If you have ever wanted to use SharePoint in your organization but have been afraid that you don’t have the IT knowledge, budget, or expertise to install, manage, and maintain the machines or software, this appendix is for you. This appendix explains how Microsoft allows disparate businesses—from the smallest one-person home office to the largest enterprises—to get the benefits of SharePoint without needing to know how to install, manage, deploy, patch, back up, scale out, or generally maintain the machines or software.
This appendix is relatively short because you can do most of the same things with Office 365 and SharePoint Online that you can do with SharePoint on-premises. But this appendix does highlight a few important exceptions and concepts.
Words and phrases such as “software as a service,” “software plus services,” “cloud services,” or simply just “the Cloud,” have been buzzing around in the industry for a while. Various pundits have heralded these as the “next big change” in computing, on par with how the Internet or the graphical user interface changed computing.
The upshot of all this buzz is that if you don’t know much about services or service-based computing, you’re probably starting to feel left out in the cold. Don’t worry, you’re not too far behind; many people and companies are only just now starting to understand what services are, how to leverage them, and how to ascertain their proper role in business productivity.
But what are services? What is the Cloud? Why is it important? And, more importantly, how can it benefit you and what does it have to do with SharePoint BI?
The notion of a service is not a new concept. People have been consuming services for a long time. Services are simply about having someone else perform a task or job—that is, a “service” that is useful to you. Simple day-to-day examples of services are exactly what you might think they would be: having someone do your dry cleaning, wash your car, do your taxes, or pick up your trash. In all these cases, someone else does work for you, and you don’t have to understand how they do those jobs, what tools they use, and so on. In other words, there’s nothing new or novel about services. The definition of service hasn’t magically changed somehow just because large computer companies have started using it.
So how does the simple notion of services apply to software and computing? The confusion starts with the many different meanings assigned to this combination. But fundamentally, the concept is still exactly the same—it’s still about someone performing a service that is useful to you. The only difference is that in this context, the services pertain to computing.
Here are some simple examples of computing-based services that you’ll probably be familiar with:
Buying and selling items on your favorite auction website . You don’t have to worry about where the site stores pictures, how it manages bids, how buyers and sellers connect, nor do you need to worry about applying security updates, site scalability, or anything of that nature.
Doing taxes online . You don’t have to install the tax software, run the machines, update it for security issues, and so on. You just log in and use it.
Using an Internet search engine . You don’t have to know how a search engine works or how to run the computers to perform a successful search. It is even possible to install a search engine on your local network and have search capability “powered by Bing.”
Hosting a website . Many people have their own homegrown websites these days. In most cases, the provider performs all the hosting tasks (the actual running of the computers that contain your website), domain registration, and so on. In the early days of the Internet, this wasn’t the case. Today you have the option of doing all the steps separately, but more often than not, cheap providers are ready to do all these things for you. Once it is up and running, you generally need to worry only about the content on your website. How often the machines are updated, patched, and so forth is usually not a concern.
The preceding simple cases should illustrate the point. Even in the context of computing, the idea of a service is fairly straightforward. The services described above purposely use simple examples to illustrate the concept. You’ll see more complex examples of services later in this appendix.
Another often-misunderstood term is “the Cloud” and how it pertains to services. Generally the distinction between the cloud and services is minor and can usually be ignored altogether. People often use these terms interchangeably. But sometimes the cloud can imply a few distinctions that are worth discussing.
When people refer to the cloud, they usually mean a system that resides in some location (in fact, usually spread across many locations) that users can access from anywhere. In most cases, this really just means that there are a bunch of server computers in dark air-conditioned rooms somewhere, often called “datacenters.” In fact, there are probably many such rooms spread out over many different cities, states, and even countries—all networked together in some way, with data stored redundantly in multiple locations. This scheme means that regardless of local interruptions, such as a power outage or even a catastrophe such as a fire or flood, the data stored on those machines, and likely even the service itself, won’t be lost.
So the cloud implies both redundancy and infrastructure, ensuring that the computer programs providing the services and any data they store are maintained and always available. Services “live” in the cloud.
All the computing-specific services described so far must run on a computer. You may think that they are running on your computer, but your computer usually just shows you an interface and the results in a browser. The Bing search engine doesn’t use your computer to scour the Internet. The auction website doesn’t use your computer to store or calculate sales costs for all the items in the various auctions. Your computer shows only what you need to see (the search results, the current bid, and so forth); in other words, when using services, your computer simply displays some content in a webpage. The real work that must occur for the service to be useful is done on the large network of machines known as the cloud.
