Ravi, Having never used SAS, I can't comment directly on it, but just from your description it sounds like a fairly robust system that provides for your current needs. Realize that when moving to BO, if your company doesn't already have a BO architecture online, that doesn't come with ITSM and costs can be expensive, and as you mentioned, the architecture is different and isn't as easily sliced and diced....about the only advantage that I can see you gaining by going to BO is your own knowledge of how to get things done in in....which may be a huge + to the switch...that's up to you though....and the ability to 'report' directly out of Remedy....but really that's as simple as running an open url run process to get your current reports....so I don't see that as much of a +....a + to staying where you are of course is the opportunity to get very experienced in SES and add that to your resume as a toolset you are comfortable with....
-----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rabi Tripathi Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 11:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: SAS for Remedy Reporting: Anybody doing it? Done it? Has anybody done or seen reports generated from Remedy data using SAS? We have such a setup that has worked fairly ok so far, but since there is no longer any SAS expertise in house, I'm trying to figure out if I should keep SAS or move away from it to what's more common...such as Business Objects. If anybody (a university?) is using SAS for this purpose, I would like to know what they think about SAS vs other tools (such as Business Object) for Remedy reporting. I inherited this fairly impressive report generation mechanism built using SAS (v9) scripts. It builds daily, weekly and monthly reports for different groups. Each group's (or each area's, meaning a cluster of groups') report is available over the web as a set of static html files. By clicking around, different reports showing different breakdowns of the same data is seen. Some reports can be drilled down to get to the actual tickets behind the data. There are many graphs too. It has worked pretty ok so far, and I have become good at doing some light maintenance/update. What impresses me about SAS is the ease with which data can be manipulated by SAS scripts with a few lines of script. And how easily reports/graphs can be produced. A few lines do what would take many many lines in other platforms. One downside is that connection to Remedy is at the database tables level, but using views it's not too bad. To think of it, BO does the same thing anyway. I am more familiar with BO/Crystal Reports. The big difference I see is that with BO, the report layout and delivery is emphasized, with the understanding that data is already pretty much laid out in the right format. With SAS, because of its original purpose (statistical analysis), you can easily manipulate, slice, dice data or merge data from different sources on the fly. Our scripts do quite a lot of this. If I go with BO (during an ARS/ITSM upgrade), I will have to deal with this data manipulation/merge. Anyway, those are the random thoughts for today. If you have any comment, please....well...comment. ____________________________________________________________________________ ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
