PC Files Management with Windows EG 4.1 and Unix Server

[deleted_user]

Hi,

We're in the middle of a large EG rollout at our bank. We use SAS BIS 9.1.3 on IBM AIX and EG 4.1 on Windows. I'm facing the following difficulty and would appreciate some pointers on this - have already approached tech support. We cannot immediately upgrade to EG 4.2/SAS 9.2 and I'm looking for some solutions on the current tech stack.

Background:

* We're doing away with PC SAS and all users are migrating their code to work on EG 4.1 with Unix SAS

* Our users are having a hard time giving up proc export/import for excel and adopting the EG export/import wizard since the latter does not support macro based filename export or updating of multiple worksheets per workbook etc

* If we use proc export/import on unix side itself, EG 4.1 doesn't open the XLS files (it's a known issue) and there seems to be no way to move all XLS files generated in a unix to desktop PC - we can't use direct file transfer tools like FTP in our production environment, and such an external file transfer breaks process flow automation from EG perspective.

* We tried to prototype PC Files Server, but finding it's implementation difficult from security perspective as our unix SAS server is shared by multiple countries and having all PC files generated on a single windows machine is a information security risk for us. Implementing suitable windows security on a PC Files Server machine in a production data center environment is a major administrative overhead, and I'm worried about the robustness of the PC Files Server when handling large amount of simultaneous proc export/imports (e.g 100+ connections at a time).

Question:

* Is there anyway to get results of XLS, CSV, HTML etc generated at the end of a EG code executions to user's own desktop PC - e.g something like an *.spk ? Any other solution to make it easier for our users ?

Regards Message was edited by: Deepak Mathur

[SASKiwi]

This is a rather left-field thought, but are your AIX server disks NFS-enabled so you can view them from your Windows desktops as network drives? If you do then you could continue to use proc import/export to your server disks then view and open these files via Windows Explorer. This would probably only work for delimited files not Excel format, or you could switch to ODS EXCELXP tagset for exporting only and these would definitely be OK as they are simply XML files that Excel recognises.

[deleted_user]

SASKiwi,

We looked at NFS enabling & even Samba. Internal organization security policies don't allow this on production servers.

Any other ideas to move files between unix server and PC ? or have we tied ourselves up in knots ?!

[SASKiwi]

Then how about NFS-enabling a non-production AIX server and writing your production import/exports to this location from the production server?

Also have you tried FTPing to a Windows server from AIX? This would only work for delimited file exports I suspect or ODS EXCELXP tagset. If this works then you may be able to automate the FTP using a SAS FILENAME statement after your EXPORT code.

[SASKiwi]

Then how about NFS-enabling a non-production AIX server and writing your production import/exports to this location from the production server?

Also have you tried FTPing to a Windows server from AIX? This would only work for delimited file exports I suspect or ODS EXCELXP tagset. If this works then you may be able to automate the FTP using a SAS FILENAME statement after your EXPORT code.

[boschy]

An easy way to surface XLS, CSV, RTF (DOC), PDF etc files to customers is by installing a web server on your UNIX machine, e.g. Apache.

Then you can send customers URL links to SAS output files, or create custom HTML pages that are built dynamically to contain links to standard output files.

FTP and other such methods usually need a login at both ends, with hardcoded passwords.

In terms of the big picture, you may want to ask customers why they need to manipulate SAS data in Excel. If you figure out a way to change these habits, let us all know please.