Understanding the SAS Information Delivery Portal

The SAS Information Delivery Portal

The SAS Information Delivery Portal provides the following capabilities:

personalization features that enable users to create and customize their own pages and portlets
the ability to subscribe to publication channels, and to publish content to channels or to a Web-Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) repository
support for running SAS Stored Processes in the background and receiving alert messages when processes are finished
support for syndicated, continuously updated Web content from information providers
access to SAS Information Maps and SAS reports via the portal, if SAS Web Report Viewer and SAS Information Map Studio are installed

Features Ported from the 4.3 Release of SAS Information Delivery Portal

SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 offers the following new features for administration that were ported from the 4.3 release:

A content promotion tool. This tool consists of stand-alone batch scripts, shell scripts, and metadata extraction templates. These scripts and templates use the metadata server's import and export capabilities to promote portal metadata.
SAS BI Portlets are displayed with the Flex interface.
You can alert users by displaying a warning message before they are logged out of their inactive sessions.
You can choose to enable unchallenged access to the portal. Users can then access the portal and interact with selected content without providing a user ID and password. The option is similar to the Public Kiosk feature in the SAS 9.1.3 release of the SAS Information Delivery Portal. You can either enable the option in an existing deployment, or you can enable it during the process of a new installation or a migration from SAS 9.1.3.
A Diagnostics Portlet enables you to determine the current state of the portal's environment.

The SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java is no longer supported. It has been replaced by functionality that is available in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3 and later. Therefore, the 4.31 and 4.3 versions of SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3 contain the following changes:

Bookmarks and data explorations are not supported.
All data explorations are migrated to SAS Web Report Studio reports. However, users can still use the search capabilities within SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 to find those reports, as well as information maps.
SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 includes a new Report Portlet that displays SAS Web Report Studio 4.31 reports.
During software updates, the SAS Information Delivery Portal converts instances of the Information Map Viewer portlet to the new Report Portlet.

Other Key Features of the SAS Information Delivery Portal

SAS Information Delivery Portal includes the following key features:

Users can access the personalization options in order to update their personal views of the portal. By using these options, users can do these tasks:
- create new portal pages, and edit or remove existing pages. Users who are authorized as content administrators can also share pages with groups of users.
- choose the portlets that are to appear on each page, and arrange portlets in a grid layout in which the portal page is divided into one, two, or three columns and a specified number of rows.
- create, edit, and remove collection portlets and URL display portlets. A collection portlet contains a list of content items; a URL display portlet accesses a specific URL, and then displays the returned information inside the portlet's borders.
- create, edit, and remove WebDAV navigator portlets. These portlets enable users to access files of any type that are stored on a WebDAV server.
- create links to intranet locations, external Web sites, or any other content that is accessible through a URL.
- set user preferences, including country and language (locale), and theme.
- move the portal's navigation bar to the top or side of the browser window, and change the order in which tabs appear on the navigation bar.
For details about using these options, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface.
Users can choose to run SAS Stored Processes in the background and receive alert messages when processes are finished.
Users can view content that has been published to SAS publication channels, manage their own subscriptions to publication channels, and publish content from the portal to a publication channel. Users can also publish portal content to a WebDAV repository and view packages that have been published to WebDAV.
Syndicated, continuously updated Web content from information providers can be provided to users through the portal. The portal provides support for the Rich Site Summary (RSS) standard, a lightweight XML format that is designed for sharing news headlines and other syndicated Web content.
If your organization has installed SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Information Map Studio, then users can access SAS Information Maps and SAS reports by using the portal. Depending on the software that is installed and the roles and capabilities that are assigned to users, the portal uses either SAS Web Report Studio or SAS Web Report Viewer to display reports and information maps.

For information about using the report and information map features, click the Help link in the banner of the user interface.