SAS GF 2020 Sooo...What sessions do you have in your agenda?

[bradlee3d]

This will be my first SAS GF. I am a SAS Admin and occasional SAS programmer/developer. I work in the banking industry.

What sessions are you absolutely attending and why?

Just want to see the variety and suggestions from all! Thanks!

[cj_blake]

A great question! There is some great Admin content this year. On the 23rd January, if you can bear waiting that long, there are going to be a bunch more sample agendas going up on the SAS Global Forum catalog website. I know that there are going to be at least two Administration focused ones going up (I wrote them ).

Some sessions that I am excited about seeing though:* 

• 4669: Exploring DataOps in the Brave New World of Agile and Cloud Delivery by Shane Gibson - I'm always interested in how teams are trying to make themselves more efficient and Shane is an excellent speaker. 
• 4857 Efficient Release Management with SAS® by Lars Tynelius - CI/CD and Release Management in the world of SAS for many organizations is significantly behind other technologies. It's somewhat of an obsession of mine and I love hearing other people speak about it.
• 4577 SAS® Grid Manager and SAS® Viya®: a Strong Relationship by Edoardo Riva - As I start to explore Viya more I see that it's place, at least for the time being for many, will be alongside their existing implementations. Understanding how to get the most from both from an Administrators perspective will be helpful here.
• 4214 SAS® Viya® Monitoring Using Open-Source Tools by Bryan Ellington - Knowing what's going on in your environment is crucial and anyone who's used it knows that Environment Manager isn't the whole answer for everything that an Admin would want to know. There are some phenomenal proprietary tools out there like Boemska's ESM** but getting started with open source tooling is a great.
• 4764 Managing IDLE Grid-Launched SAS® Workspace Servers by Piyush Singh - Anyone who works with Grid will know this is a real pain. Excited to see Piyush's solution to this.

*There are lots of other sessions this just a few I picked out that I am excited to see.

** Full disclosure, I work for this company 

[bradlee3d]

Chris,
Thanks for all of the information!

[knoxkooley]

Do a speaker search for Chevell Parker. He's not going to be talking about SAS Admin. That said, if one is going to SGF, then one must see Chevell Parker. Trust me on this. I don't care what job you're in, you simply must attend.

The name again, Chevell Parker. 

[bradlee3d]

Duly noted! I will fit this speaker into my schedule.

[plf515]

Aside from my own HOW on "You are using PROC GLM too much (and what you should be using instead)" I will mostly be in analytics:statistics sessioins, with some data visualization sessions as well.

I also want to plan lots of time to hang out.

My tip to first timers:  Plan LOTS of time to hang out and talk to people. You can read the papers at home - and if you have questions, most presenters will answer them via e-mail  But you can't hang around with these people at home.

Yeah, yeah, we're a bunch of geeky introverts (well, a LOT of us are) but .... you'll be among your peers.

If someone is giving a talk you are interested in, by all means go the session. But find them before or after. Tell them you're interested.

[bradlee3d]

Thanks for the response!

[MichelleHomes]

Hi @bradlee3d,

Nice to meet you here and hopefully in person in Washington, DC too! Being a SAS admin, I hope you have subscribed to SAS User Group for Administrators (SUGA) too. I am a SUGA committee member and there are plans for a SAS Admin gathering on Sunday 29th March before the conference starts. It is a fabulous way to network with fellow SAS admins and also share schedules and areas of interest.

Keep an eye out in this SASGF community and the SAS admin community as I'm sure @ShelleySessoms, the SAS Admin community manager will provide a post when the details are known.

In the meantime I'd suggest to have a look at past SAS Global Forum papers in the areas of interest to you at http://www.lexjansen.com and get familiar with who the authors are so that you can see if they are presenting or attending this year to add meeting them to your to do list.

See you soon!

Kind Regards,

Michelle

[bradlee3d]

Thanks, so much. I appreciate the information. There will be 4 of us out there and we are looking to learn as much as we can!

[MichelleHomes]

My pleasure and hopefully we'll get to meet in person at the SASadmin networking event or visit the Metacoda stand in the sponsor area in the Quad.

If you are looking for SAS admin tips you may also want to check out @PaulHomes' blog http://platformadmin.com

Kind Regards,

Michelle

[ShelleySessoms]

Hi @bradlee3d,

Congrats on your first SAS Global Forum. It will be a great experience for you and your co-workers. As @MichelleHomes mentioned, I will be promoting admin and architecture sessions in the admin community next week: https://communities.sas.com/t5/Administration-and-Deployment/bd-p/sas_admin.

