SAS prides itself on being a very transportable system. SAS datasets might be easily transportable in most cases, but a lot of work is involved when one is migrating from an old machine with a non-standard character set to a machine based on the ISO-8859-1 (or Latin1) character set.
http://www.sas.com/service/doc/periodicals/obs/nls_article.html.PROC CPORT
PROC MCIMPORT