What's New in Middle-Tier Administration for the SAS 9.3 Intelligence Platform

The SAS 9.3 middle-tier software is supported on 64-bit operating systems only.

SAS has discontinued the SAS BI Web Services for .NET product. Customers that used the functionality provided by this application are encouraged to transition to the SAS BI Web Services for Java product.

In the SAS 9.2 release, logging for the SAS Web applications was performed with a logging service. For the SAS 9.3 release, logging is performed with log4j. Logging configuration is performed in two ways. First, each Web application reads a log4j configuration file. Second, some Web applications enable dynamic logging changes that can be set in the SAS Web Administration Console.

In the SAS 9.2 release, audit records could be stored to a log file or to a database. In the SAS 9.3 release, all SAS deployments are configured to use the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform database. The SAS 9.3 release also has an update to the SAS Web Administration Console to display user-level audit information.

For the SAS 9.3 release, the SAS middle-tier software includes a configuration scripting tool for each of the three supported Web applications servers. The primary purpose of the configuration scripting tools is to support configuring a Web application server for sites that do not permit running the SAS Deployment Wizard on a middle-tier machine.

In the SAS 9.2 release, editing and deletion capabilities in the SAS Comment Manager were accomplished by creating a role and assigning users to that role. In SAS 9.3, users requiring these capabilities should be assigned to a new predefined role, Comments:Administrator.

For the SAS 9.3 release, SAS Logon Manager can be configured to prevent concurrent logon sessions. This option might be attractive for deployments in highly regulated environments.