Today then I shadowed someone from the web development division. I honestly knew very little about what kind of company SAS was. All I knew about it was that it included programming and something with analytics. After today, I can safely say that I know almost everything there is to know about SAS in general as well as what the web development division does and how they help SAS. Before I actually started shadowing, I sat down with Jeff Foxx, one of the managers of the division, to go over SAS as a whole and how his division plays a part in SAS. I learned that SAS sells multi-million dollar software that analyzes big data in a way that other companies such as banks and insurances can use. After we talked about SAS, I met with my host. She gave us a quick tour and introduced us to the 50 or so people in the web development division, explaining to me what they did. Afterwards, we spent a lot of time talking about how her job is to make sure all the websites are consistent, but are still able to be customized to the preferences of its audience. This is really important because there are over 50 SAS websites for every country, and updates for one site affects all of the other sites. She showed me a “blueprint” of how the countries are grouped by both language and region, and how changes to the websites move through a program called AEM as the process of activating these changes occurs. I thought it was really cool how the people at SAS are able to make changes to the live website fairly easy, and I think that SAS has come up with a really great way of simplifying the process of editing and even making new pages for the website. I learned that SAS is keen on streamlining everything to make things more efficient and easier for both employees and customers. Unlike what I originally thought, creating web pages does not require knowledge of html coding or programming skills in general. They use a program called AEM which is similar to word press, but much more extensive and allows for the writers and designers to create the pages themselves rather than having to take the time of communicating back and forth between designers/writers and programmers. All in all, I think that today was really interesting as well as engaging, since I also got fix errors and update some of the SAS websites.
site_structure_2017_june-2hjvbht (Blueprint)