Single Access Point to Enterprise Information

Much has been written about the current state of information overload that many organizations are experiencing today. These organizations are all struggling with how to manage an overabundance of information. To gain competitive advantage in a fast-changing business landscape, it is critical for organizations to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time.

Knowledge workers must have quick and efficient access to the information that they need to perform their jobs. However, countless hours are often lost as these workers hunt for the information that they need. In addition, there is a time value associated with information, and the half-life of valuable information seems to be ever shortening.

The SAS Information Delivery Portal solves these problems by enabling you to provide a single access point to enterprise information that is universally accessible across the organization. It enables you to aggregate all of the content that is stored on information systems throughout your enterprise — or any other Web resource that is available to your organization.

What is Content?

The SAS Information Delivery Portal uses a broad definition of content that gives you the flexibility to deliver any form of digital information that your users require. We provide a comprehensive set of predefined content types, and you can also define your own content types. Here are some of the content types that you can make available through the SAS Information Delivery Portal:

• Content that is managed through your data warehouse, such as SAS data sets and multidimensional databases (MDDBs).

• Reports that are dynamically generated using SAS stored processes.

• Web applications that access and generate content dynamically through Java servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs).

• Content that is syndicated from a provider using technology such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) Rich Site Summary (RSS).

• Links to any other content that you want to make available.

In addition to these content types, the portal also leverages the capabilities of the SAS Publishing Framework. The Publishing Framework provides powerful tools for packaging content into digital containers that can be transported as needed to users throughout your enterprise.

These packages can contain SAS files (for example, data sets, catalogs, and database views); binary files such as spreadsheets and word processing documents; GIFs, JPGs, and PDF files; HTML files including ODS output; text files; and reference strings such as URLs. Packages give you virtually unlimited ability to surface almost any kind of digital content using the SAS Information Delivery Portal.

Managing Your Content

The key to making all of this content available through the SAS Information Delivery Portal is a centrally managed enterprise directory. The enterprise directory, which is implemented using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), is used to catalog each content item that is to be accessed through the portal. For each content item, the enterprise directory stores metadata that includes attributes such as the content's location and access permissions. This metadata enables the portal to access information seamlessly from various systems throughout the enterprise and on the Web.

Ease of Use

Making all of this content available is not enough; the content must also be usable in order to empower the knowledge worker to make effective decisions. Because the portal is a Web application, it delivers all of its functionality through an easy-to-use and simple-to-understand Web browser interface. The result is a powerful tool that uses an already ubiquitous interface paradigm, and therefore requires a minimum of training for end users.