Reset your SAS Profile Password and update your information

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|January 8, 2012

~ Contributed by Marci Russell, Project Manager, SAS ~

The SAS Profile application is very important to the business of knowing our customers and providing you the information you need about SAS. Today, you create a Profile for actions like subscribing to SAS e-newsletters, downloading software, viewing your e-learning and participating in our Discussion Forums. In the future, we want to expand on your SAS Profile benefits.

Help us ensure that we have accurate contact and interest information for you and that the information is secure. Beginning on Monday, January 9, 2012, some of you will be prompted to change your password when you log in to a SAS Website.  If you’ve created a SAS Profile account in the past year, you’ll see no change.

However, if your SAS Profile information is more than a year old, you’ll see a message that your password has expired. When you try to log in to support.sas.com or www.sas.com, you’ll be prompted to change your password. To complete the task of changing your password, you will need access to the email account that is associated with your SAS Web profile.  If you no longer have access to the e-mail address you used to create your SAS Profile, create a new SAS Profile using your current e-mail address.

By resetting your password, we know that we have your valid e-mail address and an updated, secure password. This updated information will help us provide you with a better user experience and prepare your account for future functionality on the site. 

And, while you’re thinking about your SAS Profile, take some time to update your subscription and preferences information: https://www.sas.com/profile/user/contact.htm. This information will allow SAS to provide you with e-newsletters and relevant information about webinars and software releases as soon as they are available.

Thank you for letting us know you better through the SAS Profile.

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Performance help for customers running SAS on AIX

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|December 22, 2011

Back in September, I shared performance help for SAS 9 users who run on Windows 2008.  At that time, I promised more insights from Margaret Crevar.  Your next installment has arrived!

For all the SAS customers running on AIX (5, 6, or 7), please note that SAS and IBM have been working together on “living” documents that capture AIX tuning parameters in short white papers that you can share with your AIX administrators.  Enjoy the read and let us know if you have any questions.

Read this post if you are interested in performance help for SAS 9 on Windows 2008.

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Choosing the right pumpkin

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|September 30, 2011
Contributed by Memsy Price, Product Marketing Manager, SAS

 Jack o'LanternHere in North Carolina, October is a magical month. Temperatures and the humidity return to bearable levels and the landscape turns into a classic postcard image of autumn. One of my favorite fall traditions is to go to a local pumpkin patch and select just the right pumpkin for our Jack o’ Lantern. First I drag my poor family in a loop of the entire patch so I can scope out what’s there. Then I back-track, narrowing my choices down to 3 or 4 pumpkins that we look at side by side. I know what makes a good Jack o’ Lantern, but I always find a better one when my husband and daughter help out.

I can think of two recent announcements from SAS that remind me of a trip to the pumpkin patch. As many of you know, the smart folks in Tech Support and R&D work with SAS users—think of them as your helpers in finding that perfect pumpkin—listening and responding to requests to make our software and services better.

Our new SAS Community for SAS Administrators is a great example of what happens when we listen and respond to your requests. As R&D Director Mark Schneider says in his welcome post, “we’ve received quite a few requests for a SAS Community for SAS Administrators, and as an initial response, we’ve created this SAS Deployment Community.  The intent of this forum is to cover anything and everything related to deploying SAS software.  Of course there’s much more to SAS administration (e.g., security, users and groups, backups, etc.), but we feel the potential deployment traffic alone justifies this focused forum.”

This community, like all our discussion forums, is mainly user-driven. But several subject matter experts in R&D and Technical Support are monitoring discussions, and you might see them jumping in from time to time to provide additional perspective.

Our friends in Technical Support have been listening to SAS Users, too. They’ve recently worked with the Customer Loyalty team to help get the word out about some changes in support for two previous foundation releases of SAS. These changes will go into effect on December 31, 2011 (long after Jack o’ Lanterns have gone into compost bins) and mean:

  • SAS 8.2 (originally shipped March 2001) will move to Level C support.
  • SAS 9.1.3 (originally shipped August 2004) will move to Level B support.
  • The current release of all SAS solutions will continue to receive Level A support.

