Limited Technical Support

At SAS Technical Support, our mission is to "help our customers make the best use of our software products through effective and responsive support, active advocacy, and a broad and flexible range of self-help resources." In support of this mission, the following services and policies set the expectations for your relationship with SAS Technical Support.

• Suggest the appropriate SAS procedure, language feature, or products for the particular type of analysis or functionality that is requested.
• Answer questions about specific details of procedures, such as discussing available features, options, and limitations.
• Provide references for formulas and statistical techniques that our algorithms use, where possible.
• Provide limited guidance and references to help you interpret the output that is produced by statistical procedures.
• Isolate, document, and find circumventions for reported software defects.
• Work with SAS software development staff to provide safe hot fixes for our software, as we deem appropriate.
• Provide limited and general statistical advice on a case-by-case basis; however, it is your responsibility to determine which type of statistical analysis is appropriate for your needs.
• Address concerns with printed or online documentation by providing additional examples, if necessary, or explanation for concepts that require clarification.
• Address specific questions and concerns that are related to the installation and maintenance of SAS software.
• Provide limited assistance with programming logic.
• Provide a broad overview of hardware tuning, operating system modifications, SAS system performance enhancements, and methods of efficient programming for achieving optimal performance; however, we do not provide benchmarking for specific hardware or operating systems.
• Provide support for the interaction between the SAS system and any third-party software that ships with the SAS system.
• For other third-party applications, we are glad to convey any knowledge that we have, but we cannot provide support for another vendor's software.

Due to limited resources and knowledge of any particular customer's data analysis situation, we cannot provide customized consulting services. Nor can we provide customized SAS code, for example, CONTRAST, ESTIMATE, or TABLES statements; macro, JSL, SCL, DATA step, DataFlux EEL, or IML code. You can visit the SAS Consulting Web site to learn more about the consulting services that are offered by SAS. Your Account Representative can also assist you in engaging the appropriate professional services.

SAS Technical Support applies only to SAS licensed software products. Work Product from SAS Consulting services engagements can be supported under a services contract from SAS Consulting. Visit SAS Consulting web site to learn more about the consulting services that are offered by SAS. Your Account Representative can also assist you in engaging the appropriate professional services.

Some SAS software products are designed to be modified by the customer. However, modifying SAS software products in a manner not authorized by the applicable user documentation might limit or preclude SAS from providing technical support. Contact SAS Technical Support if you are unsure whether your planned modification will result in a supported software configuration. Attempting to reverse engineer, reverse assemble or decompile SAS software, or in any way attempting to recreate or modify the source code for any SAS software, is never authorized under your SAS software license and might preclude SAS from providing technical support.

The current release of SAS is the latest release in General Availability status. We provide Problem Alert Notices and source level maintenance (executable modules or "hot fixes") for selected critical problems occurring in this release. We also provide problem alerts and hot fixes for selected critical problems in the two most recent, non-current releases. For all releases, regardless of age, we provide technical support running on these supported operating systems in accordance with information in the tables below. However, if a SAS customer chooses not to install the most current release of the software, then the level of support available will diminish over time.

In general, SAS provides:

• Level A support for the current SAS release and the release immediately prior
• Level B support for the release immediately prior to the supported Level A releases
• Level C support for all other releases

The support levels for SAS software releases are indicated in the following table: