Updates in SAS Online Support

SAS Publishing wants to get closer to the people who read, write, or dream of writing a SAS Press book. You can find SAS Publishing products and contact information on support.sas.com in the Bookstore. SAS Publishing is reaching out to you in other locations so that we can get to know each other better. Join the conversation.

• Become a fan of SAS Publishing on Facebook.
  
• Follow @SASPublishing on Twitter.
  
• Join Fans of SAS Books on LinkedIn.
  

Watch this space for more ways to connect with SAS and SAS Publishing.

The last time I visited blogs.sas.com, there were a handful of interesting blogs listed down the right side of the page. Over the last few weeks, I have seen and heard about new blogs coming online but it didn't really sink in. Then today, I visited blogs.sas to find a long and growing list of bloggers. The following highlights some of the new bloggers:

• In Other Words (by Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Jim Davis)
  Davis' initial posts offer insight into how to retain and motivate employees and how those efforts create an environment for innovation and loyalty. Read Davis' most recent post Loyalty insurance.


• The Business Forecasting Deal
  Michael Gilliland is a product marketing manager at SAS who focuses on business forecasting. Gilliland's blog offers practical solutions for common mistakes and bad practices. He is currently blogging about interesting activity at F2009. Visit Gilliland's forecasting blog.


• In the Final Analysis (by executive Vice President, EMEA and Asia Pacific, SAS, Mikeal Hagstroem)
  Hagstroem is interested in optimizing business performance and uses his blog to discuss issues facing organizations today. Visit the blog for a global view into business.

You can access all blogs by SAS employees at visiting blogs.sas.com. And don't forget the blogs written by SAS users. I'm sure that we don't have a comprehensive list, but Alison Bolen does her best to keep a current list of blogs by SAS users.

SAS campus has this great art installation titled Frightened Deer by Richard Rothschild. (That's it in the picture below.) As you can see, this is a large art installation. I run or drive by these deer almost every day. Most days I am oblivious to their existence, but some mornings, I find myself pulling up short and sucking in my breath startled by what is about to attack me. How can I forget that these deer are there? It's easy really. They are a part of the background of my life.




Sometimes the things we are the most blind to are the things that we look at everyday. I haven't found a trick that helps me open my eyes and mind and take in my everyday surroundings. But I'm trying.

What fades into the background on support.sas.com

My team monitors the comments that come from visitors to the Website and actively solicits input from you. From your comments, I have created a list of support.sas.com elements that have faded into the background for many site visitors. The remainder of this post will introduce you to a few of the features that you might be missing.

We're on a roll with discussion forums. We launched yet another customer-requested forum this week; it focuses on data mining and text mining. Mining is all about digging through vast amounts of data to find trends that enable creating predictive and descriptive models. The SAS Data Mining and Text Mining forum will be most helpful to those who have SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Text Miner, and SAS Credit Scoring. However, you don't have to have these products to explore large data sets. Note: If you are unfamiliar with the data and text mining offerings from SAS, review the material provided in the Products & Solutions section of the SAS Web site.

As always, we hope that you will use this forum to share experiences, post questions and suggestions, offer solutions, and interact with other SAS data miners. Remember that you can follow the conversation in e-mail by setting a watch or in an RSS feed by subscribing to items that interest you. Instructions for both of these tasks are provided in Watching a forum.

I was reading Alison's Friday Fast Links post in the sascom voices blog and was amazed at the growing list of blogs by SAS users. If you are interested in what other SAS users are doing with SAS, be sure to check out the running list of blogs that Alison maintains.

You will also find user blogs in the Bloggers Corner on sasCommunity.org.

Note: If you have a blog that includes SAS tips, ideas, and musings, leave a comment so that you can be added to the list.

Contributed by Richard Foley, Product Manager, SAS

Twitter, a microblogging platform, has become all the rage. Companies are using Twitter to inform and market to customers and the world. People use it as a way to keep in touch and let others quickly know what they are thinking and where they are. Visit Twitter at twitter.com.

Wouldn’t it be cool to use SAS as your Twitter information hub? Post twitter updates, called tweets, from SAS; have SAS query Twitter and then load the results into SAS datasets for further analysis.

Twitter’s API uses Web Services to allow clients, such as SAS, access to the Twitter functions. Typically you find two different types of Web Services, a SOAP style Web Service and a RESTful style Web Service. (I won’t go into the differences, but have provided links for reference.) SAS 9.2 has two new procedures to handle these services:

• PROC SOAP for SOAP style Web Services
  
• PROC HTTP for RESTful style Web Services.
  

