Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 38. Excel Services Configuration

Excel Services is a highly utilized feature when operating SharePoint Enterprise Edition. Deployment of this feature is straightforward, well documented on TechNet and rather uncomplicated. Instead of providing a series of additional screenshots that explain the deployment of Excel Services, we will focus on the following in this chapter:

• Understanding how Excel Services interacts with PowerPivot

• Excel Services and the Secure Store

  • What is the Secure Store Service?

  • Configuring the unattended service account for Excel Services

• Allowing cross-domain access

One of the keys to properly configuring Excel Services is to understand the data flow and where each component should live in a farm environment (Figure 38-1).

Excel web access, the Excel Web Services, and the PowerPivot Web Service will be installed and run on the Web Front End. The PowerPivot Web Service is a WCF service that handles the routing of requests from external data connections. There is no management or configuration available to be done to the PowerPivot Web Service, hence our leaving it out of the PowerPivot chapters above.

Figure 38-1. Excel Services data flow

Excel Services and the Secure Store

There are three primary methods of using Excel Services with the Secure Store Service:

Unattended Service Account

The unattended service account is an account that is used by Excel Services to provide ...