There is very little difference between processing data with Hera and SAS; that being the case, people who are already familiar with XMM-Newton data and SAS may find it useful to simply be aware of these differences, rather than go through this entire primer looking for discrepancies. For these users, the most relevant information pertains to the Hera GUI interface and placing data on the Hera servers (see §4). Also, due to NASA network security restrictions, the pipeline task epchain cannot be used. Further, the task cifbuild no longer needs to be run; the Hera server runs it every night, so the ccf.cif file is always up-to-date.
Users who generally prefer to run tasks from the command line may find that it is best to download their datasets from the HEASARC archive straight to their Hera account, repipeline the data there, and then analyze it using the Command Window instead of the GUI.
While tasks can also run on anonymous Hera, they take a much longer time, since the ``files'' in an anonymous user's account are really links; so when a user runs, say, odfingest, Hera has to replace the links with the files and unzip them before running the process.