Twitter has a developer API Wiki that describes the various operations available to the public along with the parameters required when invoking these methods. To follow along with this example, you'll need a Twitter username and SAS 9.2.

According to the Twitter API documentation, we see that many of the API methods require authentication using HTTP Basic Authentication and are REST style services. Therefore, we use PROC HTTP, which supports HTTP Basic Authentication via the two procedure options webusername and webpassword. (HTTP basic authentication passes your username and password. If you're overly concerned about securing your account you shouldn’t use HTTP basic authentication; HTTP basic authentication can be intercepted and reused or broken, giving someone else access to your account.)

Refer to the Twitter API to find out how to update our status. We see that we need to call the URL http://twitter.com/statuses/update.format where format is either xml or json. We want XML in this case, so we'll use the URL http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml. The method or HTTP verb that's required for this particular operation is POST because we're updating data (many other Twitter API functions only retrieve data and therefore use a GET operation). The one parameter we really need is the status parameter that contains our update. So let's look at our SAS code to see how this is done.

A SAS developer Zach Marshall was the first to use the Twitter API and here is the code he developed for tweeting on Twitter.

  filename twtIn "\\sas\status_update.txt";
  filename twtOut temp;
  %let proxyhst="myproxy host"
  %let twUser="mytwitterusername"; 
  %let twPass="mytwitterpassword";   

  proc http 
   in=twtIn  
   out=twtOut 
   url="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"
   method="post"
   proxyhost=&proxyhst
   proxyport=80
   webusername=&twUser
   webpassword=&twPass; 
  run;  

where \\sas\status_update.txt is the text you will be sending to Twitter.

Let’s use Zach’s code as a template and go one step further; query Twitter and put the information into SAS.

Social media and community experts write tomes full of advice for how to foster conversations with and between your customers. The best advice is "be where they are." In other words, have the conversation in a place where your audience already hangs out. Sometimes that means participating in a community where your customers are already engaged. Sometimes that means creating an environment for them where they can share ideas and problem solutions. And in many cases, it means doing both.

We created forums on support.sas.com because we know that many customers visit the site to learn about SAS or to solve problems with their applications. We started with five forums that addressed hot topics at the time. Since then, you have requested forum topics and we've done our best to launch them. We also launched forums that we thought would address topics on the horizon. (See the graph at the end of this post for a glimpse of forum usage in March and April.)

Forums that are arriving

At your suggestion, we launched a general SAS Procedures forum in February 2008. This forum has been very active; generating 900+ threads in just under a year. We took a look at what was posted and decided to split this forum into two. The new forum, SAS Statistical Procedures was launched at the beginning of April 2009. It focuses on questions, experiences, and best practices for using SAS statistical procedures. We hope that the new forum enables you to use your forum time wisely and to target your posts to the right audience.

Because the existing procedures forum contained many posts that focused on the statistical procs, we moved 13 posts into the new forum to get it started. One of the great new posts comes from a SAS user plf515. He offers four quick steps for writing a good post, which in turn gets you a better answer. These guidelines apply for all posts, so take a look at How to ask a statistics question.

In addition to the SAS Statistical Procedures forum, we also launched the SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio forum. Hutch@sas says that the forum is "designed to serve users of SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio (formerly known as Stat Studio). We hope you will use this forum to interact with other users, posing questions and contributing your opinions about programming features and best programming practices." His two introductory posts provide some overview information about SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio. These are great posts to read even if you don't use the IML language to perform advanced analytics.

You can read the forums by visiting support.sas.com/forums, you can subscribe to any or all forums via RSS (look for the orange icon on the page), or you can set a watch that will deliver forum content to you via e-mail.

To set a watch, you must first login to the site. To watch a forum or thread, navigate to the appropriate forum page. The list of items will contain either Watch Forum or Watch this Thread. Select the link.

You can create customized watch settings, such as the frequency with which you receive email. To customize your settings:

1. Make sure that you are logged on to support.sas.com.
   
2. Select Your Control Panel from the list at the top right of the forums page.
   
3. Select Your Watches from the Your Control Panel box.
   
4. Select the settings that fit best with your reading and work habits.
   
5. Select Update.
   

You must create a forum ID before you can post. You will be promoted to create this ID. It is the name that appears next to your post. You can decide how much to reveal about yourself in this name. All SAS posters have names that end in @sas. SAS employees posting for JMP, have names that end with @jmp.

Updated April 23:
Notify me when there is a response to my post
If you find that watching your posts is taking more time than you want to spend with forums, this tip is for you.

