What's new for SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 administrators
As of May, SAS 9.4M6 is out and with it, SAS Visual Analytics 7.5. So what's new for administrators? SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 is our first release to help customers remove dependency on Adobe Flash technology so the biggest change administrators will see is the new Flash-free administrator interface. Other changes in Visual Analytics such as the combining of Visual Analytics Explorer and Visual Analytics reporting into one application result in less obvious changes which may not even be noticed by most administrators.
SAS Environment Manager Administration application
So let's look at the most obvious change...the new VA administrator interface. Feature for feature, administrators of VA 7.5 have everything they had for VA 7.4 management and maintenance but it may take a few minutes to adjust to where those tasks reside in the new deployment.
Remember when you were young and you went into a friend's house for the first time and everything seemed so strange? Your friend's house had bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, and living spaces, just like yours did. But because the layout of their home was different from yours, it took a little while before you could find your way around. That's the same feeling I had when I opened the VA 7.5 Administrator for the first time. However after a few minutes, I felt right at home and found the new interface to be quite nice.
The best news is that management of LASR servers and administration of metadata folders, content, authorization, users and groups, mobile devices, and alerts, is all together in one, unified application for VA 7.5. Regardless of whether you access it from SAS Environment Manager or from the Visual Analytics Hub or the Application menu, all Visual Analytics administration takes place in the new SAS Environment Manager Administration application.
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From the new application administrators can manage all of the system components you see listed here. So no more bouncing between applications to administer VA specific items like LASR servers and mobile device access and having to go elsewhere to administer users, data libraries, and such. And the Administration application is sensitive to the active deployment, only showing pages that are applicable. So, for example, the Grid Manager page only shows for sites with Grid in place and the Tools page only shows HDFS tools when appropriate. Similarly, the pages users see reflect their capabilities as defined in metadata. Speaking of which...
Controlling access to pages
Access to all of the different pages is controlled by way of capabilities so administrators can directly control which users have access to each administration function. All of the relevant capabilities are outlined in the administration documentation but here is the table for easy reference.
Roles
VA 7.5 does away with the separate Visual Analytics Explorer application which results in a few minor changes to the Visual Analytics capabilities provided by way of metadata roles. As you can see below, The Explore Data capability has been removed from the general Visual Analytics category and the Visual Analytics Explorer category now only contains the Build Analytical Model capability as the previously separate settings are now controlled by the Visual Analytics selections.
Summary
As you can see, administration of Visual Analytics remains relatively unchanged outside of the new, Flash-free interface and some minor adjustments to account for product changes.
If you run across other notable changes please feel free to point them out in the comments.
