Overview of SAS Enterprise Guide Administration

Administering SAS Enterprise Guide in your organization involves creating an environment for SAS Enterprise Guide users that contains all of the SAS resources and data that your users need to perform their jobs. SAS Enterprise Guide users should be able to complete tasks and access the data that they need, but be prevented from performing tasks that they are not allowed to do or accessing data that they are not allowed to use. These objectives are met by creating definitions in metadata for the SAS resources that are accessed by SAS Enterprise Guide users. These definitions enable SAS Enterprise Guide users to access data transparently, without knowing the actual location of the data. If you are using SAS Enterprise Guide in a SAS Intelligence Platform environment, metadata definitions can be used by both SAS Enterprise Guide and other Intelligence Platform applications (such as SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Information Map Studio). This lets multiple SAS applications access a consistent set of resources and data.

To perform SAS Enterprise Guide administration tasks, you need to use both SAS Enterprise Guide Explorer and SAS Management Console. SAS Management Console is the main administration tool for the SAS Intelligence Platform, and enables you to create definitions for servers, libraries, users, groups, and security settings. SAS Enterprise Guide Explorer is a secondary administration tool that provides several functions that are specific to SAS Enterprise Guide. The application enables you to identify metadata sources, create definitions for servers and libraries, and administer a common environment configuration for all SAS Enterprise Guide users. Most tasks that can be performed in SAS Enterprise Guide Explorer can also be performed in SAS Management Console, and there are some tasks (such as defining users and groups and setting up security) that can be performed only in SAS Management Console. Functions such as importing tasks and deploying metadata profiles are available only in SAS Enterprise Guide Explorer.

Creating and Accessing Metadata Definitions illustrates how SAS Enterprise Guide uses the metadata definitions that are created by SAS Enterprise Guide Explorer and SAS Management Console to access SAS resources such as servers and libraries.

This document does not contain detailed information about the administration tasks that are required to set up a metadata repository and create metadata definitions that are common to all SAS Intelligence Platform applications (such as user definitions and security settings). For information about these procedures, see the SAS Intelligence Platform Administration documents that are listed in the Recommended Reading section.

You can also use SAS Enterprise Guide without a connection to a SAS Metadata Server. In this configuration, SAS Enterprise Guide works on a local SAS server, and cannot use any functions that require a metadata connection. The functions that are not available include the following: