Hi:
A SAS Stored Process is a SAS program that lives in a special location, defined to the Metadata Repository of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. The fact that the stored process definition and parameters are stored in the Metadata means that many different client applications (such as Web Report Studio and Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office) can all run the stored process program without the end-users needing to know anything about starting SAS or submitting programs -- they just use an interface that is comfortable for their level of expertise and usage -- and request the stored process to run (probably coded by someone else -for- them -- and then they get the results returned to their client application.
WHAT a stored process can do is a harder question to answer. What can a SAS program -do-??? A SAS stored process is just a SAS program. Usually, the full spectrum of SAS procedures and processes is available to you -- with the exception of programs that pop open the KEYS window or the CAT window or the VAR window -- because your stored process programs are running in "batch" mode -- so there's no way to pop a Display Manager window from within a stored process.
The documentation on Stored Processes in the Integration Technologies portion of the Enterprise Intelligence documentation talks about how to define and register stored processes. If you do NOT have the Enterprise Intelligence platform, it is unlikely that you can use stored processes, although some SAS solution products, like Marketing Automation do have a stored process like capability. Or, the SAS/IntrNet Application Dispatcher programs were in some sense the pre-cursor to SAS Stored Processes.
These 2 papers talk about stored processes from a programming/code standpoint.
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/024-2008.pdf
http://www.nesug.org/Proceedings/nesug07/ap/ap22.pdf
I'm sure if you Google on the topic, you can find other papers that talk about stored processes from the Enterprise Guide or Add-in for Microsoft Office standpoint or from a general overview standpoint.
cynthia