BookmarkSubscribeRSS Feed

I suggest that SAS make available for free download an integrated Help system (using the SAS Documentation Viewer) for all (but only) the products in SAS University Edition (UE). This will give UE users a much more friendly Help system than having to navigate the intimidating SAS Product Documentation website. The website (though well organized) is intimidating because from the point of view of a UE user it contains large amounts of extraneous information. So it's easy for a user to get lost on the website and give up. An integrated help system on the user's computer organizes all the resources to be in a single small "neighborhood", rather than being scattered throughout a large "city" on the SAS website. This increases the convenience and decreases the response time of the help system which makes it more likely that users will use the help system. This will lead to more successful UE users.

 

When a user starts UE, I suggest that there be a link on the initial "SAS University Edition: Information Center" web page labelled "How to Install the Help System for SAS University Edition on Your Computer", which would lead to a webpage with description of the Help system and how to download and install it.

 

Ideally, if a user installs the proposed UE Help system on their computer, then the Information Center page should have a new link to to launch that system on the computer, perhaps labelled "SAS University Edition Help System", although that may not be technically feasible.

 

Also ideally, if a user clicks on on a link in an autocomplete dialog box, this should take them to the relevant material in the local Help system on their computer instead of leading to the same material on the SAS website. But that may also not be technically feasible.

 

Don Macnaughton