User:StaceyHamilton/BlogEntry: 2009 January 09 11:01:44 EST
From sasCommunity
Guest blogger Julie Platt writes:
Faster, Sleeker, and Easily Accessible
We just welcomed into our family a new laptop computer! I have to say that this has been a life-changing event. It’s FAST. It’s sleek. It has more memory and power than the hulking desktop model we bought in 2002.
Check out the difference in bulk, alone:
Isn’t that amazing?!
This is the first computer we have bought in about seven years. Our old system was a desktop model. The model was huge. The hard drive was slow and small. We dedicated a desk to it and had to walk upstairs to use it.
This new laptop is sleek and FAST--five times faster! It has five times more memory on the disk drive. The screen of the laptop monitor is about the same size as the large monitor screen of the old computer.
In preparation for the new arrival, we called AT&T, our Internet service provider. “We’re getting a laptop! We need wireless access at our house.” They came right over with the router and set it up for us.
In just a few years, we’ve been able to get a system that really works for our lifestyle. We can take the computer anywhere in the house and connect anywhere there is wireless Internet access.
This transformation makes me think about how SAS Press has transformed itself over the years and the new things we’re planning for the future. Our publishing program originally focused on print media, primarily. We publish books and, for several years, published the Observations journal. Announcements about new books revolved around postal mailings and printed collateral. Authors were people you might meet at a conference if you were lucky.
As we think about how we want to offer SAS Press books to become part of the everyday lives of SAS programmers, we need to think about how you get your information, how you might connect with SAS Press authors, and how we can keep you informed of content from SAS Press that can help you in your everyday work.
Here are some of the ideas that SAS Press is looking to deliver to you in 2009:
• Provide the content in any way that you want to access it. We’d like to find additional ways to make SAS Press books accessible electronically so that the content is more searchable and portable. Perhaps you’d like to be able to access smaller “chunks” of the information and we should experiment with making chapters of books available. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to download a copy of a SAS Press book onto your iPhone?
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Of course, all of these methods require carefully planned infrastructure to prepare and deliver the content, so this won’t happen overnight. We are working with many groups at SAS to prototype these approaches and will keep you involved in that process.
• We want to be involved in the conversations that you’re having over the Web. Conversations around SAS are happening all over the Web--SASCommunity.org, Facebook, LinkedIn, technical bloggers. We want to be sure that as you’re looking for answers to your questions about using SAS, we can point you to content or examples that could help. Of course, we always want our content to evolve so that it best serves you. If we don’t already have a book that would answer your questions, perhaps that indicates a topic that needs to be developed. We want to develop content that will help make your jobs easier, and we want you to be involved in helping to shape the evolution of the SAS Press offerings.
• Learn from the expert. Podcasts and webinars on SAS topics are very popular. Through podcasts and webinars, you have an opportunity to hear tips or lengthier discussions on a topic, similar in length to presentation you might attend at a conference. View the presentation live or refer back to an archived version. The podcasts and webinars will be available when you need them.
Of course, these initiatives are above and beyond the twenty-plus books we’ll be publishing for you this year! We’ll keep publishing the information you rely on. We are so excited about the promise that these initiatives hold, and we want to involve you as part of the team that helps SAS Press continue to evolve--becoming faster, sleeker, and easily accessible to you in your everyday work.
Contact us and tell us what you need and want to help you use SAS even more successfully!
