SAS Tips

SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office (AMO) and or SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) uses profiles to maintain connection information to their respective SAS servers.  SAS EG and SAS AMO. SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office shares profile information with SAS Enterprise Guide which could be set as shared profiles and stored in a central location. Profiles are updated when you initiate SAS Enterprise Guide or start a Microsoft Office application.

When you create a shared profile deployment, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office and SAS Enterprise Guide update their profiles automatically. The benefits are that shared profiles could be deployed across your enterprise and help IT maintain the same version of EG  & AMO across the user community, as well as maintain update version and control from central location(s).

How to

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASEnterpriseGuide\8\SEGExplorer.exe and double click to start the SAS EG Explorer window

2. Select Tools –> Profile Deployment Wizard.

3. Read the Tasks and Click Next

4. Page 2, select profile to use or if selected ensure that the profile is the correct one, if this is not the desired profile, click on the “Configure Profiles” button to create and select one:

5. Test each connection profile that is defined by clicking Begin Test, this is Optional step:

6. Different results shown after test

7. Specify an accessible shared network location that is accessible by all clients as well as the SAS EG and AMO instances for the new SDSUpdate.xml update file

8. Specify a local new folder which acts like a staging location for the SDSUpdate.xml and SDSControl.xml

9. click Finish to generate the configuration files

10. The Profile Deployment Wizard creates an SDSUpdate.xml file that contains the metadata connection data with all user names and passwords removed and an SDSControl.xml file that describes how the updates should be applied.

11. Copy the SDSControl.xml file from your staging folder into your SAS software depot to instruct SAS EG to use central shared profile for updates

12. Save the SDSControl.xml in the top English (en) only directory/folder regardless of language used to deploy the install. This causes the clients that are installed from this depot to examine the location specified on page 4 of the Profile Deployment Wizard for a new update file.

13. Copy the generated SDSUpdate.xml file to the path specified on page 4 of the Profile Deployment Wizard so that the clients retrieve that file and apply it the next time they are started. From our example:

14. Note: The following steps need to be done if step 12 was not done (placing SDSControl.xml  in SAS depot)
a) Open the File menu, and select Manage Profiles in SAS EG, to enable the automatic update of profiles on other hosts.
b) In Connections window select Updates
c) Select Update profiles automatically
d) In the field Location of update file, specify the network storage location of the file SDSUpdate.xml
e) Click Check for updates now to update profiles immediately