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Meet your community managers

Started ‎03-30-2015 by
Modified ‎02-12-2024 by
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SAS® software users first appeared in universities long before we incorporated as a company in 1976. That year, our first users conference drew more than 300. Many of you began collaborating via email in 1986 with the advent of SAS-L. If we asked you to raise your hand if you’ve ever subscribed, hands would shoot up around the world!

 

SAS users range from commercial data scientists solving mind-boggling business problems to learners who see SAS as a ticket to a lifetime of meaningful, well-paying work.


Whatever perspective you bring to the SAS Support Communities, welcome! This collection of websites, organized by product, is about helping you get the most value from our software.


That’s it.

 

No other agenda.


You deserve our best efforts. That’s why SAS multiplied the number of community managers to take service and participation to the next level. Our job: See to it that you get what you need when you come here.


Read on to learn a bit more about each of us.

 

Meet the team

Alex Beaver

Alex BeaverAlex BeaverAlex joined the SAS Support Communities team in 2022. She brings her background in digital marketing and project management to her role overseeing support.sas.com.


Alex’s mission is to provide SAS users of any level with a seamless online experience and to ensure the valuable resources we offer are easily accessible. Working alongside SAS communities gives Alex the opportunity to integrate shared knowledge and engagement into our top-notch support experience.

Originally from Indianapolis and an alumna of Purdue University, Alex now calls Charlotte home. In her free time she likes to take workout classes, spend time with her dog, and visit new coffee shops in search of the best latte.


Beverly Brown

A former journalist and communicator at SAS since 1994, Beverly now spends her days looking after the forums under the Learn SAS category, forums under the Customer Intelligence category and handling a range of moderation duties. She also edits various SAS blogs and newsletters. A SAS programming class a few years ago opened her eyes to the power of SAS and piqued her interest in becoming one of you. She’s out to prove that a word nerd like her can be a competent programmer. 

Bev BrownBev Brown
“I love the ‘human switchboard’ aspect of my new role,” she says. “To me, there’s nothing more rewarding that being a vital link in someone’s effort to achieve a goal. I can feel the endorphins kick in when a connection is made. It’s fun to think up ways to increase participation in here."


While at SAS, Beverly enjoyed varied public-relations roles, including managing corporate PR and assisting SAS executives with media interviews and speaking engagements. She was previously a reporter at newspapers in North Carolina, including the state’s largest dailies, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer. 

 

She has a husband and son and loves to run, which enables her chocolate habit.

 

Thiago De Souza

Thiago De SouzaThiago De SouzaPrior to joining the SAS Support Communities team, Thiago was a producer for SAS’ Video Communications & New Media team.

 

"I wish I had gotten more involved with the Communities sooner," he says. "There is just so much great information here, it would have been an especially helpful resource for when I was learning SAS in college. It’s a never-ending mission to get the word out!"

 

Thiago has an academic background from North Carolina State University in Media, English, and Statistics, so what better place is there than the SAS Support Communities to combine all three?

 

In his free time, Thiago loves to play volleyball, listen to music, and watch soccer. Visca Barça!

 

Janine Franke

Janine FrankeJanine FrankeJanine describes herself as a customer advocacy enthusiast. She leads the global SAS Brand Ambassador program and helps customer advocates embark on their analytics adventure through SAS Analytics Explorers. Since joining SAS in 1998, she has covered various roles within the SAS marketing organization, including internal communications and customer reference management. In 2024, she joined the Communities team.

 

Janine has looked after the SAS Analytics Explorers platform for several years already. It is dedicated to customers who want to join a community of SAS users and learners, act as a SAS customer advocate and increase their visibility as experts. SAS invites every customer to adventure alongside this community of peers to learn resumé-worthy skills and earn rewards.

When she's not working, you can usually find her outside in her garden, training her dog, on a hike or on a bike ride.

 

Joe Furbee

Joe joined the SAS Support Communities team in 2018. He oversees developer.sas.com and the Developers Community. Joe is our liaison between the developer, open source, and SAS technologies.

 

Joe FurbeeJoe Furbee"I relish and thrive upon my interactions with SAS developers,” Joe says. "There are so many ways developers can access, and work with their data in SAS. My objective is to empower developers with the tools and knowledge they need to interact with data, perhaps in ways they had not before considered."

 

Joe’s goal is to make developer.sas.com a valuable, interactive resource for SAS developers, data scientists, application developers, and business analysts.

 

Joe has come full circle since using SAS software in his Regression Analysis class, while getting his degree in Statistics at Northwestern University. He spent two years in Gabon Africa as a teacher in Peace Corps. Upon his return and receiving a Master’s degree in education, Joe taught computer applications at a public school in Philadelphia. He then made the leap to the technology field and spent the next 18 years at IBM, holding a variety of positions including time as a training coordinator, requirements analyst manager, and software and hardware tester.

