It's too late to freeze the current version of the browser. Browsers had a "kill-switch" baked in for some while, since last ~1.5 years.   An older version (perhaps Mozilla Firefox may be easier to find and install) may still work. Or manipulating with the dates on the machine.   That said, Adobe Flash does provide a way to "domain whitelist" Flash content after December 31 for intranet environments: https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/enterprise-end-of-life.html. See "Enterprise enablement support" chapter. It wasn't planned originally but I think they included this capability sometime this July or so. Perhaps this should be your way to go.   Keep in mind when Adobe says "unsupported" it means they don't provide support, it doesn't mean it won't work for some time. It will - that's why this option exists. It will probably still stop working after a while, perhaps with the Operation System evolution (when the new OS version becomes incompatible with the legacy version of the flash player - and updates are not being created, except by that Harman partner they referred to). ... View more

Happy or not, there is not much choice - Flash-based version will just stop working (and possibly stop being supported to? not sure about it) after Dec 31. The benefit is business continuity.   Functional improvements exist both for MA and RTDM but are relatively minor (though to whom how); Both MA and RTDM improvements a listed in the What's New section in the documentation (Users Guides) as available on the Support portal... ... View more

Also, one more important note: currently available latest product release is SAS Marketing Automation is version 6.5, which is at least 3 years old at this point. Without being too specific, I'd say that it may be due for the next version upgrade, which might bring some important changes, that you may then want to deploy as soon as it is available (if and when it is released)...      Make sure you are in touch with your SAS account representative and discussed SAS's plans on the product roadmap and upcoming upgrades - to avoid the situation where you spent efforts on a cloud migration project of v6.5 only to face the need to install a next version upgrade very shortly afterward.         ... View more

Hi,   We've deployed SAS Marketing Automation (and also regular SAS 9.4 analytical environments) to our clients in AWS many times, at least one in Azure, and currently starting a pilot in the Google Cloud. If you PM me, I can connect you with the person involved in this pilot so you could stay informed. In general, there are exist many good SAS papers about this topic, such as http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/Implementing-SAS9-4-Software-Cloud-Infrastructures.pdf https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2019/3363-2019.pdf (and there are many others, easily googleable). Most of these papers would be about SAS 9.4 platform (not SAS Marketing Automation specifically), but SAS MA is SAS 9.4, so many recommendations from such papers are still fully applicable. There's really not much SAS MA product specifics that would affect environment deployments in the cloud. It's very important to place SASWorks on local ephemeral SSD storage (ideally, NVMe based) - all clouds support that with certain specific instance types, Google also allows attaching multiple Local SSD Drives to general-purpose instances (N1 and N2) - you will have to stripe them together with "mdadm". But again, this is also a general platform-specific recommendation mentioned in the papers above. Good thing though is that if the environment is only used for SAS Marketing Automation needs (and not as a general-purpose analytical sandbox for SAS EG/SAS Studio users), then you largely avoid most of the heavy I/O dependency on permanent storage drives (except for SASWork) - which is otherwise a big issue for many generic analytical SAS 9.4 platform deployments (analytical sandboxes) in public clouds, and which (issue) is covered in details in some of the papers mentioned above.    But you still need to place SASWorks on fast and local (ephemeral) NVME-based SSD drives.   Still, watch out for network throughput between your SAS Compute node and the Database server. Network throughput limits per instance are well-documented in Amazon and Azure clouds, but not so easy to find for Google Cloud.   Domain User Authentication (and IWA/Single Sign-On) are often becoming a hot and sometimes problematic topic in cloud deployments, depending on the general state of public cloud adoption in your company (whether your domain is already replicated to this cloud, etc.), additional authentication mechanisms used in the organization (dual-factor, etc.).  Choice, sizing, and configuration of a database is very important for a successful SAS Marketing Automation implementation, but I guess you already know that very well. We've run SAS MA successfully with all 3 mentioned databases (though Oracle being most popular), including in some cases for quite significant workloads and datamart sizes. Database choice considerations and deployment specifics are too client-specific and I don't think anyone can give you general advice on that, without access to additional details. There so be many factors in play, including database licensing / pricing, application migration complexity (I guess you are upgrading an existing SAS MA environment into the cloud), ETL development, query performance, backup/recovery/high-availability approaches, etc. Happy to start a dialogue and help you with more specific recommendations and advice, especially if you have more specific questions or concerns.  Feel free to send a PM.   Good Luck, and have a Happy New Year! ... View more

This information is quite hard to obtain from the system. You will need to use SAS MA Integration Utilities to export campaign objects into XML and obtain that information from there.  Note that extracting not just one, but all campaigns may not be an easy task and will require fair degree of automation efforts.   Most often, you can substitute the original question "which campaign diagrams still exist in the repository are using the data item" with a very close, but a bit different question "which campaigns that were actually executed (or counts updated) in last XX days were using the column during that execution".      This information can be obtained from the Customer Intelligence Core log, searching by the physical column name in SQL queries.    Hope this helps.   ... View more

Are you relatively modern SAS CI version (6.x), or a very old thick client version (5.x)?  Are you connected locally, or do you access it through Citrix or some other form or a virtual desktop or virtual application environment?  Do you operate on normal-sized diagrams, or something unusually large-scale?   Can you record a video to show how your problem looks like?   If you observe some major jumps and misalignments, then this is not a typical problem to be reported by SAS CI Users. Something should be wrong on your side, and you should address this with SAS Technical Support.   In SAS CI Studio (at least in version 6.5), nodes can be moved around at 1/6 of a node size increments horizontally, and 1/3 node size vertically (in a kind of invisible grid).  It's not exactly pixel-smooth smooth, but sufficient for most users - and most importantly, nodes can be aligned (either horizontally or vertically) with no issue according to this grid. ... View more

@JamesAnderson    Respectfully disagree... I'd not use Cells / Links for Universal Control Groups functionality.   Typical marketing requirements for Universal (Global) Control Group - all that I have seen - would require, at a very least: 1) That it was persistent and stable over very long periods of time (6 month - 1 year - "forever / undefined"), an need to be robust - accidentally losing and recreating a control group from scratch is absolutely unacceptable 2) That it allowed incremental additions from a portion of new customers, so it won't miss out its share of new customer population throughout the group's lifetime. 3) That it could be used for reporting. One needs to be able to build a report comparing long-term performance of Universal Control Group (as a whole) with Universal Target Group (as a whole).   Storing "static" diagram cells as storage for Universal Control Group in my view does not satisfy any of these 3 requirements...    There are lots of ways how the contents of a cell can be cleared or lost, accidentally and not... It includes many kinds of upstream diagram modifications, accidental diagram reruns, using many kinds of MATables cleanup procedures, some scenarios to system restore after failure, etc. And once it's gone, there is essentially no way back. This is not something one can rely on to be a robust and guaranteed storage for 1 a year.    Requirements 2 and 3 will not be satisfied unless Universal Control Group is being materialized to the actual database table. One will need to introduce a customized database table (CDM or CMDM) for the Universal Control Group, and implement a mechanism to store it there. At this point, it becomes easier to just add this table to the infomap... And there is no more need for a statically linked cell altogether... ... View more