We received reports from Info Commons today that graduate students in a CoB course taught by Hemant Jain were prevented from opening datasets inside SAS due to a version incompatibility with the SAS Enterprise Guide tool. Our version of SAS is up-to-date, but we are behind in SAS Enterprise Guide. This is through no fault of the library, but reflects a disconnect among CoB that has trickled into the library.
CoB professors who opted to use the newer version of SAS Enterprise Guide (not all of them) were told to inform students to first use Davenport Lab. For students whose schedules restricted them from using Davenport Lab during its hours of operations, their overflow was to be the Bloomberg Lab. CoB professors can request night and weekend access for students needing access to Bloomberg Lab.
The library is not expected to and has been not asked to update SAS Enterprise Guide to accommodate this mix-up. The reminder around Davenport/Bloomberg has been re-sent to the appropriate CoB professors by their IT. However, as it is not ideal to turn away students who are already here, we can do two things: 1) Inform them of what’s been communicated to us by CoB; 2) Let them know the only option in the library (for the moment) is to check out a laptop. The laptops have administrator rights which allow them to update SAS Enterprise Guide. However, due to DeepFreeze, as soon as the laptop reboots, it will default to the old version. So it’s a rinse and repeat situation.
When I am back to full staff and we’ve finished fixing Tableau and a handful of other issues on our public computers, we can fold this into the queue and discuss the value of getting an updated package on the machines before the normal update cycle. Hopefully, improved communication within CoB will help resolve the issue in the meantime.