited about the features we can add to expand the breadth of our product's capabilities. In addition, it's a great framework for customers to extend using the SAS add-in APIs.

Right now Enterprise Guide is an add-on component and requires separate installation. The rumor has it that Enterprise Guide will become integrated into SAS and the Enterprise Guide interface will eventually replace the familiar SAS interface (at least on PCs running Windows). When is this likely to happen?

We are always looking for ways to make Enterprise Guide a productive environment for all of our users, whether they are new to SAS products or experienced SAS programmers. We strive to make it so that Enterprise Guide is the preferred interface to SAS for our customers. If Enterprise Guide does someday become a default view of the SAS System, we want to make sure it is ready to handle the needs of everyone using it. Here's the best way to ensure that your favorite feature or capability is considered for inclusion in Enterprise Guide: send a note to SAS Technical Support. There is a team of Enterprise Guide experts on hand to answer your questions and all feedback that they receive does come back to us.

Stored processes enable users to create graphical interfaces and, from this perspective, provide a great alternative to custom add-in tasks that require Visual Basic or C# programming skills. However, stored processes support only fairly basic graphical interfaces in Enterprise Guide 3.0. Are you planning to provide users with more options in future releases of Enterprise Guide?

The great thing about stored processes is that the user interface is not tied to how they are modeled. That is, you can create a stored process that can run anywhere, whether it's in a Windows application such as Enterprise Guide or the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, a Java application, or a web page. The user interface presented is appropriate for the environment. The add-in tasks provide you with extra flexibility for the user interface, but as you point out, these require more skill to create. I expect that as we progress, stored processes will gain more UI flexibility and add-in tasks will become easier to create. I don't have any specific news to share here though.

Are you planning to add support for XML output in future releases of Enterprise Guide?

Yes, a future release will support the SAS Report XML from ODS.

Enterprise Guide 3.0 comes with a lot more tasks than Enterprise Guide 2.0. What new tasks or categories of tasks are you planning to add in the near future?

We plan to expand our palette of analysis, reporting and utility tasks, as well as add some more focused business-oriented tasks. In addition, we plan to add task wizards that simplify some of the more complex tasks. If you have a favorite that you would like to see, send a note to technical support.