And we are having the networking event the afternoon of Sunday, March 29. We are still waiting on a room assignment and specific time, so I will send a message out to the community when that is nailed down.

And if you are looking to get a handle on all the resources available to you as an admin, I am presenting a paper on Monday, March 30 at 4:00pm, Resources for SAS Admins and Architects: What You Need to Know to Get the Job Done Hassle-Free: http://sasgfsessioncatalog.com/#/filter/Topic%7C%7CAdministration:%20Deployment%5E@3 

Stop by the SAS Communities booth in the Quad and say hello.

See you in D.C.!

Shelley

[bradlee3d]

Absolutely! Thanks for the info.

[louisehadden]

Hi, all.

Sorry to be a bit late to the game! I'm one of the CATs for SGF 2020, and helped put together the wonderful programming content for the conference.  In order to schedule all those great sessions, I needed to analyze titles and abstracts, with, you guessed it, SAS! I came up with a bunch of topic and subtopic areas within programming, and then scheduled accordingly so that if you were interested in combining files, all the merge / update / HASH / SQL sessions were in the same room (and not at the same time). It made it somewhat easy to come up with sample agendas like the one below:

Sample Agenda for Programming: Visual Analytics

Date / Length / Time	Session Title	Session #	Location
Monday Mar 30 / 60 / 10:30 AM	HOW: SAS® Visual Statistics in SAS® Viya®	5330	Street Level - Middle Building 143A-C
Monday Mar 30 / 30 / 2:00 PM	Census Tract Maps Using SAS® PROC GMAP and PROC SGMAP and SAS® Visual Analytics Using USALEEP Data	4707	Concourse - Hall B Eposter Station 10
Monday Mar 30 / 30 / 3:00 PM	Designing Dashboards for Multiple Target Audiences with SAS® Visual Analytics	4323	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Monday Mar 30 / 30 / 3:30 PM	Make Beautiful Vertically Scrolling Dashboards in SAS® Visual Analytics	4171	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Monday Mar 30 / 30 / 4:00 PM	How To Make Your Reports Fly!  The Impact of Visualization Layer Calculations on Performance	4761	Street Level - Middle Building 147B
Monday Mar 30 / 30 / 4:30 PM	Dynamic Parameters and Data Visualization in SAS® Visual Analytics and SAS® Viya®	5131	Street Level - Middle Building 147B
Tuesday Mar 31 / 60 / 10:00 AM	Modernize your SAS® Visual Analytics Environment	4359	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Tuesday Mar 31 / 60 / 10:00 AM	If You Build It Well, They Will Come! Responding to a Growing Analytics Program with SAS® Viya®	5087	Street Level - Middle Building 150B
Tuesday Mar 31 / 60 / 11:00 AM	Raising the Bar! Developing World-Class Reports with SAS® Visual Analytics®	5027	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Tuesday Mar 31 / 60 / 10:00 AM	Using SAS® Visual Analytics Reports for Operational Reporting in Clinical Trials	4270	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Tuesday Mar 31 / 60 / 10:00 AM	Hands-On Workshop: Data Discovery and Reporting Using SAS® Visual Analytics in SAS® Viya®	5323	Street Level - Middle Building 143A-C
Wednesday Apr 1 / 30 / 10:00 AM	Vroom Vroom! Fast-Track Your Organization onto SAS® Visual Analytics on SAS® Viya®	4403	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Wednesday Apr 1 / 30 / 11:30 AM	Implementation of SAS® Visual Analytics on SAS® Viya: The Success Behind 'Less Is More'	4877	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Wednesday Apr 1 / 30 / 12:00 PM	Tips for Building Rich Interaction in Your SAS® Visual Analytics Reports	4219	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Wednesday Apr 1 / 30 / 12:30 PM	SAS® Visual Analytics SDK: Embed SAS Visual Analytics Insights in Your Web Pages and Web Apps	4309	Street Level - Middle Building 151A
Wednesday Apr 1 / 30 / 1:00 PM	Performance Do's and Don'ts for SAS® Visual Analytics	4357	Street Level - Middle Building 149 A-B

You can do the same by creating your own agendas once you've registered (YAY!) as described elsewhere on this thread - but in the meantime, here's some questions for you. This was created searching for the word visual in titles and abstracts. IYO does this fit the bill? What other keywords do you think would get you more content that you are interested in? (I already have done several for Viya including Admin, Analysis, etc.) Let us know what keywords you are searching on to create YOUR personal agendas! Thanks in advance.

[littleleaf2]

Thank you. That's really helpful.

[bradlee3d]

Thanks for this post. Very helpful.