SAS BI Dashboard Feedback - What is your experience?

Question

Backgroup: We are looking at SAS BI Dashboard. We have currently implemented almost all of SAS's other applications (with the exception of Enterprise Miner). Other technologies online include Business Objects, some custom reporting stuff, and Project R.

The Question: What feedback do you have with:

1. implementing SAS BI Dashboard
2. building dashboards and reports in BI
3. linking BI with other technologies, databases, and SAS datasets

Answer 1

I haven't used it a lot myself but a friend has and even wrote a paper for the last SAS Global Forum that is on this very topic that might have some useful info for you.

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/044-2009.pdf

Answer 2

Due to licensing costs and difficulty of implementation (you have to use a specific -- not the most recent -- version of WebLogic, etc.), we COMPLETELY dumped the BI Dashboard and replaced it with LifeRay (open source portal).

SAS analytics, graphics, etc. are surfaced through weblogic calls to the SAS Stored Process server.

Answer 3

I haven't used the new SAS "BI Dashboard" offering, but I've done a lot of dashboards using SAS/Graph, such as the following (included here, along with the SAS code used to create them):

http://robslink.com/SAS/dashboards/aaaindex.htm

Doing dashboards this way, you can create standalone web output (like the ones above), either interactively or from a batch job, or you can generate them on-the-fly when you click on a web page via SAS/Intrnet or a BI Stored Process. The output can be viewed in a simple web browser, and/or you can display the URL output in a Portal (be it the SAS Portal, SAS Web Report Studio, or other).