 

While not dreaming up the best way to utilize SAS API’s, Joe spends his spare time as an amateur backyard pit master. He also loves to watch any sporting activity he can on TV. Joe, his wife, and two teenage children reside in Cary.

 

Chris Hemedinger

Many of you already know Chris, who supervises the communities.sas.com management team, because he is so active in here.

Chris HemedingerChris Hemedinger
Since joining SAS in 1993, Chris has been a writer, a software developer, an R&D manager, and a consultant in SAS Professional Services. He founded and led the SAS® Enterprise Guide® development team for 10 years. He is also co-author of the popular SAS for Dummies book and The SAS Dummy blogHis newest book is Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET, and he has turned that content into a SAS Education course. 


Chris frequently presents at SAS users groups around the world and participates in all of the online forums where SAS customers gather. Besides these communities, you’ll find his posts in sasCommunity.org, sasProfessionals.net, and – of course – SAS-L.


At SAS Global Forum, he hosts SAS Tech Talk, a show-and-tell video series that features SAS R&D staff.

 

“I like anecdotes from customers saying, ‘This community is helping me get my job done,’” says Chris. “That’s the target on the wall: We want all of our customers to have a great experience in the communities and with SAS software.”


Chris loves indie rock and science fiction, action and art-house movies. He and his wife are the parents of three.

 

Shelley Sessoms

Shelley is the User Group Liaison, working with local and regional user groups across the U.S. She also creates and offers best practices for our regional and private groups, as well. And she leads our Super User program - a group of community members who literally keep the community going strong.

 

Shelley SessomsShelley Sessoms

Shelley joined SAS External Communications in 2002 and wrote and edited numerous e-newsletters and magazine articles. In 2007, she moved to SAS Press as an Acquisitions Editor. In that role, she helped many SAS customers and employees become authors of the ever-popular SAS technical and business books. 

 

But Shelley’s a connector at heart. So when the opportunity to join the online communities team came up, she couldn’t wait to be involved. “My main goal with the communities is to allow customers to find what they need, when they need it,” she says. “I’ve been to numerous conferences and heard customers talking with each other, helping each other with questions and problems. For them to have a way to do this online? I knew I needed to be involved with it. And now, I get to work with those user groups in a formal capacity. there's nothing better!”

 

When Shelley isn’t finding ways to connect SAS customers, you’ll find her kickboxing, writing short stories and planning the next great trip with her husband.

 

Your turn!

Where do you live and work?


What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done using SAS?

Comments

Over 35 years (yes, I know!), I've done some pretty cool things with SAS. For me it's the most flexible tool for ETL, with or without DIS.

  • Presenting a paper at the NZ Statistical Society conference showing how I had used SAS to disprove a statistical demographic theory using logic (I don't understand statistics!)
  • Writing a DIS user transform to incorporate point-in-polygon processing by using procs MAPIMPORT and GINSIDE as generic parameter driven processes
  • Running the very first in-house SAS training course at Statistics New Zealand, in 1980
  • Finding that an end-of-year COBOL payroll process had corrupted itself, so stripped all data out into SAS datasets, recalculated the tax values, rebuilt the flat files and carried on - the IT auditors were impressed!

There may be better data manipulation tools out there, but I've never found one.

Lovely to get to know you and I hope to meet all the community managers and new members in person soon! It's great to see the SAS community growing and for SAS Institute to provide support to SAS users in many specialized areas.

About me... I'm based in Brisbane, Australia and have been using SAS Software for almost half my life! You can read more about me at

For those going to SAS Global Forum 2015, please join us at the #SASGF15 #TweetUp: to meet each other in person. Details can be found at the blog post - Let's meetup at the #SASGF15 #TweetUp

Anna, Beverly, Shelley & Chris - Great to finally put faces to names.. (although Chris gets around - is there anyone in the SAS Community who hasn't met Chris yet?)

Although I'm Melbourne born & bred, I've worked in both Melbourne & Sydney (gotta love the weekly commute!) as a SAS Tech Lead at most of the major banks, and now insurance.

I'm on the SAS Melbourne User Group committee, and also the committee of the SANZOC (SAS Australia & New Zealand Online Community) group in communities.sas.com with (and other local User Group committee members).

I think the coolest thing about SAS was using what I know to get to present at SAS Global Forum, and getting to finally meet a lot of my SAS peers. I first presented at SAS Global Forum in San Francisco in 2013, and last year in Washington D.C. I'm presenting again this year in Dallas, so that's three in a row.

If anyone's is in Dallas Saturday night, I also strongly encourage you to turn up to ' & 's TweetUp - its a great informal ice-breaker to SAS Global Forum (and a handy way to take the edge of the jetlag of a 16 hour flight..)

Great prez!

Feels like I know quite good after reading this.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for all the great comments, everyone. I’m amazed by the depth of SAS knowledge in this thread alone! LaurieF: I love your story about SAS helping save that payroll all those years ago. One of my favorite things to do is blog about interesting, unusual uses of SAS, like this user searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. Andrew and Michelle, this post mentions an air ambulance service in Australia. I look forward to getting to know you all better in the days ahead.

