One of the biggest hits of the demo hall at SAS Global Forum was the cute Koala bear swag from MetaCoda.com. Everyone wanted to stop by the booth and pick one up for their badge.

Driving people to your booth is the first step, but then you must have cool gadgets to show off. Well MetaCoda did not disappoint. They have a custom plug-in for SAS Management Console that is a java api, it immediately refreshes the view based on metadata security settings. There is no proc metadata requests and no data tables stored! Awesome & cool right? Here is a list of other 'must see' items.

1. The screen layout reminds me of RACI diagrams. SAS Administrators can quickly identify current settings.
2. Paul Homes also created rules to validate and alert metadata items based on recommendations & best practices from documentation, user papers and his years of consulting/administering metadata systems.
3. The interface and associated highlighting/warnings is intuitive. A SAS admin can quickly scroll through the search results to understand what issues might exist.
4. In the upcoming version (this June) you will be able to search by user or object using the Capability Viewer & User Viewer options and see all the underlying permissions granted to that entity.

The demo hall is now closed, but you can check out the website MetaCoda.com for more information & chat with Paul and Michelle about buying the plugin!