Manageability

The SAS Information Delivery Portal has several important features that make it easy to manage and administer. First, the portal has a very small client footprint. At a minimum, it consists of an HTTP client, typically a Web browser, that interacts with the portal Web application via an HTML interface.

Depending on your content, the client may also use one or more standard desktop viewers such as Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Excel. These applications, which are commonly used to view content from the World Wide Web, may be used to view content that is streamed by the servlets in the portal's middle tier.

The use of the enterprise directory by the SAS Information Delivery Portal offers further advantages relative to systems management. Since every user and every piece of content is defined in the directory, you have a centralized point at which to manage these objects. Regardless of where the server, application, report, or user resides on the network, you can administer it in one place using one interface.

The fact that the SAS Information Delivery Portal is based on an n-tiered architecture also makes it easier to administer and manage code changes. All of the servlets and JSPs reside on the middle tier, and when they need to be updated, you only have to go to one place to do it. Further, the ability to store your SAS programs centrally on the business tier enhances change management. For example, instead of embedding the SAS code into client applications, you can centrally maintain and manage this code from the server. This gives you the ability to change your SAS programs and at the same time ensure that every client that invokes a stored process will always get the latest version available.