Assuming the Administrator Role

[#1]

Let's face it, most people who serve as SAS administrators do so in addition to their "real" job. They might spend a few hours a week taking care of routine tasks like quickly adjusting permissions, helping others relocate content or managing SAS folders, but most of their time is hopefully spent using SAS to help their companies succeed. In the SAS 9.4 world, a specific login is bound to certain groups so separating the ability to access to say, Visual Analytics as a regular user from work that requires administrative privileges requires separate logins. SAS Visual Analytics 8.1 introduces the notion of SAS Administrators as an assumable group which allows a user to decide at login if they want to use Visual Analytics with administrative rights or as a regular user.

I'll use Ahmed as my example user. Ahmed's real job is as a data analyst so he spends most of his time working with data, exploring that data, developing models, and reporting on his findings. In his spare time, he also serves as one of his company's SAS administrators. To prevent himself from making any accidental changes to the system that might affect others, Ahmed prefers to use Visual Analytics as a data analyst with his "regular user" privileges. If and when Ahmed needs full administrative privileges, he would prefer to have those permissions only for the time required to perform the necessary task.

As long as Ahmed has been assigned to the SAS Administrators group in Visual Analytics 8.1, he can now decide at login whether he wants to enter the system as Ahmed the "SAS administrator" or as Ahmed the "data analyst."

Selecting "Yes" in the Assumable Groups dialog logs Ahmed in with all the rights and privileges associated with being a member of the SAS Administrators group and those rights persist until he logs off. Ahmed can quickly assume the administrator role, perform the tasks he needs to do, log off, and then login again declining his SAS administrator role and continue his work as data analyst. So with one login, Ahmed now has the ability to be the SAS administrator or not.

Seems like a small thing but I have a feeling that many "part-time" SAS administrators will appreciate the convenience of this feature.