 This change in support is standard for all legacy versions of SAS Foundation software, and you can always check out the Tech Support Services and Policies for this kind of information. Any changes to support levels are made based on the interests of our customers and our plans for the future direction of our software. SAS Technical Support strives to provide effective and responsive support, and offers a broad range of self-help resources – resources that ensure you’ll always choose well in the SAS pumpkin patch.

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Performance Help for SAS®9 on Windows 2008

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|September 12, 2011

Configuring and tuning an environment is part luck and part science. Luckily, a group of employees at SAS dedicate their time to helping you improve system performance.  Margaret Crevar is one of those people. She just recently shared several papers with me so that I can share them with you.  The first of those papers addresses performance with SAS 9 on Windows 2008.

If you are running SAS®9 on Windows 2008 and your system is not performing like you would like, please read on.   SAS and Microsoft have been working very closely since the first of this year to help mutual customers overcome performance issues.  All of the lessons learned have been captured a SAS paper, Configuration and Tuning Guidelines for SAS 9 in Microsoft Windows Server 2008, which is available on support.sas.com. 

If you aren't convinced that this paper is for you, read the following snipit from the Introduction:

Before you examine the system demands and performance issues that occur with SAS®9 in Windows Server 2008, you should be aware of system provisioning for throughput and performance in SAS®9 in Windows Server 2008. When you install a new system or upgrade an existing one, your initial hardware configuration is someone’s best guess at what you need, based on the information that is available. While experience can make that guess more accurate, the initial configuration is based on some assumptions about how many jobs, how much data, and the type of processing being done.

Hooked now? Read the paper and post questions or comments to this blog post.

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New SAS Release Brings Changes for Documentation

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|July 12, 2011

Contributed by Helen Weeks, Editing Manager, SAS

Whether you're moving to SAS 9.3 or still using SAS 9.2, you'll want to check out the changes that we made to the Product Documentation on support.sas.com.

Navigation Changes
Many things in the documentation remain the same, but you will notice a few changes to the navigation structure. You can access the list of documentation by product by selecting the Product Index A-Z link under Documentation. We also dropped a few of the older versions of SAS documentation from the navigation, but they are not gone. You can find them behind the Earlier SAS Releases link. And of course, we added a SAS 9.3 link to give you quick access to the documentation for the current release of SAS.

Starting Points
Starting points are provided for all of SAS documentation as well as for the SAS 9.3 and 9.2 documentation. We've taken some of your favorite documentation pages and linked them at the top of the page. We call this list Starting Points. From this list, you can

  • Browse What's New
  • Find a book by the book title
  • Find documentation for a specific product
  • Get documentation for Base SAS, SAS/STAT and SAS/GRAPH from an easy-to-use list.

New and Updated Titles
In addition to hundreds of new or updated titles for SAS 9.3, the new Product Documentation page provides new filters, enhanced search results, and easy access to your favorite books.

Use these search tips to get the most out of the new features.

  • Looking for a code example that shows how to use xyz? Enter your search term, select a release, and select Examples only from the Display options. Your results will include only documentation that provides examples.
  • Trying to remember the format of a specific option? Enter your search term, select a release, and select Syntax only from the Display options.
  • Want to see only the search results for your product area? Submit your search term. When the search results are displayed, use the new Results Filter tab to select the product you're interested in. You can also select the product release to further subset the results.

Leave a comment or submit it using our feedback form. Tell us which of these features and links you like, what we missed, and what could be better.

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Updated Discussion Forums Arrive on Thursday

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|June 22, 2011

I've always suffered from a strong sense of deja vu. Never has the feeling been stronger than this week. This blog was started way back in 2007 to keep you posted on changes on support.sas.com. I remember writing a post one morning in October 2007 titled in part, Anticipation. I was waiting to unveil the new organization for the Customer Support Website. I was nervous and excited. I was living the words of a Carly Simon song.

Today is a day just like that day 3 1/2 years ago. Anticipation. Now deja vu. Around this time tomorrow we will have completed the migration from our existing discussion forums to an updated, feature-rich new collaboration site. So much excitement. So much anticipation.

UPDATE June 23: The new forums are live. The URL has changed. Please visit the forums at communities.sas.com.

