Hi, Here’s my take on this very interesting subject. I believe that the benefits your organization will see from using Enterprise Guide (EG) instead of the Display Manager interface (DM) depends on a number of factors. I'll try to explain my views: The SAS language requires a programming mindset The SAS language, as used in DM and in the code editing window in EG, is a programming language. As such, to use it effectively people have to acquire sufficient programming skill, either through formal education or "in the trenches". When advising non-programmers about how to solve problems using SAS, I frequently try to explain that some things that can be done in SAS are very suitable for non-programmers, some are on the border, and some absolutely fall into the domain of "programming", and require that training and mindset. Experienced SAS programmers will see minor benefits from using Enterprise Guide If the people in your organization already program using the SAS language, and your company is willing to invest in the required training and development, you won't see huge productivity benefits from using Enterprise Guide. You'll be in a similar situation to me; I have many years of experience with SAS, and I am also very familiar with EG. I like EG, I feel that my productivity is improved in the following ways: When I am using a server environment, particularly accessing data in non-SAS environments like databases, having all of the connection and inter-machine communication handled by EG takes much less time that setting up SAS/Connect and SAS/Access code, with accounts, passwords, server names, and all that stuff. Personally, I like the style of code that EG supports, of having a number of small code nodes connected in a network. I believe that it keeps the code cleaner. I find it much quicker for a lot of the tasks in EG to use the point-and-click interface instead of typing the code. But these are quite marginal benefits. Take EG away, and life goes on swimmingly. Maybe I’m five to ten percent faster because of these benefits, but they’re not world-shakers. Offset against these benefits are the costs associated with learning EG. You can do much more in the SAS programming language than with Enterprise Guide As many of the posters in this thread have pointed out, the range of things that can be done in SAS code is infinitely greater than the things that can be done using only the point-and-click EG tools. This is by design, and is comparable to any other situation where a vendor supplies both a powerful programming tool and a “user-friendly” interface. EG does, however, compare very favourably to other easy-to-use BI tools like MicroStrategy, Business Objects, and Crystal Reports. Enterprise Guide can make non-programmers into valuable resources The reason my organization reaped incredible benefits from using EG was that we took a different approach. We needed to conduct a huge number of analyses of our Census data, many of them simple, some of them extremely complex. Using EG greatly increased the number of people who could undertake this work, with much lower training and development costs. When you have a situation where you can assign fairly easy jobs to less-experienced EG users, supported by experts, and save your experts for the tough jobs, you will see an absolute explosion in productivity. Plus, you’ll be able to find the people you need to get the job done (having much luck finding and hiring large numbers of SAS expert programmers recently? Us consultants make a KILLING because you can’t!) Conclusion So, to conclude, if you have a small SAS shop, already have your SAS developers, and don’t have a big workload, using EG may or may not bring small benefits. On the other hand, if you have a big workload, and don’t have enough SAS developers, having EG users do much of the work supported by SAS experts can be an absolute game-changer. Hope you find this useful, Tom
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