During the SAS Global Forum this past week, SAS offered several demos on mobile technology including:
- Michael Hecht, SAS, JMP iPad App Super Demo
- Chris Hemedinger hosted a Live Tech Talk on Tuesday that covered the new SAS Visual Analytics Explorer with demos on Microsoft Surface and iPad Apps
Remember everyone is using mobile devices and management continues to request access to results this way. But did you know that with a basic SAS license (yes, even BASE SAS users with a PC only license) can generate awesome reports for consumption by mobile devices. For example, during the conference this week, SAS Employee Michael Drutar presented paper 240-2012 that covers integrating Google Spreadsheets and SAS ODS to offer a mechanism for mobile data entry
For you to get started with this technology, I would suggest starting with an old paper - yes from 2008 & talking about (not the fruit) Blackberries. LeRoy Bessler goes step by step through resizing graphical output into tiny graphs.
/*Hint #1*/ goptions reset=all dev=gif gsfname=gout gsfmode=replace ypixels=300 xpixels=500;
Next, set up SMTP connection from your machine to successfully send emails out. Included is SAS Sample 19767 which explains the sasv9.cfg changes required to estabilish the connection.
/*Hint #2*/ -emailsys SMTP -emailhost your.smtpemail.server.com -emailport 25
And if your users would prefer text messages or better yet multi-media text with graphs rather than emailed graphs, use the email address equivalent of the text device in your to= statement. A quick search on google.com resulted in this website from SlapStick.com that lists off the various vendors email domains (such as Verzion = phonenumber@vtext.com and AT&T = phonenumber@txt.att.net).
For users fortunate to have more licenses there are even more options.
- SAS Stored Processes (SAS Integration Technologies)
In my 2nd book "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes", there is an entire example that sends an ondemand graphical report to email addresses supplied when requesting the stored process. And this week during the conference, Falko Schulz, also of SAS, wrote 011-2012 that describes how to use jQuery and jQTouch to interact with SAS Stored Processes from a mobile device. - SAS Business Intelligence
SAS joined forces with ROAMBI to supply iPad/iPhone applications to users interested in interacting with data remotely and securely. Lisa Pappas, SAS Global Product Marketing Specialists, discusses this capability in two blog posts.
Boost your BI Adoption Rates Part 1 and Part 2 - JMP
Michael Hecht (part of the original JMP development team) wrote two posts in March about moving data and results into the iPad. Neato!
Getting Data to the iPad and Sharing Your Results
For tips on what NOT to do for Mobile implementations, check out this Smart Data Collective post on 10 Don’ts for Delivering Mobile Business Intelligence. It's not about making everything available on that tiny mobile device but giving users a friendly interface to get actionable information when they need it.