What to Expect

We made sure that this release contains so many familiar words and features that you will be able to pick up right where you left off. We are recreating all 18 of the current public forums in the new Communities on SAS site. We migrated all of your existing ForumIDs, now called username. We also migrated all of the existing forum posts. You still have the ability to search the archives for questions asked and answered. (In order to ensure that we migrate all content, there will be short period early Thursday morning when the forums will be unavailable.)

This wouldn't be an upgrade if everything stayed the same; some changes will be more subtle than others. For example, to participate in the discussions you must still log in using your sas.com Web profile credentials, but the login uses our new profile model. Some of you will be required to reset your password before completing your login.

Other changes to look for:

  • New look. The design and layout has changed. Be sure to look for posting options in the Actions box on the top right of any discussion page.
  • Content tagging. You can add tags to your posts to help you and others search and watch for posts on a particular topic. Tagging can help create groups of content within a discussion.
  • Participation recognition. We have implemented reputation monitoring that recognizes users who are active in the community. As a way to say thank you to everyone who supported the forums in the past, we included points for previous activity.
  • Personalized experience. You can make your experience more personal by completing your community profile. Note: This step is not required for participation.
  • Better notifications. Use email notifications and RSS feeds to ensure that you don't miss any great content. Note: All of the URLs have changed, so you will need to reconfigure your RSS feed subscriptions and watches. BTW, we dropped the term "watch" in favor of the more intuitive "email notifications".
  • Better editor and spell checking features. Ah. The editor. The new site provides a much better editor. You can use it in WYSIWIG mode or switch to a full text editor where you can format your post using HTML tags. Using the HTML view will make it easier for you to format your complex SAS code.

I hope that is enough to raise your anticipation level. Stay tuned.

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Job Postings Have a Place

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|June 1, 2011

A few of the things that my mother drilled into me as a kid really did stick. One of them is that everything has a place and when you put an item in the appropriate place, you can always find it.

Today, I received a few messages about job postings that appeared in the SAS Discussion Forums. I wondered if SAS users like seeing them there or not. A quick poll on Twitter revealed that most people feel like these postings were inappropriately placed. So then I wondered, "where do job postings belong?" Because, if they aren't in the right place, who will ever find them!

My suggestions for job postings include:

Where do you suggest that people post information about job openings that require SAS experience?

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It's the Search

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|May 25, 2011

My friend Leslie posted this comment as her Facebook status: "There are no answers, just the search." At first I thought, "Now that is just silly. Of course there are answers." Then I thought about it a little more. Maybe she is right.

The Customer Support Website has hundreds of thousands of content pieces. Each piece could answer someone's question. But it isn't an answer until two things happen: 1) someone has a question, and 2) they find the content in time to be helpful.

I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again. Each person you meet will have their own way of locating content. No method is wrong. No method is THE way either. The possibilities are staggering. Over time, I have or will talk about many ways to locate and share content. But today, it's about the search.

Latest Update

Many of you went to work on May 18th, 2011, accessed support.sas.com, and discovered new search features. Judging by your comments, some of you like the changes, some of you are still discovering them, and others could use a little help getting the most out of these changes. I'm here to help.

As an aside, I'd like to thank those of you who sent in comments. Your comments helped us identify issues. Some we have already fixed. Some we are still working on. And some are being evaluated for later updates. Don't rely on your friends to comment. Tell us what you like and what you don't.

To make this a little easier, I'm going to divide these explorations into multiple posts. This post is going to focus on general layout, date sorting, and display options.

General Layout

The most noticeable change comes in the page design and layout. Ladies and gentlemen, the new search results page:

search layout

To see and experience these features, go to support.sas.com and type "keyboard shortcuts" in the search field at the top of the page. Submit the search.

Section 5 lists the items that match your search term. This part of the results page didn't change much. Two differences to note. We increased the default number of items displayed. Now you can quickly scroll through the top 25 results. If an item is a component of a book, the title of the complete book is shown in bold just under the title of the item. You can see an example of this in the first result.

If the top 25 results aren't enough, Section 3 makes it easy for you to move back and forth within all of the pages of results.

If the top 25 results are plenty but you want to reduce the amount of scrolling required, select the Hide results summaries option shown in Section 4. This is a toggle that will shrink the results display and show only the title of each item returned -- a handy feature when you have a very good idea of the item you need.

Not sure how many results there are or what you searched for? Section 7 is a display field that shows the term or phase for which you searched as well as the number of results returned. Many times, you will see 1 - 25 of top 500, which indicates that there are a lot of results for your query. If you don't see a good result candidate in the first few results, visit Section 1 to focus on a subset of the results or Section 2 to refine your search.

There is one more option for modifying your display. In Section 6, you can change the sort order from one related to the relevance of item to a sort order based on date. The sort order that is in effect is displayed in bold. To change the sort order, select the option displayed in blue. Sorting by date can be very effective when searching conference papers (we know them by year) or for content relevant to older releases of SAS.

Two of the biggest changes are represented in Section 1 and Section 2. Section 2 is a new tabbed structure that lets you easily access the search field to refine your search. Notice that the second tab is the Advanced Search tab. Select Advanced Search to create fantastic boolean searches or to change the number of items displayed on your results page. Switching between the tabs retains your search query so that you can refine your search as often as necessary. Read this earlier post for more information about advanced search.

Section 1 is what this is all about: the ability to drill through the sections of the site to learn which section contains the most search results for your term. In our example, the Knowledge Base contains the most results with 49. Select Knowledge Base to reveal that 35 of the results are part of the SAS documentation, 8 results are papers and 6 are a Sample or a SAS Note. You will also notice when you select Knowledge Base that the results displayed in Section 5 now only reflect those 49 items. Because there are so many great uses of this Subset feature, I'll talk about it more in a later post.

Whew. Is this a blog post or a novella? Give the search a try and tell me what you think. I can't wait to hear.

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Search Changes Available May 18

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|May 17, 2011

The time has come. The launch sequence has started. At 11 pm EST, the process will begin to update the search results page. The new results page looks different and offers some really cool new features:

  • A drillable navigation on the search results page shows result totals for various sections of content (papers, SAS Notes, Community pages, and so forth). As you drill deeper into the site, the displayed search results become more focused.
  • A more accessible, integrated, advanced search. (Look for the tabs in the middle of the page.)
  • Sorting capabilities than enable you to sort results by creation/modified date or result relevance. (Relevance is a measure of how well the search engine thinks the document matches your search terms.)
  • A toggle that enables you to show or hide document summaries.
  • A redesigned filtering mechanism for narrowing the search results for 9.2 documentation, 9.2 installation instructions, and all Samples & SAS Notes content. The filtering mechanism has moved to the tabbed structure in the middle of the page. The Results tab is available only for these specific sections of content.

My thanks to Roger Chenoweth for the feature descriptions

Another look to hold you until morning....

Update The search is ready!! Dave, one of our Webmasters, pulled off the deployment without a hitch. The new search is live. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think. Your comments helped to create this foundation change in search and will help improve it even more.

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Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, Right?

Renee Harper
Renee Harper|May 2, 2011

We've all heard that at some point. You heard it when your best friend moved across town or changed schools. They were words of comfort when you returned from summer camp with your first crush. And you heard them again at graduation when you and your friends were scattered to the four corners of the world. Your experiences determine how true you believe this saying to be.

One thing I know for sure. No one ever told a blogger that absence makes the readers more anxious to read your next post. In fact, every social media advisor tells you that you must post at least once a week to keep your readers. I am so far behind in meeting those guidelines, so if you are reading this, please accept my heart-felt Thank You for staying with me. (And thanks to my co-workers who posted great topics in my absence over the last few weeks.)

What have I been doing, you ask? I'm working on some really exciting enhancements to our Online Support Site offerings. The best part is that they are things that you, our customers, have been asking for. I can't wait to get your feedback. These updates will be available before summer arrives in Cary, North Carolina. The first change is an update to our discussion forums. Here are a few things to look forward to:

  • a better user interface
  • a much better editor
  • the ability to embed graphics inline in a post
  • reputation ratings for contributors
  • indicators of answered questions.

I talked about this a bit in my Inside SAS Global Forum video.

 

The second change will be an update to the search results. We've added some new features and improved on a few existing ones. You can expect:

  • an improved interface
  • easier access to advanced search features
  • better access to content filters
  • the ability to drill into a section of the site to narrow in on the best results.

Get a first look at the interface.

You'll be hearing a lot more about these features before we release them. Stay tuned.

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