Viewing and Sharing Information That Is Published to Channels

The portal enables you to view the contents of packages that have been created using the SAS Publishing Framework. A package can contain files, links, SAS Stored Processes, and other packages. Packages can be published to a publication channel and also to a WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) repository.

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.

The portal provides several ways to view and share information that has been published:

The following sections describe the process of subscribing to publication channels, viewing content that is published to those channels, and publishing content.

Your organization defines channels using the SAS Publishing Framework, and your SAS administrator applies security in order to control which users and groups can access the channels.

After publication channels have been defined for your organization, you can subscribe to the channels and add them to portlets. Here are the main steps:

Depending on the profile that is associated with a channel, channels to which you subscribe are automatically added to your Publication Channel Subscriptions portlet, as shown in the following display:

You can also search for channels, you can bookmark channels, and you can add channels to collection portlets.

From a portlet, you can open a channel and view the packages that have been published to that channel. The following display shows the contents of the North American Sales Region channel. This channel contains a number of charts for sales in North America:

After you have opened a package, you can bookmark it or send an e-mail message that contains a link to the package.

The portal uses the default e-mail program that is defined in your browser to create an e-mail message. The URL address for each content item appears in the body of the message. You can then enter the recipient's e-mail address and send the message. When a user accesses portal content through a URL address, the portal checks the user's credentials to determine whether the content can be viewed.

From the portal, you can publish files, links, and SAS Stored Processes to a publication channel.

One way to publish content is to use the Bookmarks portlet. Suppose you want to publish some links that you have bookmarked, as shown in the following display. In your Bookmarks portlet, you would check the links, and then select Publish. (For more information about bookmarks, see Using Bookmarks.)

After you select Publish, a Publish page is displayed in which you provide information about the package that you want to publish. You must provide a name for the package, and you can provide a description and other information that others can use when searching for this package. You can also choose to publish to a document repository using WebDAV rather than to a channel.

After you publish a package, when you open the corresponding channel once again and refresh it, you see the new package listed. Other users who subscribe to this channel see the package when they log on to the portal. If they open the package, they can view, bookmark, or e-mail the links.

Here are the characteristics of a package that you publish from the portal: