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SAS Enterprise BI Server web seminar

Live web seminar
Wednesday, March 16
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. ET

To register, please visit the web seminar page.

Envision the potential of delivering business intelligence to the desktop of every information consumer who needs it, enabling everyone to access the data they need – quickly – and derive the intelligence they seek. And here's the best part: envision your organization making decisions using only one version of the truth.

You can make this vision a reality with SAS Enterprise BI Server. With its easy implementation and deployment, SAS Enterprise BI Server delivers intuitive interfaces that enable diverse users throughout your enterprise to make better, fact-based decisions – and get better results. Discover how Web-based query and reporting capabilities in SAS Enterprise BI Server's Web Report Studio can help you save both time and money with:

Intuitive interfaces for all levels of your organization.

Self-service access to data, no matter how complex.

Flexible report authoring and editing.

Fast access to multiple data sources.

Easy deployment, management and administration.

You'll also hear from Jody Porrazo, director of econometric risk strategy for APEX Management Group about why her company chose SAS Enterprise BI Server.

Business Intelligence SAS Users Group at SUGI 30

If you are going to SUGI 30 in Philadelphia, PA, please be sure to attend

BISUG birds of a feather (BOF) session from 6:00-9:00pm on Monday, April 11,

Users Group booth from 1:00-2:00pm on Monday, April 11, or from 11:00am-noon on Tuesday, April 12.

Learn about SAS Business Intelligence from experts

Review of SAS Enterprise Guide training courses

The January issue of the BISUG newsletter featured a review of two Enterprise Guide self-paced training courses by Linda Lucek of Northern Illinois University. Linda reviewed Programming Using SAS Enterprise Guide and Querying Data Using SAS Enterprise Guide.

In this issue Linda Lucek returns with a review of an Enterprise Guide live web course (Querying and Reporting Using SAS Enterprise Guide).

Linda Lucek works at Northern Illinois University. SAS was first installed on the mainframe at Northern Illinois University in 1973, which pre-dates the incorporation of SAS Institute. SAS short courses have been taught from the central computing facilities since that time and Linda has been providing research assistance to NIU faculty and graduate students and supporting SAS products at NIU since 1986. She began to offer hands-on short courses on Enterprise Guide shortly after it was included as part of the campus site license. Since then Linda has added web-based courses using flash-based tutorials and Blackboard course management.

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in the live web course Querying and Reporting Using SAS Enterprise Guide. It is a beginner course, designed for end-users without previous experience with SAS or Enterprise Guide. As the course title suggests, the focus is on retrieving data of different file types from various sources, summarizing and presenting it in tables and graphs. I will attempt to recap my experience for you in this article.

Materials

A few days before class, a link to download course materials was provided via e-mail. The downloaded materials included exercise datasets, course notes and workbook in a PDF format. I particularly appreciated receiving the very complete Course Notes prior to class. It provided time to get somewhat familiar with the course format and content. It also serves as a great record of the content later.

The 380 page Course Notes could have been printed, put into a binder, and used for adding notes during class. Being environmentally conscious, however, I preferred to have the PDF file open on a second monitor. It was even more important to have ready access to the 78 page Course Workbook, since it contained the exercises to be completed during class (solutions are in the back!). The workbook also includes optional exercises that can be done outside of class time.

Course Format

The course "met" for five afternoon sessions, Monday through Friday, 1-4:30 EST. It covered the same material as their 2 day classroom course. The online course was conducted using Live Meeting PlaceWare. The audio portion is over phone lines, so a headset was an important resource to keep my hands free, especially considering the length of each session.

Some variety was added to the course via a team-teaching approach. There were two instructors who took turns presenting and moderating. The instructors encouraged questions, providing plenty of opportunities for them over the phone line or typed into a response area. The moderator fielded typed questions and responses.

There were seven modules covered over the course of the five days plus an eighth, self-study module introducing SAS programming from Enterprise Guide. For each module, there were anonymous question polls to encourage attention and participation, presentation slides, then a live demonstration of the tasks, question and answer period, one or more hands-on exercises conducted in their virtual lab environment, and a 10-15 minute break. The exercises could also be done on your own system, if need be. I used their virtual lab with no difficulties. Subsequent class sessions started with brief review of previous days material. There was a brief evaluation form presented to participants at end of each session, with a more comprehensive evaluation at end of last session.

The pace of the course was fine and the instructors were pleasant and knowledgeable. The session content covered the following topics.

Session 1: Getting familiar with the SAS Enterprise Guide environment and accessing data.
Session 2: Producing List and Frequency reports and filtering data.
Session 3: Creating new columns and joining tables.
Session 4: Creating summarized output and graphs.
Session 5: Creating advanced queries, customizing and updating results, and automating projects.

Availability

One nice feature of the course was that 24 hour access to the virtual lab was provided during the course dates. This allowed for extra practice as well as a chance to work through the optional exercises. Because I used the virtual lab instead of my own system for the exercises, my projects were saved there instead of my hard drive. Any of the projects can be recreated at a later date on a system with Enterprise Guide installed. You just work though the exercises in the workbook and use the downloaded data files.

Recordings were made during each live PlaceWare session, which were then made available to course participants the following day and for 5 business days after the course completion date. Watching and listening to the replay requires Windows Media player. A convenient slide list is presented to skip to an area of interest. This is useful to make up sections you may have missed or that you would like to repeat. The replay is also pausable, so it's easy to adjust viewing times to fit your schedule and to manage interruptions.

One potential problem with expecting to make up a live session via the recorded playback is that recordings will be unavailable for sessions in which the PlaceWare server goes down. Although server downtime occurred in only one of the live sessions, I was initially only able to replay 2 of the 5 sessions. I notified one of the course instructors who was then very quick to request the links be fixed. The technical support staff were able to make all but one of the sessions available and I was also offered the opportunity to view the recordings from the next month's course.

Evaluation and Comparison to Self-paced Courses

The self-paced courses I took earlier were very good, and the live web course added some new dimensions, such as the opportunity to ask questions and hear input and ideas from other participants. The live web course had quite a bit more content and extra procedural tips, such as processing a join on the server where largest data table lives and customizing code to move the vertical axis label of a plot to the side. Also, the live web instructors very helpful, answering questions knowledgeably and offered to answer additional questions via e-mail, as well as before or after class.

The use of PlaceWare and the Citrix virtual lab environment involve more extensive system requirements than with self-paced courses. They have a system configuration checker to use prior to class to verify that your system meets these requirements. There were a few participants who experienced some technical difficulties during the presentation, but the Live Web technical support team provided assistance. The course server difficulties on the third day did result in a delay for everyone.

Although the self-paced course was a great introduction to the topic, the live web course provides sufficient depth for those planning to use Enterprise Guide extensively for queries and reporting. The live web course involves greater investment of time and money but may be worth it for new users who need to quickly become comfortable with using Enterprise Guide for queries and reporting. This particular course is not for those most interested in learning statistical analysis tasks or SAS coding.