SAS Business Intelligence

SAS BI combined with the underlying SAS compute engine makes the tool a jack of all trades. Using the stored process feature combined with information maps and the portal, I can build a web-site to do just about anything. SAS is very flexible, I can manipulate and validate data in various formats and create many data sets to use for analytics.

As a system administrator, I dislike the lack of an established work-flow for managing content and data in SAS BI. Aside from the built-in security of the Metadata and the underlying OS security, there seems to be very little to help promote governance, consistency and 'a single view' of data and information. The SAS-user mentality has traditionally been every-man-for-himself, and this seems to translate into SAS BI as well.

Make sure you design well, document your design, and plan for portability. If you can pick up your stored process and run it, with little-to-no modification, in any of the SAS App Servers in your environment, you have maximized the availability of your business process to as many users as possible.