For your PowerPivot Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and random thoughts!
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.
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on April 7th, 2010
For all of you that are running a combined all-in-1 system, i.e. domain controller, SharePoint and all of PowerPivot (desktop + server), you will notice that if you are trying to debug with non-administrator accounts that you can no longer remote desktop on to your machine. This is because by default only administrators are allowed to remote desktop onto a domain controller. To allow all Remote Desktop users that right:
Continue reading: Giving remote users rights to log on to your domain controller
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on April 2nd, 2010
(This applies to the RTM version of SharePoint and is an extremely common problem that is occurring with all of our RTM servers. I think that it will quickly become one of those things that everyone does each and every time they install a SharePoint server.)
There are two reasons why the “Claims to Windows Token Service” (c2wts) might not be started: (looking at the state of the service with the Service Manager MMC snapin will tell you which one applies to you)
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on March 25th, 2010
Recently we been hit with a rash of inquiries around whether folks should install the 32-bit version of the PowerPivot client, or go with the larger capacity 64-bit version. Office 2010 is the first version of Office to offer a native 64-bit option. In previous releases, you had to install the 32-bit version to run under WOW (Windows-On-Windows) mode. WOW emulates a 32-bit environment under the 64-bit OS. That is cool and all, but you were still limited by the 32-bit address space (2GB of memory). Now with Office 2010 64-bit the memory use is virtually unlimited for a client application.
So where to begin . . . Being a geek, let’s start off with a technical topic. When you are running in a 64-bit process, then you can only use dlls and other executables that are build as native 64-bit applications. Therefore whatever our choice, 32-bit or 64-bit, the ‘bit-ness’ of our approach has to hold for the entire process. For example, if we pick 64-bit, then we need the 64-bit version of Excel 2010, we need the 64-bit versions of any add-ins, such as PowerPivot for Excel, and we need 64-bit versions of any OLE DB providers or ODBC drivers (using the 64-bit version of the OLE DB Provider for ODBC here). So let’s keep that in mind.
Ok, here we go:
As you already may know, we have a couple of forums for PowerPivot at:
Dave Wickert with his PowerPivotGeek.com site has also created two new sections:
Please do not forget that the all four PowerPivot for SharePoint installation guides can be found here as well.
Rob Collie has also put together:
where you can see some of the key MVPs respond to some great questions concerning PowerPivot …disclosure: myself and Dave are also answering questions there 
The coup de grace of course is is Dave and my downloadable Academy Live presentation which
This will definitely help jump start your PowerPivot for SharePoint geekiness.
Enjoy!
[Originally posted at dennyglee.com]
