I want to point to a blog post created by a colleague Pej Javaheri. This blog post will describehow to set up a complete machine with Crescent, Tabular project and PowerPivot for SharePoint:
A great new whitepaper by my colleague Mariano Teixeira Neto:
The purpose of PowerPivot for SharePoint is to allow users to share their PowerPivot workbooks in a secure and scalable environment. To ensure that you are sharing and collaborating on the most recent data available to you, PowerPivot for SharePoint provides a data refresh feature that lets you automatically update PowerPivot data in an Excel workbook. This white paper describes in detail the data refresh feature in PowerPivot for SharePoint. It starts by explaining the steps for setting up a data refresh schedule in SharePoint, and then it continues with an in-depth view on how data refresh works on a SharePoint farm. Both administrators and the business analysts who author and manage PowerPivot workbook data can benefit from learning more about setting up and using data refresh in a SharePoint environment.
Download the entire whitepaper here.
Sometimes you think you are onto something great but are thrown back by something unexpected. In this case I wanted to work with some XML files and import them into PowerPivot. For this I used the the Excel XML support to import a XML file and create a table from it. Loaded this data into PowerPivot and all looked well.
Until I uploaded this workbook to SharePoint:
“The workbook cannot be openend because it contains the following features that are not support by Excel in the browser: XML maps”
Ok now what ? Only one thing to do .. remove all the references to XML. So I deleted the table and the connection and uploaded the workbook again.
But alas still the same error message. What now .. after searching the internet I found there is a special way to do this:
After I followec the steps suggested by the help file I could finally upload my workbook to SharePoint.
Now that PowerPivot is getting more and more known the IT departments are getting used to the idea they will need to publish data feeds to end users. But how can we do this ? How can we make one central location for this ?
In this blog post we are going to create a data feed on top of my SSAS cube and publish this feed to a central datafeed library.
A lot of times you want your PowerPivot site to have another URL then the one you original got during the install. During installation the it uses the server name as url. In just installed PowerPivot on a local machine in our netwerk called l01, but because we have this running in a separate lab domain it cannot be accessed from outside the domain.
Calling the website from his entire URL does work from outside the domain as well: http://l01.labdomain.nl. Until you actually open the PowerPivot file from the gallerie. You get a
The file that you selected could not be found. Check the spelling of the file name and verify that the location is correct.
The SQL Server SSAS team just release 4 great video’s where MSFT’s Lee Graber explains the PowerPivot for SharePoint Architecture. This gives great insight on PowerPivot and SharePoint integration. Mind you these videos are not for the weak of hart and go pretty deep 
But well worth the time if you are into SharePoint and PowerPivot:
Update: They are now all available on the PowerPivot Technet site.
We recently created a new web application on our SharePoint farm, we chose claims-based authentication as authentication option. All seemed ok until i wanted to create a report on top of the PowerPivot application in SSRS. I got a error “‘Too many automatic redirections were attempted” in the report builder 3. Searching on the Internet i can across a blog of Dave Wickert that explains that we need to run a PowerPivot web application in classic mode: Why PowerPivot requires ‘classic-mode’ web applications.
Unfortunately we cannot change back classic mode from a claims based web app. So we had to create a new webapplication and copy everything from one site to the other (or create a backup of your sitecollection and restore it in a new web application.