1. Make sure that you are logged on to support.sas.com.


2. Select Your Control Panel from the list at the top right of the forums page.


3. Select Your Watches from the Your Control Panel box.


4. Select Yes for the first question and maybe the second:
   
   Always watch threads I create
   Always watch thread I reply to

When you turn on this setting, answers to your questions will appear in your email inbox on the schedule you specifiy.

The Proceedings from SUGI 24 forward are available on support.sas.com. You can browse the table of contents for the Proceedings or search the Proceedings collection by visiting the SAS Global Forum site at support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/previous/online.html.

However, you can search all of the papers that are available on support.sas.com, including the Proceedings, from one spot. Try this.

1. Go to support.sas.com
   
2. Type your term or phrase in the search entry field in the top right corner of the page.
   
3. Select the down arrow for the drop list, then select Papers.
   
4. Select the Search button or hit your Enter key.
   

The search results include appropriate entries from the Proceedings, all TS Docs, and all technical papers that are available on support.sas.com.

Note: You can also browse our technical papers by visiting support.sas.com/resources/papers and selecting a topic category.

What do you think; is the papers search a useful tool for locating information?

Maura Stokes works in the Statistical Applications Department in Advanced Analytics at SAS. Maura is also a member of the review board for support.sas.com. She works hard to provide you the information that you want as well as the statistical features that you need in our products. Let me introduce you to Maura.

What do you do:

I’m the development product manager for SAS/STAT® software, and I also coordinate some division-wide activities such as our documentation process.  Since SAS/STAT now includes 75 procedures and requires nearly 8,000 pages of documentation, obviously it takes several people to manage it. I keep current with statistical methodology being developed and adopted, obtain feedback from customers, and help to decide on priorities for future development. My role also includes outreach, and I give talks to both SAS user groups and statistical groups about our statistical software.  I also represent the analytical interests in SAS Global Forum planning and coordination, as well as support.sas.com, where I manage the Statistics and Operations Research focus area on support.sas.com.  I’m also the lead author of the SAS Press book Categorical Data Analysis Using the SAS System.

What’s the most interesting part of your job?

Learning new statistical methodology is still probably the most fun for me.  We occasionally bring in area experts for seminars to jump-start us in new areas, and that’s always invigorating.   

Once again, Alan Hoffler and Brendan Bailey trolled the halls of SAS Global Forum with a camera and microphone. They interviewed everyone from the SAS Student Scholarship Winner to John Sall, Jim Davis, Dr. Goodnight, and even yours truly.

You can view the videos on the SAS Global Forum blog at blogs.sas.com/sgf without having to visit YouTube. This feature gives those of you who cannot visit YouTube access to the videos. Have no fear YouTube fans, the videos are also available on the SAS YouTube channel.

Update: To view the videos without visiting YouTube, visit the SAS Global Forum blog and look for links that look like this:

SAS.com:
http://www.sas.com/apps/webnet/SGF2009VideoBlog/index.html?videoID=isgf09ep17

Tip: If you are preparing for SAS Global Forum 2010, you may want to watch the video on Submitting a Paper to SAS Global Forum.

User discussion forums are a great way to find answers to your problems. I've searched forums for help with updating operating systems, fixing the washing machine, and selecting new plumbing fixtures. In all cases, the forums have been helpful and I never posted a single question. I just looked at the other questions, comments and opinions. I found most of these resources using search tools.

I look at the SAS discussion forums daily. Judging by the number of views for some of the posts, it looks like a lot of you are just looking for answers and opinions too. You can do that by scanning the posts on a regular basis, which is what I do, but I'm just looking to make sure that the forums are moving along nicely. Scanning the forums is not an effective way to locate more targeted information. Searching is what you want. Keep reading for hints on how to search the discussion forums for just the right piece of information.

New! Forum content is included in the site search
Starting in early March, we included the content of the discussion forums in the overall site search. This enables you to use the content of the discussion forums to help you solve problems without specifically visiting the forums. Just issue your search from the search box at the top of every page. You can easily recognize a forum post in your search results. Each forum result is preceded by SAS Discussion Forums: as shown in the image below.

Read these posts for more searching tips

Using the extending search
The discussion forums have their own search feature. You can search all of the forums from the entry page (support.sas.com/forums) or you can click to the forum most likely to contain your answer and search that forum using the search box on the right. But let me introduce you to the extended search.

You can access the extended search by selecting the Search link next to the search box on any page. The extended search page displays as shown below.


Just use the entry fields and selection lists to search all or some of the forums, look for posts from your favorite poster, or search posts within a certain date range. If you frequent the forums, you'll want to give this a try. You may also want to set watches so that updates are delivered to you.

Do you have a tip for how to use the discussion forums to learn more?

Contributed by Lainie Hoverstad on behalf of the sasCommunity.org Advisory Board

When SAS Global Forum 2009 is over, join the user community online at sasCommunity.org—the collaborative online community for SAS users worldwide.

Created and managed by the sasCommunity Advisory Board, sasCommunity.org was created by SAS users for SAS users.
The site is in a wiki format (just like Wikipedia) to make it quick and easy to collaborate, contribute—and connect.

Here are just a few of the many ways to get started on sasCommunity.org:

• Contribute to the new Tip of the Day Project


• Collaborate with SAS on new projects and ideas


• Share your knowledge in the Sasopedia
  
• Publish articles immediately online
  
• Connect with local or regional User Groups
  
• Post or find jobs in the Opportunity Registry


• Ask questions and find answers in Forums


• Search sasCommunity.org articles and uploaded documents


• Create your own home page and even include your LinkedIn Profile


• Review or add events such as training classes or Webcasts
• Write a book review about relevant books
  
• Write a blog about your SAS adventures!
  
• Provide feedback to help improve sasCommunity.org

sasCommunity.org was created especially for YOU. Why not join today?
Get started now by creating a sasCommunity ID.

We had five warm sunny days in a row last week. It felt like spring. Even a few daffodils were fooled into thinking that spring had arrived. The weather has returned to a winter-like chill but these early bloomers stand tall anticipating more warm days. The promise of spring has me looking forward to March and warmer days. The next few weeks promise to bring exciting events, news and content to support.sas.com. Because SAS Global Forum 2009 is right around the corner, I have started to receive new content for support.sas.com that will be made available just before the conference. We are also planning updates to search, and new content for large sections of the site to accommodate the next release from SAS.

What can you expect?

• New technical papers and presentations
  
• Documentation updates
  
• New samples and notes
  
• Software release announcements
  
• Search enhancements, starting with discussion forum content

How will you know when this information becomes available?

• Read this blog, of course
  
• Visit the support.sas.com home page frequently
  
• Subscribe to the Recent Highlights RSS feed
  
• Subscribe to the SAS Samples RSS feed
  
• Watch for the SAS Global Forum 2009 link on the support.sas.com/saspresents page
  
• Watch for notices on the Technical Papers page
  
• Follow me on Twitter
  

Did you miss this?
If you aren't subscribed to the RSS feeds or reading the SAS blogs, you may have missed the discussion around SAS and R. Bob Rodriguez and Radhika Kulkarni talk about the interaction between SAS and R in an article posted to the Statistics & Operations Research focus area on support.sas.com. This short article talks about the "R Interface Coming to SAS/IML Studio". If you are interested in this topic, the following links will enable you to catch up and participate in the conversation:

• R Interface Coming to SAS/IML Studio


• SAS Warms to Open-Source One Letter at a Time from the Bits blog of The New York Times.


• Commentary from Anne Milley in the sascom voices blog.

I just received a news bulletin regarding SAS Global Forum. If you are planning to attend, check out these resources.

Agenda Builder Now Available
Your Personal Agenda Builder is now available to help you plan, build and save a personalized schedule for SAS® Global Forum 2009. Plan your days by choosing the paper presentation and activities you would like to attend. Start planning your agenda using this convenient tool.

Post-Conference Data Mining Workshop
This post-conference, half day workshop on data mining will be held Wednesday, March 25 at 1:30-5:00 p.m. It will offer another opportunity to expand your SAS data mining and predictive modeling skills. Stay later to take advantage of exclusive training opportunities. Find out more about the post-conference workshop.

Pre-conference Seminars & Statistical Tutorials
You can extend your educational opportunities in a number of ways at SAS Global Forum 2009. Sign up to participate in a Pre-Conference Seminar, Statistical Tutorial or one of the pre-conference SAS Training classes. (Note: Available with the Conference Plus Package). View the list of pre-conference seminars and tutorials.

Haven't registered yet?
SAS Global Forum offers a unique situation to network with fellow SAS users as well as SAS development and technical support staff. The 3-day conference is packed with learning opportunities. For more information, visit the conference Web site.

Updated Jan 27:
You can save 20% off training and certification testing at SAS Global Forum. Get more information at support.sas.com/training/sasglobalforum.