external metadata plugins

[KoMartin66]

Hello,

Hopefully this is the appropriate area to ask this type of question, please point me to an appropriate alternative if other avenues are better suited to the following question. 

We have previously licensed the Metacoda plugin tool to assist us in analyzing our massive metadata repositories for 2 separate Grid platforms we maintain within the Dept of Veteran Affairs (1000+ users, hundreds of projects, etc.) and are extremely satisfied with the ease of use for that very reasonably priced software.  Unfortunately, the Contracting Officers in the current US government Office of Acquisition Operations are now requiring our group to supply a market research study to prove there are no competing products like Metacoda that might provide similar functionality as their only concern is not potentially buying a product that might be found elsewhere on the cheap.  Does anyone know of other competing products for performing complex SAS metadata related queries........or how to go about performing this particular type of market study?

Thanks

Kevin

[tammy_dezilva]

Hi Kevin

We too use Metacoda and couldn't live without it now.  Our environment is no where near as complicated as yours, and Metacoda still saves us so much time and gives us the peace of mind that our environment is secure.  So I cannot imagine how valuable it would be for you.  From my knowledge there is no other alternative, other than building your own equivalent application which would most likely take years of effort.  You will also have the problem of finding someone with the highly specialised skills needed to build it and maintain it.

We recently wrote a case study on our experience with Metacoda https://www.metacoda.com/en/wp-content/uploads/case-studies/MetacodaCaseStudyAutoGeneralInsurance.pd...

I'd be happy to talk any further about our experience if that would help?

Tammy

[AndrewHowell]

Tammy, there are other providers of metadata plug-ins (there's a German crew who have a metadata-reporting plug-in), but none I've seen so far are anywhere near as feature-rich & well marketed as Metacoda; the fact that SAS itself uses the Metacoda plug-in at numerous offices worldwide (esp Tech Support) is a testament to the Metacoda team.

[ronan]

I was asked to provide some rational motives for buying the metacoda toolset a few years ago.

I agree with  @AndrewHowell, as far as I know there is only one alternative developed in Germany but designed

for a somewhat different use case : it's a (reasonably rich) interactive visualisation tool which can be used to make some impact analysis :

- who/which group has access to such library, in turn stores which tables ? etc.

http://flitcon.de/en/products/software_en

I guess it looks complementary to Metacoda tools which create tabular reports (among other most useful things.

If by any chance, some people from Flitcon would like to give us some more follow up here about their products, I'll be happy to learn ein bisschen mehr darüber 

For a limited span of features, one can also look at the built-in Metadata Security Data Step functions :

https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrmeta/70119/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n0hll9ra1wevzhn1lr...

This basic framework can be used to create (quickly) some reports wich partially 'overlap' with Metacoda outputs. However, the display interface would not be fully integrated with the SMC, which is a critical feature only Metacoda provides. The (re)developing cost of such Java Interface (SMC JAva Plug-in + OMI Java API) alone would - in my opinion - justify the purchasing order for metacoda own plugins.

As a personal note, before Metacoda added the Role/Capacity plugins to their collection, I had tried some years ago to develop independently reports about users/groups and roles/capacities using only Proc Metadata ; the SAS OMI Java interface was absolutely required, and since I don't speak javanese very fluently (to say the least) I postponed indefinitely. Then Metacoda showed me their Role/Capacity reporting tools and I gave up altogether wasting anymore time with my coding.

[KoMartin66]

Thanks for responses to date.  I was curious about the Flitcon tools but alas, the VA firewall had that identified as a black-listed site so there is little hope of getting anyone from our Technical Reference Modeling office to perform a software review on that other toolkit.   I did browse thru that site on my home computer but didn't see anything leading me to believe it approached the capabilities offered by the current Metacoda tools.  I shall take these findings back to our Acquistions office and hope for the best.