Hi:
If you read the Platform Administration Security documentation or take the Platform Admin classes, we discuss using both drive level security and metadata security. The Metadata security adds row and column level security to the tables, on top of or in conjunction with drive level security. In addition, with the ability to create Information Maps, you can "hide" necessary joins or filtering from less experienced users.
In classes, I see different users for EG versus the SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office. Generally, the EG users are more comfortable with programming concepts and accessing data and even with seeing/writing code; while the Microsoft Office/Add-In students -mostly- want to point and click their way to reports and analysis without knowing the behind-the-scenes accessing of data that is going on.
Based on that experience, I can understand why the Add-In for Microsoft Office has different ways to access data than EG. And when you look at EG or the Add-In in comparison to Web Report Studio, the "leveled" approach to data access becomes even more apparent. In Web Report Studio, users can only point to data sources which have an Information Map defined for them. So, Web Report Studio is MORE restrictive than either EG and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. Again, this is because of the different user base. EG users can modify code and build SAS Stored Processes...Add-In users can run tasks and run stored processes, but I think the underlying assumption is that programmers/developers will use EG and not the Add-In for development.
cynthia