As you may already know, SAS has two new releases of SAS Visual Analytics (VA). SAS Visual Analytics 8.1 became available this March and SAS Visual Analytics 7.4 will be available in late April. Why do we have two separate releases so close together? Why didn’t we just combine all the features into one release? Well, SAS released VA 8.1 on Viya before it had all the features in VA 7.3 because VA on Viya is now the foundation for new visual offerings, such as SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning (VDMML). Viya is the new, open architecture that’s built for analytics innovation. VDMML needs self-service data preparation and visual exploration capabilities too, and SAS believes the new data mining and machine learning capabilities are ready for the market now. VA 7.4 requires SAS 9 and VA 8.1 requires the new SAS Viya architecture. VA 7.4 has everything that’s in VA 7.3, and gives existing VA customers several enhancements in a familiar environment.
SAS VA 8.1 requires Viya, and it was built around the following key themes:
- A redesigned user experience built on HTML 5
- Unified exploration, analysis, and report design (think: Explorer and Designer combined into one interface)
- Data wrangling and location intelligence capabilities
- A new, unified, web-based SAS Environment Manager for administration
Of course, that’s not all that is new in VA 8.1. Interested in learning more? You can find more information about additional new features in our online documentation. Also be sure to check out VA 8.1 in this SAS Viya video library, which contains “How Do I” videos for you to explore, and review the Differences in the SAS 9 and SAS Viya 3.2 platforms.
Now, on to SAS Visual Analytics 7.4. We realize that most existing VA customers may not be ready to switch to SAS VA on Viya just yet. For those of you, we have the upcoming VA 7.4 release, which will be available in late April.
VA 7.4 delivers enhancements frequently requested by users to the existing user interface. Customers will be familiar with the migration utilities and steps. VA 7.4 customers will now be able to switch to the modern viewer, which has most of the features that the classic viewer in VA 7.3 has. One feature that is still not in the modern viewer is the ability for report consumers to see and change stored processes prompt values. We’ve also made enhancements to the following:
- Calculations – an option for ignoring missing values is now available, for example
- Dynamic text - display one or more measures, filter context, and parameter values.
- Prompts & parameters – including parameters based on dates, multi-value parameters, and a dynamic slider control
There’s much more, and you’ll be able to check out the new features in detail once SAS VA 7.4 has been released in late April.
How do VA 7.4 features compare to VA 8.1’s? Well, they’re not exactly the same. Dynamic text, alerts, guest mode, and a few other features are currently not available in VA 8.1. Most of these features are planned to be in the next release of VA on the Viya platform. This will be VA 8.2 and planned to be available toward the end of 2017. Most customers with mature VA deployments on SAS 9 should consider migrating their existing environment to VA 7.4 on SAS 9.4, and transition their VA on SAS 9.4 environment to Viya with VA 8.2 when it becomes available.
Adding a VA 8.1 on Viya environment while keeping the VA on SAS 9 environment running is an option. If you need both, report consumers will be able to leverage them both quite easily. The VA 7.4 modern viewer and VA 8.1 viewer have a consistent look and feel. Once a report consumer understands one, they will know the other. SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office and SAS Mobile BI will be releasing again in late April at the same time as VA 7.4. Both will be able to connect to VA 7.x on SAS 9 and VA 8.1 on Viya from a single application. If you're interested in adding a VA 8.1 on SAS Viya environment, SAS encourages you to contact your SAS account team.
Are you attending SAS Global Forum 2017 next week? If so, here are all of the SAS Visual Analytics sessions. To help you understand what’s in each new VA release, these two sessions will do just that:
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