About Channels and Subscriptions

The SAS Information Delivery Portal provides access to the publish and subscribe features of SAS. These features enable users and applications to publish information to other authorized users. Information can be published using various delivery methods, including SAS publication channels, message queues, e-mail, and files.

A publication channel is a virtual communication path that is identified with a particular topic, organizational group, user audience, or other category. A publication channel is similar to a radio channel that is identified with a particular frequency. Your site administrator defines the publication channels for your organization. Users who sign up to receive information from a channel are called subscribers. If you subscribe to a channel, then you automatically receive information whenever it is published to that channel.

Using the SAS Information Delivery Portal, you can do any of the following tasks:

• View information that has been published to a channel. For details, see View a SAS Publication Channel.
• Subscribe to one or more channels. This action involves the following tasks:

  • Create one or more subscriber profiles that describe your subscription preferences. For details, see Managing Your Subscriber Profiles.
  • Subscribe to one or more publication channels that have been defined by your portal administrator. For details, see Managing Your Subscriptions.
• Publish information to a publication channel or to a WebDAV repository. For details, see Publish Content.
• Specify the sort order for packages that are published in a channel. Packages are listed in order by creation date. For details, see Change User Preferences.
• Specify the sort order for packages in channels that have been added to a collection portlet. For details, see Edit the Contents of a Collection Portlet.

When you subscribe to a channel, one of the following occurs:

• If the delivery transport in your subscriber profile is Portal, then the channel is automatically added to your Publication Channel Subscriptions portlet.

  If your Publication Channel Subscriptions portlet does not appear on any of your portal pages, then you can add it. See Add a Publication Channel Subscriptions Portlet.
• If the delivery transport in your subscriber profile is WebDAV, then channel content appears in the WebDAV repository.
• If the delivery transport in your subscriber profile is E-mail, then channel content is e-mailed to you. (You receive e-mail only for content that is published to the channel using SAS Publishing Framework. You do not receive e-mail for content that is published from the portal.)