Due to the failure of my Asus Transformer tablet I'm still reduced to posting from my phone. So please forgive my brevity!
Yesterday was a good day for me at the conference. I attended a number of futures sessions in the morning and gained some insights into a few developments at SAS.
Firstly, collaboration and search with Murali Nori. SAS see an evolutionary path from reporting, to analytics, to collaboration. This can be public or private communities. Collaboration covers many themes, aside from discussion it can include participation in approval processes, integration with Sharepoint, email, or IM. One key element is, perhaps, the creation of the ability to audit and report on the decision making process
that surrounds some of your SAS outputs.
Ultimately, the SAS Collaboration Framework
should produce better decisions, quicker decisions, with the right people. It'll be like
Facebook for the enterprise (secure and auditable)
As a small step in this direction, the new Visual Analytics tool will get the ability to add text comments at the end of this year.
In addition to the collaboration efforts, SAS are also aiming to provide much improved search capabilities; for structured and unstructured data. This means that a search in the portal might return you a list of "related" information items rather just items that precisely match your search (think of "Google for my SAS report"). We might see ranking of the results too.