Kasper de Jonge PowerPivot Blog

One of the most difficult things when using a multi server farm is the security delegation between the servers. In most cases this still will be done using Kerberos, even though we have Claims based authentication in SP2010 most systems outside the native SharePoint 2010 farm will be using Kerberos (like SSAS and SSRS).

Microsoft has released a great whitepaper that:

This document provides you with the information that will help you:

• Understand the concepts of identity in SharePoint 2010 Products
• Learn how Kerberos authentication plays a critical role in authentication and delegation scenarios
• Identify the situations where Kerberos authentication should be leveraged or may be required in solution designs
• Configure Kerberos authentication end-to-end within your environment including  scenarios which leverage various service applications in SharePoint Server
• Test and validate that Kerberos authentication is configured correctly and working as expected
• Find additional tools and resources to help you configure Kerberos authentication in your environment

This document is divided in two major sections:

• Overview of Kerberos Authentication In SharePoint 2010 Products

This section provides conceptual information about managing identity in SharePoint Products, the Kerberos protocol, and how Kerberos authentication plays a key role in SharePoint 2010 Solutions

• Step-By-Step Configuration

This section will walk you through the steps required to configure Kerberos authentication and delegation in various SharePoint solution scenarios.

Download the whitepaper here.

Last week i got a question if they could use a access datasource for PowerPivot and be able to automaticly refresh it. The answer is yes.

I uploaded a Access file to a SharePoint gallery. Openend PowerPivot and started to add the access datasource. The trick is to not use the default URL to the access file but use the SharePoint WebDAV.

When adding the datasource click the browse button and go to your Shared Documents folder and select the access file there. SharePoint will make this kind of connection:

“\\sp2010\DavWWWRoot\Shared Documents\Nwind.accdb”

When you use this as source you can also schedule a refresh in the PowerPivot Gallery.

Update: Dave Wickert wrote a great blog post on potential trouble concerning refresh of a access database, check it out here: http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/04/02/working-with-the-2010-office-ace-provider/

Since my server has desktop experience turned on i did not have this problem.

I was trying to upload a PowerPivot file of 1 GB to SharePoint, this didn’t work because SharePoint is by default set to maximum of 50 MB. To increase this limit you have to do the following configurations:

Out of the box, SharePoint allows you to upload files up to 50MB in size and Excel Services allows you to view files as large as 10 MB in a browser. Our new farm setup increases the Excel Services limit to 50MB. You can change these settings even further if users will be publishing and interacting with larger files.

To increase Web Application limits:

a. Navigate to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Web Applications.

b. Select SharePoint-80 and then, on the Ribbon, select General Settings > General Settings.

c. Change the Maximum Upload Size setting to the MB limit you want to set. (The maximum allowed by SharePoint is 2047MB.)

To increase Excel Services limits:

a. Navigate to SharePoint Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications.

b. Select your Excel Service Application.

c. On the Ribbon, click Manage.

d. Click Trusted File Locations and on the following page, select your trusted location. (Typically, this is listed as http:// in the Address column.)

e. In the Workbook Properties area, set the Maximum Workbook Size property to 2000 and the Maximum Chart or Image Size to 100 MB

Found at the excellent powerpivotgeek blog: http://powerpivotgeek.com/server-installation/single-server-install/

For those who missed it, the launch date of SharePoint was announced. The launch will be done by President of the Microsoft Business Division Stephen Elop as he introduces Office and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 11 a.m. EST.

You can join him live at: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=JadoeNy2pBe

I just can’t wait to get PowerPivot to production !

I recently found a great PowerPivot feature to make the published PowerPivot sheet “view only” for a end user.

When you have write permissions for a PowerPivot sheet you can open the sheet in Excel and use all the measures and columns and use everything available in the sheet by using the “Open in Excel” button:

Now the great news, you can contain these permission to view only, documents can only be viewed sever side:

When you open the PowerPivot sheet in the browser you see the Open in Excel button is gone:

When we open the PowerPivot gallery as a default document library you will not be able to download the Excel sheet, it will render as html when you download it. I think this will be a very usefull permission !

This screencast will show you how we create a dashboard on a SSAS cube in PerformancePoint 2010 using a filter with time intelligent functions:

A few important points:

• use a Hierarchy to assign multiple Time Member Associations,the more levels you use the more functions are available. When you assign day you can use functions on day (like today), when you assign year you can use functions like nextyear.
• The Time intelligent functions use the time settings of the server to determine the current day and calculate the functions.
• You can map the time from your cube to any time you want, like in the demo you can map 2008 to 2010 to fool the functions
• Use the formula in the  time filter to connect controls where available

Pretty though demo to do 10 minutes, please don’t hesitate to ask me questions here.

Big thanks to these blog posts:

http://consultingblogs.emc.com/davidfrancis/archive/2007/12/02/PerformancePoint-Time-Intelligence-_2D00_-BI-for-the-masses-Part-1.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2009/12/14/configuring-data-source-time-settings-for-time-intelligence.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2010/01/21/time-intelligence-formula-quick-reference.aspx

And Dan English to point out to me i have to use the Hierarchy to add multiple Time Member Associations at the Ms forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/5f7f3e9b-1648-48c7-8cdf-8e3fb211b0ae?prof=required&ppud=4

This screencast shows how you can import data from a reporting services report published to SharePoint into PowerPivot:

This blog post will describe how you I enabled PerformancePoint 2010 on my SharePoint 2010 with PowerPivot integraton where I used the VidasM installaton guide. This is by no way the best way to do this but it enables you to play with PerformancePoint.  I used (and took some quotes) the PerformancePoint team excellent blog post Deploying PerformancePoint 2010 Soup to Nuts as a base (this is the official way to do it).

 We start by creating a site collection:

Set a name, location and choose  Business intelligence center as template:

Site should be created ok:

Now we are going to turn on the PerformancePoint services:
Go to central admin , system settings, manage services on serve.  You need to start the PerformancePoint Services and the Secure Store Service:

Once the Business Intelligence Center has been created, the administrator must create a PerformancePoint service application. This creates the service application proxy that facilitates web service calls between the WFE and the app server, along the Windows Communication Framework.

Go to Application Management, Service Applications , Manage service applications, click new, select performancepoint service application:

Last step is configuring the service app, give it a name and add check the “Add this service application’s proxy to the farm’s default proxy list” and create a new app pool.

Read the entire PerformancePoint team blog post for the details on the why.

When you finished this last step you can start playing with PerformancePoint and publish the dashboards: