SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31

New Features and Enhancements in the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31

Several new features and enhancements were added in the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3. These features have not changed for the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31. The difference between these two releases is that the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 runs on SAS 9.3, and the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3 runs on SAS 9.2.
Here are some of the new features in the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3:
  • a new report portlet that uses SAS Web Report Studio or the SAS Web Report Viewer to display SAS Information Maps.
  • the ability to restrict the options on the title bar.
  • a new Customize menu and a redesigned Options menu.
  • if you also have SAS BI Portlets 4.3 installed at your site, then the new Dashboard Portlet and Diagnostic Portlet are available.
For more information, see http://support.sas.com/software/products/portal.

Upgrading from the SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0

The SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0 runs on SAS 9.1.3. The following considerations apply to SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 customers who are upgrading from the SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0.
  • The following changes in the user interface can cause differences in the portal:
    • In the SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0, a Public Kiosk was not available to comply with a stricter security model. However, starting in the first maintenance release for the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2, you can now enable unchallenged access. For more information, see Enabling Unchallenged Portal Access in SAS Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide.
    • The Alerts portlet has been renamed the Stored Process Alerts portlet. This change avoids possible confusion with a new general-purpose alerts portlet that is included with the SAS Enterprise BI Server package. The behavior of the Stored Process Alerts portlet has not changed.
    • The portal uses a new common logon interface to authenticate users. This change results in a different logon and logoff flow. For example, by default no Logon page appears after you log off.
  • The following changes affect portlets that have been migrated:
    • Due to infrastructure changes to the portal, custom-developed portlets require code changes. For more information, see Developing Portlets for the SAS Information Delivery Portal.
    • Migrated WebDAV content and the WebDAV graph portlet use a new SAS Content Server instead of a Xythos WebFile server.
    • Migrated navigator portlets might display locations that are no longer documented. The documentation for the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 describes a SAS Folders tree. The documentation for the SAS Information Delivery Portal 2.0 described a root-level folder called the BIP Tree.
  • The following changes affect SAS Publication Channels:
    • Users might need to re-create subscriber profiles and subscriptions for channels that have been migrated.
    • Due to stricter security enforcement, users cannot create subscriber profiles by default. For a user to create subscriber profiles, an administrator must grant permissions to the user in SAS Management Console.
    • SAS reports cannot be published.
    • The channels to which users subscribe are automatically added to their Publication Channel Subscriptions portlets only if the related profiles have been defined with a delivery mechanism of Portal.
  • The following changes apply to SAS Information Maps and data explorations:
    • Depending on the software that is installed at your site, the portal now uses SAS Web Report Studio or the SAS Web Report Viewer to display SAS Information Maps.
    • Data explorations are no longer available from the portal. Any data explorations from earlier version of SAS are converted to reports that can be viewed in SAS Web Report Studio.
    • The Information Map Viewer portlet is no longer available. You can use the new report portlet to display reports with data from information maps. Any Information Map Viewer portlets from previous releases of SAS are converted to report portlets.
    • Publishing SAS Information Maps is no longer supported.

Upgrading from the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2

The SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2 runs on SAS 9.2. The following considerations apply to SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 customers who are upgrading from the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.2.
  • Depending on the software that is installed at your site, the portal now uses SAS Web Report Studio or the SAS Web Report Viewer to display SAS Information Maps.
  • Data explorations are no longer available from the portal. Any data explorations from earlier version of SAS are converted to reports that can be viewed in SAS Web Report Studio.
  • The Information Map Viewer portlet is no longer available. You can use the new report portlet to display reports with data from information maps. Any Information Map Viewer portlets from previous releases of SAS are converted to report portlets.
  • Publishing SAS Information Maps is no longer supported.

Upgrading from the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3

Administration Changes in the 4.31 Release

The 4.31 release of the SAS Information Delivery Portal includes the following changes and enhancements:
  • The content promotion tool includes a new build.properties file. When promoting portal content from a SAS 9.1.3 environment to a SAS 9.2 or SAS 9.3 environment, the values for certain parameters in this file are modified to ensure that the appropriate metadata repository ID and the names of the internal accounts for sasadm and sastrust are specified to prepare the target system.
  • An additional upgradeMetadata command is used when promoting a Portal Application Tree or a portlet instance to a target SAS 9.3 system from a source system with SAS 9.1.3 or SAS 9.2.
  • Message logging is accomplished with logging contexts that are added to the SASportal-log4j file.

Features Ported from the 4.3 Release

The following enhancements and changes that were introduced in the 4.3 release have been ported to the 4.31 release:
  • Messages that are displayed at the top of pages and in the title bar of portlets can be hidden by specifying two new properties and their values in SAS Management Console.
  • A content promotion tool is provided. 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.
  • By default, SAS BI Portlets are displayed with the Flex interface.
  • You can alert users by displaying a warning message before the users are logged out of their inactive sessions. For information about using this feature, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: Middle-Tier Administration Guide.
  • 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.
  • A Diagnostics Portlet enables you to view information about 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. Therefore, the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 contains the following changes:
  • Bookmarks and data explorations are not supported.
  • All data explorations are migrated to SAS Web Report Studio 4.31 reports. However, users can still use the search capabilities within the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 to find those reports, as well as information maps.
  • The 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.
  • Visual Data Explorer is not available to display information maps.
If the SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.31 runs on a JBoss Web application server and Secure Sockets Layer is configured in your environment, then edit the server.xml file to specify the emptySessionPath parameter within the section on SSL Connector. This is necessary to enable the SAS BI Portlets to run in this environment.
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