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In this issue
Introduction to SAS Business Intelligence Applications (Cindy Romig, SAS Institute)
SAS Business Intelligence imperative seminar series: Focus
on SAS Enterprise BI server
SAS Information Map Studio (Diane Hatcher, SAS Institute)
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Introduction to SAS Business Intelligence Applications
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Cindy Romig, SAS Institute
With Business
Intelligence (BI) training from SAS Education you can
immediately begin to harness the power of SAS 9's Business
Intelligence capabilities during implementation. The BI
curriculum encompasses ten courses, but the best place
to start, as they say, is at the beginning.
Introduction
to SAS Business Intelligence Applications is a two-day,
advanced-level course designed for anyone wanting an overview
of SAS 9's new BI features in the areas of foundation technologies,
data warehousing, intelligence storage and business intelligence.
"I originally took Introduction to SAS Business Intelligence
Applications to better understand how the SAS enterprise
solutions integrate and whether or not it was the proper application
to provide us with an enterprise business platform,"
says Po Wang, assistant vice president of Pacific Capital
Bancorp. Wang attended the course in early 2005. "I not
only learned how the SAS components integrate, but, more importantly,
how our current system can co-exist with any SAS components
we purchased."
Wang especially found the Add-in for Microsoft Office, Web
Report Studio, OLAP and Enterprise Guide overviews helpful,
stating that the tools and knowledge helped provide discipline
for the company's metadata structure.
"Rather than researching all of the information and speaking
to numerous SAS technical representatives, I took this course,"
concludes Wang. "It was a good, one-stop repository for
all of the information I needed and gave me the opportunity
to try the applications first hand."
Register
today or view a full course outline.
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SAS Business Intelligence imperative seminar
series
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Focus on SAS Enterprise BI server
Web Seminar
Wednesday, June 15
1:00 -- 2:30 p.m.
You're invited to watch an in-depth Web seminar, Focus on
SAS Enterprise BI Server, to discover an open, integrated,
enterprise architecture that empowers diverse users with
targeted interfaces -- so everyone in your organization
can make better, fact-based decisions -- and get better
results.
See how Web-based query and reporting capabilities in SAS
Web Report Studio, part of SAS Enterprise BI Server, save
you
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.
Join us on the third Wednesday of each month for another
installment in the SAS Business Intelligence Imperative
Seminar Series, free Web seminars complete with product
demonstrations that are designed to help you understand
the power of SAS technology. Visit the Business
Intelligence Imperative site for the latest information
on dates and topics in this series.
For more information and to register, please visit our Web
site or call us toll free at 1 (866) 887-1339.
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SAS Information Map Studio
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Diane Hatcher, SAS Institute
Diane.Hatcher@sas.com
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Diane Hatcher has been at SAS
for 4 years, where she is the Product Manager for Information
Map Studio. Prior to SAS, she spent over 15 years providing
business intelligence content and solutions to various enterprises
ranging from Fortune 500 companies to internet startups. She
received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois
and an MBA from Indiana University. She was among only a few
people in North Carolina who were disappointed by the outcome
of the NCAA basketball tournament.
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SAS Information Map Studio:
Business metadata creation and management for empowering business
users with self-sufficient access to consistent information
In today's market, companies must be able to respond quickly
to changing conditions and grasp opportunities as they arise.
As a result, the demand for enterprise-wide business intelligence
(BI) is growing -- driven by all decision makers across the
enterprise. IT is overloaded with one-time requests for information
because end users cannot self-sufficiently get the data that
is held throughout the enterprise into their own reports.
The challenge for you is to stay ahead of the demand with
your existing resources. You have multiple data sources in
multiple formats. You have SAS analytics output. Co-workers
have renegade data in Excel spreadsheets. You already provide
reports through a portal or a custom web-based interface,
but it's still not enough. The problem is that business users
need to be more self-sufficient, but you are still being held
accountable for the information that is generated.
So, the question is "How can you be confident in letting
business users out on their own?"
SAS Information Map Studio: Empowering business users with
self-sufficient access to consistent information
SAS Information Map Studio, an application available with
SAS Enterprise BI Server, enables information architects or
query designers to build information maps - a business metadata
layer that describes the physical data warehouse. This layer
surfaces your warehouse data to business users in terms they
understand, providing self-service business intelligence capabilities.
These metadata definitions are presented to business users
through SAS reporting interfaces, enabling them to query the
data without requiring technical knowledge and giving them
confidence in the results they retrieve.
Map physical data structures to easily understood business
terms
Through SAS Information Map Studio, you can create data items
that map physical data references to business-context terms.
For example, you can create data items with descriptive labels
such as "Age Group" or "Sales Revenue from
Internet Orders." Information maps can contain information
about data sources, data relationships, data items and their
usage. You can easily organize the data items into folders
and subfolders to help users quickly find the information
they need.
Specify business rules that drive consistency of data
results and guidelines for appropriate usage
Information maps can capture standard definitions for key
business metrics, creating business rules that ensure consistent
definition across the enterprise. In addition, information
maps also capture proper usage information, such as allowable
aggregations. This usage information sets boundaries for the
business user to ensure the data is used only as intended
and that business users have the appropriate information on
how to use a data item. For example, if you have a data item
called "Price Per Unit" that is based on the expression
"Sales Revenue/Units Sold," you can restrict users
from applying an additive aggregation.
Leverages SAS' strength in data storage and data access
to exploit multiple data sources
Information maps leverage SAS/ACCESS engines, providing unmatched
capabilities to access and join data from multiple data sources.
For example, you can join a table from Oracle to another table
from DB2. SAS 9.1 OLAP structures can also be accessed with
information maps - using MDX code to provide flexible access
to multidimensional data. You can build information maps from
multiple data structures or OLAP structures without business
users needing technical knowledge of underlying data sources.
Integrates with SAS to provide real-time analytics
SAS analytical models do more than summarize historical data
- they provide analytical power to derive intelligence on
where you've been, why things happened and where you can go
in the future. These powerful models can be turned into stored
processes and linked to information maps to provide up-to-date
intelligence in business reports. By linking SAS stored processes
directly with your information maps, SAS analytics can be
processed on-the-fly, allowing business users to view the
latest analytical content. They can create and view reports
and be confident that they have the most up-to-date forecasts,
analyses and intelligence to make the best decisions. For
example, if you have a SAS program that builds a table with
forecasted results, you can register that SAS program as a
stored process and link it to an information map that describes
that table. When users build or view a report that accesses
the information map, the stored process will execute first,
the table is refreshed with the latest results, and those
results are shown in the report.
Leverages SAS' centralized metadata architecture
SAS information maps are stored in the central SAS Metadata
Repository. As a result, they are available across the suite
of SAS 9.1 reporting interfaces and to SAS solutions built
on the SAS Intelligence Architecture.
SAS Business Intelligence: Reports on time, on demand,
on target
SAS business intelligence gives you The Power to Know®
how to integrate data from across your enterprise, and deliver
self-service reporting and analysis to everyone's fingertips.
So, decision makers spend less time looking for answers and
more time driving decisions.
SAS Enterprise BI Server provides an integrated suite of business
intelligence tools and underlying infrastructure empowering
users to access information when they need it, while ensuring
IT retains control over consistency and reliability of the
data. Specifically designed targeted user interfaces have
been created to make information more broadly available and
to allow results and insights to be shared more easily, thus
supporting effective decision making. SAS Enterprise BI Server
is based on an open-standards architecture that provides report
access and distribution across the enterprise from Web-based,
desktop clients or Microsoft Office interfaces. By leveraging
shared metadata, data, centralized security profiles and existing
technology resources, SAS Enterprise BI Server supports all
activities, ranging from simple reporting to sophisticated
analytics in an integrated and interoperable environment.
SAS' advanced analytics enhance traditional BI capabilities,
enabling diverse audiences to go beyond merely understanding
what has happened to actively exploring why it happened and,
more importantly, to determining what will happen next.
For more information, see
SAS Business
Intelligence web site
SAS Information Map Studio web site
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