As you may have guessed, not all clouds are the same. You would probably prefer a white fluffy cloud to low-lying fog. It takes money, people, good hardware, great software, and general know-how to run a large enough network of server machines to make up a great cloud. If you need to choose between two different services that live in the cloud, one consideration is the relative strength of each operation.
To evaluate a service, take a look at the EULA and support level agreement (SLA) for each service. Among the things you should try to discover are:
What kind of security and privacy guarantees the service operators make
What kind of downtime they expect to have (we all know computers can fail; computers making up the cloud are no different)
How much redundancy is in place to avoid catastrophes
What kind of customer support they have when support issues arise
How large and how quickly they can scale if the number of customers, the sales volume, or processing load increases for your business
How or whether they plan to reimburse you if something goes wrong
Different services offer different levels of support. Most services don’t talk about clouds versus the service (again, those terms are often used interchangeably), but each service should offer the information to answer these and other questions you might have around how reliable the service is and how well it can meet your needs.
Microsoft has invested heavily in running services in the cloud and already has a number of major cloud services available. Microsoft has years of experience running services such as Windows Update, MSN, Xbox Live, Hotmail, and many others. In fact, SharePoint Online has been available at scale since October of 2008.
You may have been thinking of all of this as software, including programs that run on the Internet and those that run on your home computer. That’s true. It is all software—that is, code running on a computing device. However, the term “software” has taken on a slightly different meaning in many of the cloud/service discussions.
Software has come to mean programs that you install and maintain on a machine that you own. For example, installed games, photo editing programs, or applications such as Microsoft Office on your computer are traditional types of desktop software. You need to maintain all those applications, meaning you have to install them, update them when a security patch gets released, troubleshoot issues that come up if something isn’t working right, and so on. On the other hand, services are not programs that you own; someone else owns, installs, and maintains them. You typically only use them or subscribe to them.
This section goes into more detail on the tradeoffs between software and services to help you understand when and why you might choose each.
Traditional software has some advantages over services that you should not overlook. Software running on machines you own typically runs much faster. The machine is under your desk or in your company datacenter, not miles or hundreds of miles away over a far-reaching network. The software applications running on your desktop leverage your computer in a native way; desktop applications tend to be much more powerful than their counterparts that run only in a browser over the Internet. They’re also often much richer visually, and typically have more functionality. You also “own” the software you have purchased. You can update it or uninstall it as you see fit. If the manufacturer provides an update you don’t want, you don’t have to install it. You also have a greater degree of control over who is using the software; for example, you can limit which users can use which physical machines. Imposing such control is usually straightforward. And, because you own the machines, you can control what other software programs are installed on those machines.
Services have a huge advantage in terms of ease of setup and maintainability. This becomes particularly obvious for more complex server products that might need to scale out over many machines. Installing SharePoint on tens or hundreds of machines is a far different task than installing it on a single computer sitting under your desk. Even a single local installation can be complex—that installation still has to be patched, and you have to troubleshoot it if problems occur. In a world where people are inundated with information and have business-critical tasks to perform, there’s a price for each employee’s time—and increasingly, your employees’ time is better spent on business needs rather than on locating and downloading a patch or a Service Pack, deploying it, and configuring and testing everything to ensure that it continues to run smoothly.
Another advantage of services is that you don’t have to buy and maintain the hardware. Like software, hardware acquisition must be planned, and new hardware must be set up, updated, and generally maintained over time. Again, these tasks consume costs and time that service consumers can avoid completely.
Services can provide advantages in situations that require central compliance, reporting, and governance as well. For example, if users can access files only through a service application (which may limit functionality, according to policy), you gain a single point of control and a single place to restrict what users can do with those files.
As you’ve seen, software and services each have their advantages and disadvantages. Software installed on-premises may be a better fit for you or your organization depending on your level of trust or comfort with the technology or with the company providing the service, and also depending on your security needs and how tightly you need to manage your users’ computing environments.
For many businesses, the need to tightly manage their users’ desktops actually arises from the difficulty of maintaining those machines. It can be easier to lock them down than to have to patch, reinstall, upgrade, or troubleshoot them later. With services, businesses gain most of the functionality without all the setup and maintenance overhead. If you want to skip the hardware purchase, the scale-out, and the maintenance costs, and if you don’t mind not “owning” the software itself, and if you also want to avoid having to patch, upgrade, and troubleshoot software, services would be a great choice for you. Many companies find that the cost savings alone, just from not having to purchase and maintain hardware and software, make services much more cost-effective as well.
Ultimately, the best approach may be to have both—the power of software running locally while tightly integrated with cloud-based services in a hybrid approach. This is true in cases where you need extremely fast client-side software applications but where your files and environment can be stored or managed as a service. This is exactly the kind of offering that Office 365 provides. You’ll see more details about the hybrid approach later in this appendix.
Earlier in this appendix, you saw some examples of services (auctions, search, and so forth) that illustrate the basic concept of what a service is. You may feel as if you have been using services for many years already—and you would likely be right. If that’s the case, your reaction probably runs toward confusion or even disappointment over the buzz around services. After all, isn’t the whole concept simply renaming capabilities that have been around since the 1990s? The answer is “no”; services are not just a renaming of what has already been available.
Indeed, a fundamental shift is occurring around services, and the concept is extending far beyond the kinds of “Internet-based things” already in existence that were cited as examples earlier. The notion of services has expanded to encompass computing tasks that were traditionally performed on premises, such as building and maintaining traditional databases, monitoring machine performance, document management, or even using core productivity applications such as Office.
More complex examples include the following:
Databases, such as SQL Azure, which can host data for use by individuals or companies. These include complex systems for sales data, forecasting data, and so on, which can be made available from anywhere that has a connection. Traditional software programs can access the data, but the data itself is hosted as part of a service.
Monitoring programs, such as Windows Intune, that can monitor the health of various individual machines at a company. This is an example of a service that can monitor computers under users’ desks for malware like viruses, determine which programs have been installed, schedule updates, and so forth. Although the actual program that does the monitoring and aggregation of the data runs as a service, its useful task happens to be applied to a local computer. Microsoft provides such services as part of the Windows Azure wave of services.
The Office Web Applications hosted on www.skydrive.com or by www.hotmail.com . After all, what could be more “software” than Microsoft Office? If you attach an Excel document to an email, a recipient receiving the message can view it using “Excel” right inside their browser. Or they can go to SkyDrive and author a new Excel file. In other words, they get most of the advantages of Excel without having to actually install Excel on their computers. This is an example of a traditional productivity application offered as a service.
In general, offloading complex or intense computing tasks to an operating system or machine in the cloud. Many developers are now beginning to leverage the Windows Azure environment to perform complex computations and data storage in the cloud. So the program might run locally, but it can hand off some tasks to a service, such as scrubbing large amounts of data or performing intense computations.
Note
See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/evidence/ for more examples of the way many companies are leveraging the Windows Azure service.
In the future, we expect to see many more computing solutions performed as a service or in some combination of software (“on-premises”) and services in the cloud.
With the basic concepts of services explained, we’ll move on to consuming SharePoint as a service. The chapters in this book have generally assumed that you are either planning to install or have installed SharePoint on one or more machines at your home, small business, or company. But if you don’t “own” SharePoint or some of the other BI products—and don’t want to install it—there is another way to use SharePoint: as a service called SharePoint Online, which is part of the Office 365 offering.
Office 365 is Microsoft’s core offering of productivity services. It includes subscription-based services such as Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Pro Plus (the full desktop of Office 2010 served up as a download). Office 365 is a service in the cloud that provides thin applications (browser-based versions of popular Office applications) and other functionality that works seamlessly with software applications you have installed on your local computers. This means Office 365 allows you to:
Access your data, documents, contacts, email, and other solutions from any location and from many different devices.
Work using your existing software applications (Office, Outlook, Lync, and so on) in conjunction with the Office 365 online services. Many of these desktop applications have service-based companion versions, so if you have the client applications installed on your machine, you can choose which to use.
Leverage the power of SharePoint for features such as document management, dashboards, wikis, lists, content management sites, search, company portals, and collaborative sites to simplify working with colleagues and external partners.
You can subscribe to any of several different versions of Office 365. There is a version for small businesses, one for enterprises, and one for educational institutions. In addition, there is also a Kiosk Worker SKU, which is unique to the cloud-based service. This SKU is intended for businesses whose employees spend most of their time away from a computer or share a computer with others—often called “kiosk workers.” It may be important to the business to keep those employees connected even though they don’t spend much time working on a computer. To get a more in-depth overview, see the Microsoft Office 365 product page at http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx .
This book doesn’t cover all the Office 365 capabilities; it provides only a high-level overview with a focus on SharePoint. At the time of this writing, Office 365 was in the early stages of development, so some of the capabilities or user-interface features may have changed by the time you read this book.
To help you get started, the remaining sections of this appendix describe basic SharePoint and Office functionality and configuration.
You can now choose from two versions of Office—the Office Web Apps and the Office thick-client programs that you might already be using on your computer today. Both versions are useful in many different scenarios.
The Office Web Apps are particularly useful when individuals in your organization do not have an Office client at all. For those who do, the Office Web Apps are also useful as companion applications in scenarios where you are on the go and just need to read a document or maybe do some light editing, or maybe you need to work with documents on other machines or devices. In Office 365, the Office Web Apps are already configured and available. To use them, simply click the Office file you see in a SharePoint document library.
The thick-client applications are useful when you need the full power and functionality of the Office client. If you are doing more than lightweight editing or simple viewing, you will want to use the thick client because much of the more advanced functionality of Office is available only in the desktop version.
The key to being able to use your Office clients with Office 365 is to get them connected in a way that allows seamless operation with SharePoint Online. To do this, you must first download and install the Microsoft Online Services Connector. This helps you configure your Office client for proper authentication to enable you to directly save, open, and edit files stored in SharePoint Online.
Generally speaking, from the point of view of most users, most of SharePoint Online looks and behaves the same as if you were running SharePoint on-premises, providing sites, site collections, team sites, document libraries, lists, user permissions, and so on.
After you subscribe to Office 365, you can set up your tenancy—that is you can think of yourself as being a tenant in a larger system. There might be many users, companies, small businesses, and so on also using the service; in this case, you are one of many “tenants.” As an administrator (or tenant) for a service, you can configure many settings that control email, communications, management of users, sites, site collections, and so forth, for the end users in your organization. Most of the user interface elements are the same, so you don’t need much SharePoint Online-specific knowledge. That’s part of the beauty of services done well. Some of the key differences between using SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 and using SharePoint on-premises, which you have installed and configured, are discussed in the following sections.
This section looks at how factors such as hardware, configuration settings, and data connectivity are affected, depending on whether you choose online or on-premises versions of SharePoint.
Microsoft owns the hardware and servers that run Office 365 and SharePoint Online. You don’t need to worry about drivers, support, configuration, and so on for any hardware. The tradeoff is that because you don’t own the hardware, you can’t customize it to fit your specific needs. Generally, most users and organizations won’t see this as much of a tradeoff—in fact, this is probably a net benefit to anyone who has been through the process of buying and configuring a bunch of servers. Most users won’t even care about not owning the hardware, because they generally care only about using the software, which they can see. But for completeness, Office 365 users are using shared hardware resources managed by Microsoft at scale.
Even though the hardware is shared, the entire Office 365 ecosystem is designed with security in mind. The system contains multiple layers to ensure complete data isolation between different tenants—including both the physical security of the datacenters and the logical security built into the software.
Generally speaking, service administrators in Office 365 have fine-grained control over their tenancy in the SharePoint Online environment, but they don’t have control over settings that can globally affect the health of the service or machines the service is running on. Eliminating administrator access to such settings prevents one tenant from doing something that adversely affects other users of the service.
If you have adjusted the global settings of your SharePoint environment because you need them to be specific to the types of solutions your organization creates, it would be worth your time to contact Microsoft Support, or you can read the available documentation to see how well the various Office 365 services would work for you. The public service descriptions on the Microsoft Download Center, at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=207232 , are a good starting place for exploring the documentation.
You likely don’t need to worry about any configuration in SharePoint that you may have altered for hardware performance, security, or deployment reasons. All those settings have been taken care of for you and are appropriate for most users. But you may want to audit your Service Application settings, to determine exactly what you changed from the default values. As an example, one such setting in Excel Services is the Maximum Workbook Size. You may have changed this setting to support very large workbooks in your deployment. Such workbooks might not work on Office 365, because they’re dependent on the Maximum Workbook Size setting. In Office 365, the Maximum Workbook Size is considered a global setting for Excel Services because it can globally impact server resource usage. Therefore, you, as a tenant, can’t have direct control over it. This is only one example, but the concept applies to all global settings in SharePoint Online and Office 365.
Because this book is about BI, and a lot of BI revolves around data, it is worth a quick discussion about data connectivity in SharePoint Online within Office 365.
Most organizations have a SharePoint server behind a firewall, as well as a data source (such as Analysis Services) that is also behind a firewall on-premises. It is usually fairly straightforward to get data refresh working for applications such as Performance Point, Excel Services, or Visio Services. You simply set up the data refresh accounts on the server (see the Unattended Account referenced in Chapter 4), or you configure Kerberos between your machines. You make sure there is network access between your SharePoint server and your data source (if there are firewalls or other barriers in place). Then you simply have your users create their Excel workbooks as they normally would, and in most cases, when those files are loaded on SharePoint, the data can be refreshed. So a picture of a typical setup might look something like the following diagram.
The data refresh in the above scenario is possible because the back-end SharePoint machine can directly open a connection to the data source machine (assuming firewalls, and so on, are configured correctly).
However, this picture changes in the Office 365 world for the following reasons:
Your data source might still be required to live on-premises, behind your firewall.
The SharePoint machine is now in the cloud—so you can’t change the configuration on the physical SharePoint machines.
Kerberos configuration is not possible, because you don’t own either the domain or the physical machines.
You don’t control the network from end to end because you don’t own the SharePoint machines.
You can’t configure server accounts in Secure Store Service anymore because:
You don’t have access directly to the Secure Store Service.
You don’t know the domain that the SharePoint service is running on.
Depending on policy, tenants might not be allowed to store end user passwords in a service like Secure Store Service in Office 365.
You can’t configure server accounts such as the Unattended Service account (which depends on the Secure Store Service) for service applications like Visio Services and Excel Services.
So now the picture looks closer to something like the following illustration.
The factors listed above show that data connectivity available for service applications running on SharePoint Online within Office 365 is more limited than the data connectivity available to you in an on-premises version of SharePoint.
So what are the options for data connectivity for service applications like Excel and Visio? You can get connected to SQL data that uses a SQL user name and password. Excel gives you the option to save a SQL user name and password in the connection string (which is then saved in the file). In this case, when you open up your data source for read access over the network, Excel Services from Office 365 should be able to connect to it. Another option is to store even your SQL data in the cloud by using SQL Azure. You would connect to SQL Azure in the same way from a service application as you would using Excel Services in SharePoint. The downside of this is that the password is stored in the workbook file, which raises security concerns. So that scenario makes sense only when the file is tightly secured, the password used is a read-only account, and the data is not mission-critical or highly sensitive.
For data connections that connect to data stored in SharePoint Online, things should generally work without any major changes, but connectivity might be limited for data sources running on-premises.
For many, this is a small tradeoff when considered against the off-loaded expense of hosting SharePoint on-premises. Microsoft Office 365 can handle all of that for you. Also, because it is a live service, you get the newest software as soon as it is available, without having to go through a painful upgrade process. Also, Microsoft is working on data connectivity and other issues that don’t work seamlessly in Office 365. You can expect to see new features in the future that help address some of these issues, because Microsoft updates the live service continually.
Office 365 is a new offering from Microsoft, and the first version won’t support the full range of services in SharePoint 2010. At the time of this writing, neither PowerPivot nor PerformancePoint Services are supported in Office 365, but Visio Services and Excel Services are both supported (though with the limitations around data connectivity noted earlier in this appendix).
Because many of the BI products described in this book aren’t yet available in SharePoint Online in Office 365, and because the data connectivity story is still limited, Office 365 can’t yet be considered as a cloud-only BI solution. BI isn’t center stage for this service offering, at least not yet. While some simple reporting solutions built on Excel Services can work for some scenarios, many hallmark BI scenarios won’t. Because Office 365 is a live service and is just getting started, we have to watch for service updates over time. Office 365 will most likely add support for missing services and offer solutions to help better solve data connectivity issues, enabling a much stronger services-based BI story in the future.
Services in the cloud are all about someone else providing valuable computing resources and capabilities to you at a fraction of the cost of ownership of hosting comparable software on-premises. In the computing industry, a fundamental shift that revolves around services is well under way. Large companies, small businesses, and even single users are adopting services, reaping the benefits of simplicity—getting up and running without all the overhead from setup, upgrade, patching, troubleshooting, general maintenance, and without worrying about the cost of buying and maintaining hardware. Services are easy to adopt, always up to date, and easy to use from anywhere.
SharePoint, Office, Exchange, and more are being taken broadly into the world of services with the release of Office 365, which is Microsoft’s premier bundle of services for large, medium, small, and single-operator businesses, and for educational institutions.
Note
To learn more about SharePoint Online, visit http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint-online.aspx . To learn more about the Office 365 services, visit www.office365.com .