AnnMaria artfully qualifies her use of the word "lovely" as she describes her experience with one of our SAS customer representatives.

The whole reason for the encounter: AnnMaria needed to get the correct sort of software order so that she and her colleagues can run SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, without the need for any sort of pesky planning or configuration steps.

This is the stuff that meetings are made of. And I've been in my share of them, believe me.

The root of the confusion is that SAS Enterprise Guide is, on the one hand, part of your essential suite of business analytics software that can integrate with the other SAS applications you might use on a grand scale (web reporting, OLAP, information maps, and so on), and so you might want to deploy/configure it along with everything else in one swoop. You need a plan that ties all of that together.

On the other hand, many customers use SAS Enterprise Guide along with SAS installed on their private desktop machine, a use that requires no configuration (nor a metadata repository and other fanciness) whatsoever. SAS Enterprise Guide comes "in the box" with SAS for Windows (workstation edition). If that's all you want/need, then certainly we want to make that easy for you. No plan is needed; it should be a "fly by the seat of your pants" installation.

Thanks to feedback from AnnMaria and others via SAS Tech Support, I can safely say...we're working on it. If you find the experience less than straightforward, we have lovely people on hand to nudge you through it.