For your PowerPivot Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and random thoughts!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on June 17th, 2010
Recently ran into this situation: Customer installed the wrong PowerPivot bits on their machine. They were running on a 64-bit OS with Office 2010 x64, but installed PowerPivot for Excel 32-bit. Everything installed OK, but when they clicked on the PowerPivot tab in Excel; then the PowerPivot Window they received the following error:
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on June 17th, 2010
Attempting to use a modified version of the SharePoint v4.master page is a great way to style our SharePoint site. If you interested in doing this, then the first thing to do is to make sure that you go to the right place:
PowerPivotGeek has posted some mightly good stuff concerning the installation and uninstallation of PowerPivot. The quick summaries are:
Compliments of PowerPivotGeek!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on June 14th, 2010
While this is technically a pure SharePoint posting, we have found it useful in our labs. We have password resets all of the time and this cheat sheet was developed to make it as painless as possible. I hope you find it as useful as we do.
Please click to continue reading.
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Side Note: As well, there is an in depth discussion on Changing Passwords in Chapter 9 of Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on June 14th, 2010
If you are running PowerPivot for SharePoint on more than one backend app server, then it is a common issue that folks are seeing only one server being used. It turns out that this might be ‘by-design’ so let’s talk about it for a bit. Let’s look at the two allocation methods we support:
May 23, 2010 by dennyglee | Edit
As you may have noted in my original posting Delegation, Claims, Active Directory…Oh My!…Aw Crap!, it quickly described how to solve issues surrounding the delegation of the claims token within an Active Directory environment. In it I referenced Lee Graber’s excellent posting: The data connection uses Windows Authentication and user credentials could not be delegated.
As per many blog postings, press releases, tweets, messages, and streams – PowerPivot went RTM on the 5/12. So what can or should we do now? Here’s some quick great blog postings to get yourself up and running on PowerPivot ASAP:
Enjoy!!
(preliminary pre-release)
Copyright © 2010, Microsoft Corporation, All rights reserved.
Primary Author: Ankur Goyal, SQL-Analysis Services
Technical Reviewer: John Hancock, Dave Wickert, Lee Graber, and Artur Pop
Abstract
The purpose of PowerPivot for SharePoint is to allow users to share their PowerPivot workbooks in a secure and scalable environment. This whitepaper focuses on the features that SQL Server 2008 R2 provides to help IT users to manage and understand the self-service BI activity. This whitepaper also describes key features of the PowerPivot Management Dashboard that we provide with PowerPivot for SharePoint. The PowerPivot Management Dashboard is built using PowerPivot, SharePoint web part pages and Excel Services technologies. This white paper describes how IT users can extend the capabilities of the management dashboard by creating their own custom reports and dashboard.
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on April 22nd, 2010
SharePoint 2010 has a new ‘claims-based’ authentication system that allows you to use federated identities with SharePoint. And there are certainly some customers that are excited to start playing around with this capability. That is neat and cool and all . . . but that isn’t the major reason why folks should be getting excited about ‘claims’. It is just a side-effect. The real reason why SharePoint uses claims is to bypass the Kerberos requirement within the farm. This is a huge benefit for SharePoint. In SharePoint 2007 once you grow beyond a single machine, then you must configure Kerberos between all of the servers – this quickly becomes a huge problem and limits both SharePoint adoption and its growth because many customers do not have the infrastructure needed to run Kerberos. But before you get too carried away with claims, particularly with PowerPivot, you have to remember two things: (a) PowerPivot only support Windows users and (b) we don’t support claims integration down to the client. The first one is easy to understand as SSAS only supports Windows credentials – and Excel Services uses that to establish the Windows identity for the connection. Having claims down to the client means that the user can perform one login to SharePoint – and have it be remembered for all future logins.
Continue reading: Why PowerPivot requires ‘classic-mode’ web applications
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on April 14th, 2010
As more and more folks start to get into PowerPivot and SharePoint, there is a need to programmatically write entries into the ULS. Since all of PowerPivot and all of SharePoint share this common logging infrastructure, why not also include log entries from your own processes. Here is some sample code for doing that:
First via PowerShell:
