Suggestions for Managing SAS Enterprise Guide Updates

[KimLeBouton]

I support local installations of SAS Enterprise Guide 8.6 running with SAS 9.4M7.

While the Check for Updates option under Help is useful, our IT department restricts local user IDs from writing to Program Files. I suspect this policy is common across many organizations.

I’m exploring alternatives and would appreciate your input:
• Silent install via Microsoft Software Center – I suspect this may be a viable option.
• Requesting write access – Since I have admin rights on my PC, I could potentially request access to specific Program Files folders. After running Check for Updates, I confirmed that multiple files in Program Files\SASHome\SASEnterpriseGuide were updated.

Are there other approaches you would recommend for managing updates in this environment?

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

[Nigel_Pain]

We had this problem too, and our Cyber folk won't sanction that extra access required. The approach we have is as follows:

• Our desktop software (EG and AMO) is installed via SCCM packages running the standalone installations
• All the latest hotfixes are downloaded to the Software Depot.
• Another SCCM package has been created which runs SAS Deployment Manager with a response file to apply hotfixes. The important parts of the response file are:

  MANAGE_TASK=applyhotfix
  HOTFIX_PACKAGE_DIR=<full path to hotfix dir in the depot>
  HOTFIX_INSTALL=yes
  HOTFIX_CONFIGURE=no

The package is configured so it can be installed or reinstalled at any time by the user, using the Windows Software Centre. So any time there are relevant hotfixes downloaded to the depot, users can just be asked to run the hotfix package in Software Centre.

Is that a method you could use?

[KimLeBouton]

Thank you for a quick response.
SCCM is definitely an option.
Kim

[SASKiwi]

How many EG users do you support? I would recommend that SCCM-type solutions, as @Nigel_Pain suggests, are only worthwhile for large user numbers. Please note that for each upgrade you would need to request a new SAS Software Depot, download it, then do the SCCM packaging.

In my experience, for small user numbers (say < 50) the "Check for Updates" facility is far preferable as it requres less work. If company policy prevents users doing this themselves, then can your help desk do the upgrade for these users applying their admin rights? Also it is perfectly OK to have users with varying versions as long as they are at least all on EG 8. It really isn't necessary for all users to be upgraded each time there is a minor upgrade.  

[Nigel_Pain]

Yes, SCCM (and, in the future, Intune) is worth it for us as we have upwards of 300 users. But even with admin rights downloading hotfixes directly won't work because of firewall/proxy policies which prevent the download of executables (we have an extremely risk-averse Cyber Security Branch). We have to use a "staging server" in our extranet and then pull them directly from that to a location on our corporate network. And we don't upgrade the clients unless we are doing so to our main platforms, and so get a new software depot.