SAS Web Parts for Microsoft Sharepoint

The content for this post comes from David Henderson, lead software developer for the SAS Web Parts for Microsoft Sharepoint. David talks about these and other ideas for SAS-Sharepoint integration in his SAS Global Forum paper.

We are pleased to announce the availability of SAS Web Parts 1.1 for Microsoft SharePoint. The SAS Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint allow you to bring the power of SAS dashboards and SAS analytics to your SharePoint pages. This download currently includes two web parts: the SAS BI Dashboard Web Part and the SAS Stored Process Web Part. The BI Dashboard Web Part displays dashboards and KPIs at a glance to help users monitor organizational performance. Users can delve deeper into analysis using the SAS Stored Process Web Part and drill to other SAS BI tools and analytics products to gain additional insight.

These web parts are for use with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in conjunction with SAS BI Server 9.2. To install these (and any other) web parts, you must have administrative privileges in the SharePoint server and on the SAS BI Server.

This new offering from SAS is being made available via download from support.sas.com. (Here is a direct link to the download package.)

Read on for more details about this offering.
MORE ABOUT THE SAS WEB PARTS

As with any form of information, SAS-produced reports and analyses are only useful if the people who need the information have ready access them. If your organization uses SharePoint as a portal for collaboration or information dissemination, placing SAS content on SharePoint pages makes it easier for users to find and monitor those reports. Because these Web parts are pulling SAS content in real time, the viewer is seeing up-to-date reports and not reports that were created at some point in the past. This integration approach works well for content that be generated quickly.

The SAS Web Parts also handle authentication for the viewer. When a viewer opens a SharePoint page, that viewer is authenticated by SharePoint. Because the SharePoint site has verified the viewer’s identity, the SAS Web Parts use that identity to authenticate with the SAS server.

SAS STORED PROCESS WEB PART

A SAS Stored Process is a SAS program that is registered in the SAS Metadata Server and can be executed by SAS applications and clients such as SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Web Report Studio, and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. The SAS Stored Process Web Part allows you to run a stored process and include the results in a Web parts page.

If the stored process includes prompts, the viewer of the SharePoint page sees those prompts before any content is generated. Once the viewer has provided values for the prompts and clicked Run, the results of the stored process are displayed. If the stored process doesn’t include prompts, the stored process is run immediately and the viewer sees the results. The Web part is using the SAS Stored Process Web application to prompt the visitor, run the stored process and render the results. Therefore, it is capable of handling any stored process that is supported by the SAS Stored Process Web application. Supported stored processes include those with dynamic and cascading prompts and those that generate tables, images and other content.

SAS BI DASHBOARD WEB PART

Included in SAS Enterprise BI Server is the SAS BI Dashboard Web application, which is a powerful tool to assist you in monitoring the health of your organization. The SAS BI Dashboard Web Part allows you to include dashboards in a SharePoint page.

Dashboards displayed in the Web part are fully interactive. If an indicator in the dashboard is linked to other SAS content, clicking that indicator takes the viewer to the appropriate SAS Web application to view that SAS content.

SAS INTEGRATION WITH MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT

We are excited about this initial release of the SAS Web Parts, and we hope you find them useful. As with any first release, there are features that aren’t there, but we’re not done yet. We have plans to provide deeper, richer integration with SharePoint, so stay tuned.