Tag: Support Resources

SAS Administrator Series on SAS Users Groups Blog

If you’re a SAS platform administrator and you subscribe to the SAS® Tech Report you probably noticed the following snippet in the November 2012 issue:

And take a look at the new series for SAS administrators on the SAS Users Groups blog. Christina and I plan to give administrators information that includes talking with IT, storage and IO subsystems.

Waynette Tubbs
Editor, SAS Tech Report

I’m really looking forward to following this series of blog posts and hearing about the experiences and opinions of lots of other SAS platform administrators. There have been a few posts already and I was also excited that I was recently able to contribute something too: IT skills or SAS skills–what’s more important?

It sounds like there are going to be lots of great topics from a number of different contributors, so be sure to bookmark it as another resource for SAS platform administrators.

New Admin Forum on SAS Communities

I read some great SAS news this weekend. I found out there’s a new admin related forum on the SAS Communities site! If you head over to http://communities.sas.com/ and look in the list of Communities and Forums you’ll see a new header, Deployment & Administration of SAS Software, and a new forum called SAS Deployment:

In the announcement Mark Schneider, R&D Director – Deployment, SAS Institute Inc. said the following:

“We’ve received quite a few requests for a SAS Community for SAS Administrators, and as an initial response, we’ve created this SAS Deployment Community.”

Thanks to Mark and the SAS Communities administrators for setting up this new forum.

When I read the announcement I also wondered whether the phrase “initial response” and the fact that the new forum is listed under a heading of its own, could mean we might possibly see additional forums in the future on other specific admin topics (like EG Admin, Web Admin, Security Admin etc). What do you think? From my perspective I’m just pleased there’s an admin forum. If it sees so much activity that more specific ones get created down the track that could be a bonus, but for now I’m just happy there’s a new home for admin discussions.

Hope to see you in the new SAS Communities admin forum. :)

Q&A Resources for SAS® Software

In addition to SAS Technical Support, there are a number of community support resources available for SAS users too. I have compiled a list below of the sites I know of that use a Q&A or discussion format where SAS users and platform administrators can post questions and review or provide answers.

  1. SAS Discussion Forums: provided by SAS Institute and hosting a number of different forums relating to specific aspects of SAS software. This is one of my favourites – it has a high degree of activity and relevance, lots of useful questions, and answers provided by both SAS users and employees alike.
  2. SAS Professionals Discussion Forums: provides a number of different discussion forums including a forum dedicated to Platform Administrators
  3. run;submit: a site dedicated to Q&A related to SAS software. It looks like a StackExchange site but, as far as I know, I don’t think it is affiliated with StackExchange (it’s not in the StackExchange sites list).
  4. Stack Overflow (SAS tag): a collaborative Q&A site from StackExchange dedicated to programmer’s questions. This is a link to the SAS tag that filters the questions to those about SAS software.
  5. SAS-L / comp.soft-sys.sas: SAS-L has been around for a long time and has a loyal following. Unfortunately it does also contain spam and inappropriate content too so beware.
  6. Super User (SAS tag): a collaborative Q&A site from StackExchange dedicated to computer enthusiast’s questions. This is a link to the SAS tag which includes some questions relating to SAS software (not as many as found on Stack Overflow) mixed in with questions about Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives and I/O controllers – seems like there is a tag name clash.

All of the Q&A sites above provide RSS feeds so you can monitor them from an RSS reader without having to keep visiting them individually.

LinkedIn members will also find many SAS software related groups with discussion boards. There are too many to list here individually, but if you are interested you will find some of them listed on my LinkedIn public profile. You can also find those groups and others by searching for LinkedIn groups using the SAS keyword.

If you are aware of any other Q&A sites for SAS users then please let me know by leaving a comment.