Key Happenings at support.sas.com - Sharing Updates and advances in SAS Online Support

More questions answered:
Q: I'm looking for a simple install guide for 9.2
A: I couldn't answer the question about why SAS 9.2 has different installation documentation, so I enlisted the help of Fred Perry who is a major contributor of content to the Install Center.

How do I find my usual installation documentation?
In SAS 9.2, we introduced the SAS Deployment Wizard to replace the SAS Software Navigator. The SAS Deployment Wizard is a far more robust tool to drive the deployment of your software. Here are some improvements you may notice:

• The SAS Deployment Wizard allows a quiet or silent installation which was difficult to perform with the SAS Software Navigator.



• The SAS Deployment Wizard prompts you for installation and configuration information at the beginning of your deployment, so you provide the information only once and then allow installation to continue unattended.



• The SAS Deployment Wizard also replaces the SAS Configuration Wizard so you have the option to install SAS and run the configuration at the same time or perform them separately.

Instead of one or two generic paths through the deployment tool, the SAS Deployment Wizard supports a path that is tailored for your individual software order. With such a big change in the way SAS software is deployed, the documentation path for SAS 9.2 has also been updated.

Your installation experience begins with a Software Order E-mail that each customer receives. This customized starting point explains exactly what you need to do to install your software. It also includes a list of the other documents you might need and how to find those documents.

• For Windows and UNIX users, your installation path continues with SAS QuickStart Guides. Then you will move through the SAS Deployment Wizard and find targeted explanations in its Help dialogs.



• For z/OS users, your Software Order E-mail directs you to a set of installation instructions specific to your type of deployment.

For deployment on any of these hosts, you will finish with the configuration information available for the products in your software order.

Install Center continues to offer valuable documentation, the same way it did in releases of SAS software prior to SAS 9.2. Your documentation path describes when you need to visit Install Center to retrieve that documentation.

Now that the deployment path is more personalized, you may notice fewer documents in the "Installation Instructions" section of Install Center. That change is part of our effort to produce a less generic, more efficient deployment experience for you. Users have told us that, from the Software Order E-mail to the completion of any configuration steps, deployment of SAS software is faster than ever before. We hope these improvements provide an easier deployment experience for you as well.

SAS customers often ask me "How do you use SAS?" My use of SAS is very limited these days, but my co-workers do some amazing things every day. We at SAS use SAS software to accomplish all sorts of business tasks and some purely entertaining ones too. (I'm sure you've seen the blackjack and Sudoku programs at SAS Global Forum.) No matter what programs and tools we create using SAS software, we are encouraged to share our feedback with developers and testers.

I have decided to highlight some our uses for you. You will find them under the SAS Using SAS category at the right. My first interview was with Emily Wallace, Senior Director of the SAS Knowledge Management Center. I asked Emily if she could tell me what kinds of applications her organization writes using SAS software. The answer: "We use SAS for everything!" Lucky for this blog post, she offered some great details. She provided so much interesting information that I have struggled to find things to cut! The following is what I kept from our interview for this post.

Reports are delivered to internal portals
The Knowledge Management Center manages three internal reporting portals that provide information of varying details to different levels of management and staff. Each morning after the corporate warehouse data is refreshed, batch jobs run and construct all the reports in each portal. These programs run on a variety of platforms (Microsoft Windows desktop, Windows server, UNIX, Linux, and z/OS) and use tried-and-true SAS elements and procedures, such as DATA steps, PROC SQL, PROC GCHART, PROC SORT and others. The generated reports are used daily to manage and influence sales and business decisions.

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.

Did you know ... that on-line chat is available to facilitate the SAS 9.2 request process. Chat is available from 9am to 5pm EST Monday through Friday and can be accessed on the SAS 9.2 resource page at support.sas.com/software.

If you are interested in SAS 9.2, contact your SAS account executive. If you need help identifying your account executive but would like to start the request process now, you can talk with a SAS customer representative. Visit support.sas.com for details.

SAS has recently established a YouTube channel on which we publish videos about SAS -- the software, the work environment, and our commitment to our employees and our customers. SAS launched an effort to bring you an inside look at the work that goes on to prepare for SAS Global forum as well as access to customers, executives, and SAS employees who attended the conference.

The SAS YouTube channel (named SASNewMedia) contains 64 videos, 56 of those are part of the Inside SAS Global Forum series. You can find anything from anecdotes about all the work that goes into creating the graphics for SAS Global Forum, to interviews with Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO and Jim Davis, SAS Senior Vice President and CMO, to a video demo of ODS Graphics.

I have heard from several of you that access to YouTube is forbidden at work. Others said that they had no idea that SAS had information on YouTube. So the question lingered loud and large for me: Will you visit YouTube for video information from SAS? Would you watch the videos if they were posted on support.sas.com?

Shameless Site Promotion
I would be remiss if I didn't provide the video here about all of the great information that is available on support.sas.com. Take a look.



I have provided a few other videos from the collection that you might find interesting.

• ODS Graphics with Sanjay Matange    view it
• SAS 9.2 Deployment with Glenn Musial    view it


• Base SAS with Rick Langston    view it


• SAS and Teradata Alliance with David Shamlin    view it


• Self-Paced e-Learning with Nancy Goodyear    view it

Visit the Inside SAS Global Forum playlist and find your favorites, then share them with colleagues and other SAS users. A comment here or on YouTube will help us determine what type of information you want to see in video format.

For those of you who are attending SAS Global Forum in San Antonio, you are starting to hear and see lots of information about the latest release from SAS -- SAS 9.2. If you aren't at SAS Global Forum 2008, you can get this same information on support.sas.com.

If you have been around the Customer Support site very long, you know that the site contains volumes and volumes of information. This plethora of information isn't always a blessing. Sometimes it seems that the information you want is buried beneath a ton of content that doesn't interest you at the time. It can be frustrating to pick through content. It happens on every site. It makes you feel like no one understands you or cares about what you need. I know because it happens to me. When I'm shopping for pants -- why are they all petites! And when I'm trying to figure out the weather back home -- why am I getting weather for Boston! I'm not petite and I'm not from Boston. So I thought I would help those of you looking for SAS 9.2 information.

In order to help you locate information about SAS 9.2, we have created a resource page for you. Visit support.sas.com/sas92 for all of your SAS 9.2 information needs. Don't see what you were hoping for? Drop us a note and tell us what you would like to see added to the resource page.

In addition to SAS 9.2 information, we added SAS Presents papers in support of presentations and demonstrations from SAS Global Forum 2008. I have a few more to post when I return to Cary, so be sure to return next week to support.sas.com/saspresents for even more great papers. Many of these papers have also been added to the category listings for Technical Papers.

We made one last effort to help you locate the most recently updated content. Visit the Sitemap. Notice that some of the entries are highlighted in red. These areas received the most updates in the last week.

I snuck away from my demo station, so I should be heading back. If you are in San Antonio, do stop by and say "hi."