If you're a new starter, or somebody just gave you extra SAS administration responsibilities, you may be struggling to find your way around the new SAS environment. Brian Varney presented an insightful paper at this year's South East SAS Users Group (SESUG) entitled Getting to Know an Undocumented SAS Environment. Brian's insights will be of use to those pitched into the situations I described above.
Brian structured his paper into what, where, and who. In each section, Brian presented brief tips and techniques for discovering details about the SAS environment.
How do I know Brian presented this paper? Did I visit Durham in North Carolina and attend SESUG? Sadly, no. But I do subscribe to SAS's SAS Users Groups blog. It reduces the jet lag! Christina Harvey's How to Document Your SAS Environment article alerted me to Brian's paper. If you're in need of a better understanding of your SAS environment, I recommend you check it out.
AND, it's clearly a popular topic because David Chapman was talking on the same topic at NESUG (NorthEast SAS Users Group). In Determining What SAS Version and Components Are Available (MA01) (highlighted on the SAS Users Blog, again), David discussed a macro that he had written to display salient information. I was most interested to follow his reference to SAS Knowledge Base article KB20390 which offers some very neat code (with very neat output, more to the point) for displaying what server software you're licensed for, what you have installed, version numbers and a bunch of other stuff.
