The Future of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio: a SAS Global Forum recap

[#1]

There were several packed sessions at SAS Global Forum where we discussed the shared future of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio.  Wanted to post the materials here and would love to hear your feedback.  The summary is...

For the short term:
- Bring the SAS programmer features of SAS Studio into SAS Enterprise Guide
- Bring the assistive / point-and-click features of SAS Enterprise Guide into SAS Studio

For the long term:
- Expand common assets beyond .sas files
- Execution convergence – consistent way of executing jobs
With the ultimate goal being for users move seamlessly between the two leveraging the strengths of each – browser and rich-client.

You can see a test drive of the new SAS Enterprise Guide under development at the Future of SAS Enterprise Guide Tech Talk.

The new EG UI: Major and minor tabs to organize/view work

[MichelleHomes]

This is fabulous!

Even though we saw you @AmyP_sas, I missed this detailed update at SAS Global Forum. The attached document and your Tech Talk interview with @ChrisHemedinger is excellent. Thanks so much for sharing.

BTW, I love the excitement from both of you as you describe and demonstrate features of the developing new SAS Enterprise Guide product... gotta say I was impressed with floating windows too and to learn about the interoperability between the products! 😉 A prime time to be a SAS user!

Thanks,

Michelle

[Aboveland]

Wow, this is really exciting. Looking forward to the continued association with SAS.

[Resa]

I have seen the SAS Partner Enablement webinar on the future of EG and SAS Studio and share the enthusiasm of the earlier responders. Having forgotten to ask the quesion at the webinar, I take the liberty to do it here.  😉

@AmyP_sas one of the reasons I still use SAS Display Manager is because of the fact that I can use the METABROWSE tool.

Neither for SAS Enterprise Guide nor for SAS Studio I have heard whether it will become available.

Any ideas on this?

[AmyP_sas]

Feel free to add a SASware ballot idea for it.  Though what would help the most is knowing what you use METABROWSE for.  The reason this hasn't bubbled up higher on the priority list is because of concerns we've heard over whether a tool this powerful belongs in a user interface rather than in an administrative interface.    

[Resa]

@AmyP_sas thank you for your prompt reply.

I will surely consider to add a SASWare Ballot idea for it.

For your information, we use METABROWSE mostly to identify the attributes/structure of the metadata objects so we can retrieve the information using a datastep and the metadata_getattr or metadata_getnobj functions.

The data retrieved is used for various custom reports.

Information that we retrieve is (for example) related to:

• flow information including the jobs in these flows and the steps included in the jobs
• user and group information (we are aware of the %MDUEXTR macro but that does not allways provide what we want)
• table and mapping information

I understand the concern indicated but should this concern not mostly be overcome when you limit the functionality to what the name indicates, browse only?

[AmyP_sas]

Did a small update to the attached PDF.  Slide 31 was added.  It shows the planned updates to the query tool in SAS Studio (calculated columns, expression builder, more join conditions).  We've been promising these as they're important to a lot of people and they're being implemented but forgot to show them in the presentation.  Folks have been asking me if they were no longer planned.  So sorry about that!

[lanceanz]

Wow. Proof that I should stick with my gut instincts and not believe what Sales and the Partners have been telling us 😉  Sigh. Fortunately, I insisted that we support both SAS Studio and EG, but have been recommending the use of SAS Studio where (a) the team doesn't have existing EG projects; or (b) the majority of the team has no great desire to use EG. The main concerns have been that we'd love to move to a zero-client install, and that EG wouldn't connect with Viya.

From the slides, I take it that EG will be fully compatible with Viya. So ... I guess we'll want to keep rolling out EG! Unless IT insists otherwise. Of around 100 users, about 40% continue to use EG. A fair number of those using SAS Studio wish it'd was more like EG, without the bits they don't like about EG. I'm not placing any bets on what options there'll be in 5 years time 🙂

[Rico1]

I agree that this is exciting.  My organization has supported SAS EG for several years, and SAS Studio more recently...looking forward to future SAS developments.