Adventures in Consulting

I had some time this last weekend to change my home computing platform and for those of us who work independently, I thought I would mention what I ended up doing. First, I’m pretty fortunate in that I have a few neighbors who also work from home. Obviously, our life line is our internet connection to the outside world. When that goes down, it’s hard to work and bill. Last year, we decided to exchange WEP keys with each other so that if one of us loses connectivity, we can easily leach off of someone else’s connection until we are back up. This has worked great for the four of us. Interestingly, out of the four of us, we use three different providers so this has provided even more assurance that we can maintain some connectivity in the event of a connection lose. It’s all about redundancy!

I finally bit the bullet and put to rest my Small Business Server from MS. I’ve used SBS for many years and it has worked OK, but it’s over kill for a one person company. I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out proxy issues and other communications problems, but I always felt that there had to be something more simple to use. At the encouragement of a colleague, I ordered and installed Windows Home Server from Microsoft. With WHS, I get 10 licenses to connect to the server and I don’t have to worry about the complexity of administration. This thing is pretty simple. Granted, it doesn’t have Exchange or SQL Server but that’s easily overcome. I’m just moving my email to the cloud and since I don’t use SQL Server for anything other than development, I can use the Express Edition to do all my testing and dev work.

I was able to connect my analytics server to WHS and I never lost a beat. So as far as my network environment, I’m pretty much where I want to be without the distraction and overhead of maintaining a network with a domain and Active Directory, etc… One thing that I really like is now that i’m not using Proxy Server, I have full access to other communications methods that was very difficult to implement such as video conferencing.

The other advantage of WHS is that it works seamlessly with Vista and XP for backups and storing media for distribution to other devices. You can also run a website and SharePoint on WHS so you continue to get many of the benefits of SBS for about 16% of the cost WHS.

One of my few complaints with WPS is getting LST files/reports formatted properly to print on a printer. I’ve spent quite a bit of time wrestling with WPS not throwing page feeds (or whatever it is called in Windows terminology) so that my printouts fit nicely on a page. If you’ve used WPS, I’m sure you’ve had this issue as well.

Today, I spent a little time playing around with WPS and MS Word 2007. I was originally contemplating writing a short .NET program to read a WPS LST file and format it so that it would fit on a page properly. That is a bit more work than I wanted to do and since I have MS Office 2007 on my desktop, I thought it would be worth a try to set up a macro to format a page properly for printing.

If you don’t have Office 2007, it’s extremely nice.  It is well worth the investment. Although this example uses Word 2007, I’m sure you can do the same thing in Word 2003 that I did using Word 2007. So, how did I finally achieve pages to print properly using WPS? I have an affinity for landscape printing, so I have my options set in my autoexec.sas file as below.

options orientation=landscape ls=132 ps=50 ;
 

This sets up the page margins and orientation for the LST file.

The trick to getting everything to work is to use a FOOTNOTE statement in your code. Again, in my autoexec.sas file I placed the following statement.

FOOTNOTE “Report Provided by MineQuest, LLC.”;
 

Of course, you can use anything you like but I wanted something generic that I could put on any of my printouts in case my programs didn’t contain any footnotes. One gotcha here, your LST file must have a footnote to make this work. If you reset your footnotes to blank, then this little trick will not work.
 

The second part of the equation is setting up MS Word to quickly format the text file that you have to save from within WPS. I created a macro, called WPS_Landscape that simply formats the Word 2007 document so that it is printable. The settings I use are:

·         Orientation: Landscape

·         Top Margin: 0.65″

·         Bottom Margin 0.65″

·         Left Margin 0.5″

·         Right Margin 0.5″

·         Font: Courier New

·         Font Size: 9pt

Setting up the Word Macro

It’s pretty easy to setup a Word 2007 Macro. Here are the steps.

1.       Select the Office Start Button and select Word Options in the lower right hand side of the selection box.

2.       Make sure that you have “Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon” checked.

3.       If the Developer Tab is selected, the Developer options will appear on the Ribbon.

4.       Select the Developer Tab from the ribbon menu.

5.       Click Record Macro.

6.       Type WPS_landscape for the macro name and click the “Keyboard ” icon in the dialog box.

7.       Press F3 (or any key you want to use to launch the macro) for the short cut key that will launch the macro. Press Assign and then Close.

8.       Click Home on the Ribbon.

9.       Click “Select” and then “Select All” on the far right side of the main menu.

10.   Change the font to Courier New and the font size to 9pt.

11.   Click Page Layout and click on Orientation and select Landscape.

12.   Click on Margins and then Custom Margins and enter:

o   Top Margin: 0.65″

o   Bottom Margin 0.65″

o   Left Margin 0.5″

o   Right Margin 0.5″

13.   Click on Developer on the Main Menu and click on Stop Recording.

So there you have it. After you have saved your WPS LST file (as say WPSLST.TXT) all you have to do is right click on the WPSLST.TXT file from Windows Explorer, select “Open with…” and select MS Word. After the text appears in Word, press F3 and your report will be properly formatted to print.

Finally, this also gives you the option of printing to a PDF or RTF from within Word.  You might want to experiment to see how you can add a logo to MS Words header or Footnote bands to make your reports and printouts look quite nice.     

Recently, I decided that perhaps it was time to do a cost analysis of WPS on a Windows Server vs. SAS on the same Windows Server. I looked at the cost for both products for the first year, the annual renewal fee and the total cost of these products over a three year period.

Not surprisingly, the cost of a WPS license was substantially less than SAS for the same products. What was surprising was how much lower the cost for WPS is in comparison to SAS. In a time of budget cutting and when most companies are trying to become lean and mean, SAS is trying to take advantage of its customers by dramatically increasing prices when the customer refreshes hardware. By simply going from a single logical processor to a two logical processor server, SAS increases its pricing by as much as ten times the annual renewal rate.

You can take a look at this White Paper by going to the home page at www.minequest.com. You can directly view the report in PDF format by clicking here.

Tags: WPS SAS Pricing Windows Server