Thanks all for your introduction and the faces behind the names.

Being an early adapter of SAS VA, I work in the city of Roermond located in Holland (the Netherlands).

Most recent cool thing is surely the first Dutch SAS VA user group meeting 2 weeks ago.

More than 30 active VA users joined to discus tips, tricks and got informed about new features to come.

You can find more about me at the VA community (meet Peter)

After being a presenter last year in Washington, I will join Dallas this year again.

Hope to meet you all soon in Dallas.

greetings Peter

Laurie, you can feel young (which you are)! This is my 42nd year! I live in Toronto, Ontario Canada and am currently the CEO of a placement service for all SAS (and other) analytical professionals: analystfinder.com.

Coolest things I've ever done with SAS? Everything! Creating a system that set Canada's automobile insurance rates based on predictive modelling would definitely have to count amongst the coolest things, as would using SAS to identify and visually map daily vehicle theft patterns across the country. However, AnalystFinder has to be the coolest! Finding the best matching candidates for any analytical job (world wide), finding out if the prospective candidates are interested, and then matching them with the company doing the hiring.

Art, how did I spend 20 years in PR here at SAS, looking for cool stories, and not find YOU? Great to meet you in here.

Beverly, Nice to meet you as well! I've been hiding (Customer Recognition | SAS)

Hiding in plain sight! Smiley Wink Hope our paths will cross soon.

Arthur.T ,

Where is Peter Eberhardt  ?

I did not find him out there .

and John King ?

Xia Keshan

Xia,

There are a number of folks missing from that list

It's wonderful to get to know you all better on this thread. I particularly love the geographic spread of this community! Here's a SAS Visual Analytics geo map of community activity (posts & replies) since 2009.

Community Activity since 2009.png

And I hope to meet many of you at SAS Global Forum 2015!

Tom

I wonder what shade Canada would have if you removed Art's posts. :smileygrin:

Wow, what a weird projection!Smiley Happy  Makes Alaska look half as large as the rest of the US.

A Canadian user. 

Haha, that's true PGStats!

Side story - we have a world map placement on the kitchen table for my son, but I'm the one who can't take my eyes off it. I get sucked in and find something new each time I look at it. Like oh, Russia is SUPER big! An obvious 'aha' but you get what I mean.

Russia IS big.   This video clip should please our Russian friends and our Canadian (SCTV) fans:

What fits into Russia - YouTube

OMG, that video! How much Aqua Net is in his hair?

The geographic distribution is one of the things I love about the SAS Support Community. Having an online facility to have discussions, raise questions, share ideas and network makes us appear geographically closer than we physically are. A 'round the clock' community for SAS users... Great for us 'down under'!

Tom: Worse yet, what it would look like if you removed a couple of the other high posting Canadians, namely Fareeza and PGStats.

PG: Looks like it's a problem with SAS Visual Analytics (e.g., http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/demos/explore/SAS-Visual-Analytics-Quickstart-Guide.pdf ).

Alaska if farther off to the west than reality, Alberta is shown to be much taller than the combination of states below it, and numerous other distortions.

Obviously, don't use VA to plan any driving trips!

hello, is there any way that i can change my username? I read that only one of the community managers is able to help me change my username. 

Hi swanny, Sure thing, I can change your username for you. What would you like it to be?

Hi, I need to have my username changed.

Hi, @angie16,

 

I'm happy to change your user name. What would you like it to be?

 

Thanks,

Shelley

angie16 if it is available

 

 

Hi @angie16,

 

As you'll see, your user name has been changed. Thanks for using the SAS Support Communities!

 

Best,

Shelley 

Thank you ma'am

Hello,

 

I need my username changed from "JRAZAK" to JUMMY. Please can you do that for me? Thank you.

Hello @JUMMY ,

 

Your user name has been changed. Thanks for using the SAS Support Communities.

 

Best,

Shelley

 

Hello,

 

can you please change my username from "1235265" to "aman23".

 

thanks 🙂

Hi there,

 

Your username has been changed to aman23. Thanks for using the SAS Support Communities!

 

Anna

Hi, I would like to change my user name. Can you please help?

Hi @AVA_16,

 

Yes, I can help. Feel free to comment below with your requested user name. Or you may send me a PM.


Best,

Shelley

Hi - The domain of my email address was updated from @baml.com to @bofa.com. Can someone update that for me? (I don't see a place to do it myself)

Hi @jrcarr83,

 

You can do that via your SAS profile: https://www.sas.com/profile/ui/auth.html#/edit It will change it within the whole of SAS, not just the communities.

 

Thanks,

Shelley 

That worked. Thank you!


hi

Hi,

 

Please change my username to eric61. Thank you

Hi there, Your username is now eric61. 

 

Thanks!

Anna

Hi. I have been using SAS for a quite a while and I am excited for all the things that I will be learning here.

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‎02-12-2024 03:20 PM
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