Business Intelligence SAS Users Group :: BISUG newsletter [Year 2005 Issue 5]

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In this issue Reach Beyond BI with SAS 9 Training (Cindy Romig, SAS Institute) SAS Business Intelligence Tour: Share the Power! SUGI 30 Best Contributed Papers A review of an Enterprise Guide live web class by Shawn Lee, Assistant Director of Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Reach Beyond BI with SAS 9 Training
Cindy Romig, SAS Institute As a SAS user, you can take full advantage of SAS 9’s world-class analytical, data manipulation and reporting capabilities with SAS Business Intelligence training. BI training enables you to deliver the skills and technologies your organization needs to become empowered, productive and profitable. Not sure what courses to take? Our SAS Education Account Representatives can assist you with course recommendations or training assessments to help you develop a training map that meets your specific business challenges. View the SAS BI Curriculum path. SAS Business Intelligence Training Courses Click on each course to view course descriptions, course outlines, schedules and registration. Accessing Information Using the SAS Information Delivery Portal Accessing SAS from Microsoft Office Applications Using SAS Web Report Studio for Thin-Client Reporting Creating and Exploiting OLAP Using the SAS System Using SAS Information Map Studio to Create Information Maps Creating, Distributing, and Using SAS Stored Processes Introduction to SAS Business Intelligence Applications Using SAS ETL Studio to Integrate Your Data Using the SAS Data Quality Solution to Cleanse Your Data Querying and Reporting Using SAS Enterprise Guide (also available as a live web class)
SAS Business Intelligence Tour
You're invited to the SAS Business Intelligence Tour: Share the Power! You know the power of SAS. Come learn the power of SAS Business Intelligence. SAS and Intel invite you to discover an integrated business intelligence environment that gives you the power to know how to integrate data from across your enterprise and put self-service reporting and analysis at everyone's fingertips. The SAS BI Tour is coming to baseball themed venues in eight U.S. cities where you can learn more about SAS Business Intelligence through discussion and demonstration. There will also be an autograph session with a baseball personality and chances to win game tickets and more! Please visit our website for more information and to register.
SUGI 30 Best Contributed Papers
The first place in the poster category was awarded to a poster by Susan Slaughter (left) and Lora Delwiche, Summary tables in SAS Enterprise Guide: PROC TABULATE made easy. Congratulations to Susan and Lora!



Review of Enterprise Guide training courses
This issue of the BISUG newsletter features a review of an Enterprise Guide live web class by Shawn Lee. Shawn Lee is an Assistant Director of Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With an educational background in computer science, his responsibilities have included network administration, help desk management, applications development, and database administration. He is currently managing a project to migrate an IBM MVS data environment to a Unix server/Windows client platform centered around SAS, Enterprise Guide, and Oracle. He has worked with SAS, concentrating on SAS administration issues, since 2002. He will gladly respond to all e-mail sent to lee13@uillinois.edu. Administering SAS Enterprise Guide In February 2005, I attended the Administering SAS Enterprise Guide live web class offered by SAS. The class is advertised to teach you how to use the Enterprise Guide Administrator program, explaining strategies for deploying Enterprise Guide 3.0 in a multi-user, centrally maintained environment. You can customize what servers, libraries, and tasks certain users may see and access, all from a central location. Given my roles as a systems engineer and SAS administrator, I hoped to get a glimpse of how Enterprise Guide Administrator works with SAS and Enterprise Guide at a low level. Like all engineers, I learn to use tools best when I understand how they work beneath the surface. Fortunately, this class did not disappoint. Of course, the class covered how Enterprise Guide Administrator creates users, groups, servers, binders, and libraries. At the core of Enterprise Guide is the concept of the 'repository', where all of these objects are physically stored. Enterprise Guide actually works with two types of repositories. The first is an Open Metadata Repository, which is administered with the SAS Management Console (another training class altogether, I am sure). The other type of repository is the kind created by the Enterprise Guide Administrator program. If your Enterprise Guide users access SAS remotely and they need to use a remote shared repository, then this class is definitely for you. The training materials and exercises are written in great detail. They describe how to populate a repository, define access to its various components, share the repository, and allow your users to connect. Each discussion and example was followed up with explanations of what was taking place behind the scenes. The engineer part of me really appreciated this. The class materials are still useful even now that the class is done. I often use them for reference. One topic that the class could have covered a little better is how to configure your SAS server to work in an Enterprise Guide environment. They mention that your SAS Server needs to be running an object server process in order to respond to requests from Enterprise Guide, but the class did not provide detail on how this is done. I needed to open an incident with SAS Technical Support, who are always responsive and helpful, to help integrate my SAS server with Enterprise Guide. As far as the class logistics, I had never taken a class live on the web before so I had doubts on how effective it would be. SAS obviously has experience with this form of training, because the class went extremely smooth with practically no technical glitches. They have a dedicated technician on call during the class to handle technical issues any students encounter during the class. The flow of the lessons was never interrupted as the students worked out their technical glitches with the technical support staff "off-line". The audio for the training was done via a conference call. You could ask questions over the phone for all to hear, or you could type your questions privately if you preferred. The class had two professional trainers who shared the duties of covering all the material. Both were equally skilled in answering questions and worked together very well. I found it easier to stay attentive and focused by not having to listen to the same person throughout the whole class. Customer service from SAS was exceptional. The week before the class, I received a call from one of the trainers to make sure that my workstation was able to access the PlaceWare online training site. The trainers were also very receptive and responsive to my questions well after the class was over. In general, there seems to be a dearth of training geared towards SAS Administrators, i.e. the folks who configure and maintain the SAS environment. Most of the training offered is aimed at SAS programmers and analysts. The fact that SAS offers a class like this is a very positive sign from my perspective. Overall, I found this course to be a very worthwhile experience, and I would not hesitate to take another Live Web class with SAS again.