I've discovered a flaw in the access control model we have for our metadata. We have a large number of libraries saved (mostly) in their own metadata folders within /Shared Data, and ACTs are applied to those locations to ensure that only authorised users may view/update data within them. Up to a year ago this worked fine because nobody explicitly used metadata folders, simply saving and querying data sets within metadata-defined libraries. However, we got a new SAS infrastructure last year, which included Visual Analytics. As a result, users are explicitly creating VA reports within metadata folders.  I've now realised that the permissions on /Shared Data itself are inherited from the Default ACT, which grants SASUSERS RM,WM,WMM and CM. This means that any user may save their reports directly into /Shared Data. The easiest way to stop this would be to remove the WM grant from the Default ACT but I don't know if this would have any unexpected and undesirable consequences.   Does anyone have any thoughts on this?   Many thanks. ... View more

I've been trying to configure an Additional Visual Analytics Server in the Add-In for Office within Excel. However, there's not a lot of explanation in the documentation (it simply says to use the URL for the VA server). Has anyone got this working? We have separate mid-tier and VA servers, so I'd assumed that the URL would be along the lines of https://midtierserver/SASVisualAnalytics and the port would be 443, but that produces a Connection Failed message: "The server is not valid". Our software versions are: Servers: Windows 2012 R2 SAS 9.4 M5 VA 7.4 (non-distributed) SAS Add-In for Office 7.15 (32-bit) Clients: Windows 10 We have the latest hotfix for the Add-In (B4P003), which is supposed to address an issue with connecting to VA servers.   Thanks for any clues! ... View more

I'm experimenting with new implementations of autoload in VA 7.4 (on Windows server). I got it all set up, but noticed that the scheduled job that was created would be running under my own user account. Which, for the purposes of this, would be fine until I had to change my password. So I changed the account to the LASR administrator service account, which doesn't require password changes. However, this didn't work. Looking at the log it appeared that it wasn't picking up the extended attributes of the LASR library. Sure enough, the LASR administrator account doesn't have permissions to the folder which contains this library.   So, my question is, should the LASR administrator not have full SAS administrator access? Currently it is a member of the VA Data Administrators and Visual Data Builder Administrators groups, and the Management Console: Advanced role. But not SAS Administrators. ... View more