C H A P T E R  6

Installing PowerPivot for SharePoint

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

—Thomas A. Edison

After reading the preceding chapters, you should have a solid understanding of how PowerPivot for Excel can be used to author Business Intelligence solutions. To this point, all that is needed to utilize PowerPivot features was Microsoft Excel 2010 (32- or 64-bit) and the free PowerPivot add-in. With these tools, you can gather data from disparate, related systems, and generate compelling analysis of the data. Because the unit of work is a single Excel workbook (.xlsx) file, your work can be shared with others via e-mail, flash drive, or other transportation methods. The SSAS in-memory runtime will compress some datasets to create a portable file size.

Eventually, however, a dataset will result in an Excel file that is too unwieldy for transport via e-mail and flash drive. Consumers of your PowerPivot analytics may not actually need all of the data moved to their workstation, but would be completely satisfied with a method by which to view the solution in a browser. With large datasets, data refresh times may expand to a level at which a batch process could be employed to move new data into the PowerPivot solution. Finally, with the increased ability to create and publish PowerPivot solutions, information workers will require a set of features to index, find, and version control PowerPivot solutions.

PowerPivot for SharePoint addresses all of these needs, providing a repository for storing, securing, and sharing PowerPivot solutions. SharePoint Server is the third product comprising Microsoft's Business Intelligence platform. Combined with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Office Professional Plus, PowerPivot for Excel users can enjoy new data sources with which solutions can be constructed as well as new ways to utilize and share their PowerPivot development.