NOTE: Promoting Portal Content

With serendipitous timing, Paul Homes issued a new blog post last week about Updated SAS Admin documents. He highlights the fact that there is an extra chapter in the SAS 9.2 Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide, Fourth Edition about the new facilities for Promoting Portal Content (Chapter 24).

This week I am embarking on a new engagement that includes the production of a Configuration Management Plan for a large SAS Grid deployment. My experience of doing a similar thing a couple of years ago with SAS 9.1.3 was mixed. Steve O'Donoghue (SAS UK) and I described it in our 2009 SAS Global Forum paper Configuration Management for SAS Software Projects.

Managing the bread-and-butter items such as DI jobs, stored processes, and SAS macros was fine, but we came to a halt with the Information Delivery Portal. Portal elements such as page layouts and corporate branding could not be migrated from one environment to another, e.g. development to test, or test to production. The only means of doing this was to manually make changes in each environment, i.e. manually regenerating the content and structure.

The portal promotion tools described in the Web Application Admin Guide describe how to promote the following items:

• Portal Application Tree
• User or Group Permissions Tree
• Portal content object
• Portal page
• Portal page template
• Portlet instance

I'm grateful to Paul for drawing my attention to this new information. Aren't blogs wonderful!