Using PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 190

Scheduled, automatic report refresh You can configure the workbooks to be automati-
cally refreshed periodically without human intervention.

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Transparency for IT After the workbook is published to a SharePoint location, everything
happens within the realm of IT. IT is able to set the security of the workbooks through Share-
Point, learn which data sources are being used by the PowerPivot workbooks, and learn what
workbooks are actually being used and by whom. The list goes on and on.

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In a few words, PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 is the integration of the Microsoft SQL Server
Analysis Services 2012 SP1 engine with SharePoint 2013. With PowerPivot for SharePoint, the user can
securely share, manage, and refresh the workbooks, and IT can securely manage and learn about the
workbook's usage.

A brief history

The genesis of PowerPivot derived from two Microsoft internal papers. The first paper was about
the concept of a BI sandbox , which would be a product that would make the creation of BI applica-
tions much easier and in a controlled environment that would include relational databases, multidi-
mensional databases, and a reporting tool. As this first paper gradually shaped PowerPivot from the
concept to the product, many of the original ideas changed (originally, Microsoft Access was the client
application, not Excel), but many that remained are the soul of PowerPivot.

The second paper was about an in-memory BI engine. The business idea was to take advantage of
the market trends in computer hardware (such as decreasing RAM prices, and the increased adop-
tion of multicore processors) that would make an in-memory engine feasible. The in-memory engine
described in the second paper would make some of the ideas in the first paper possible.

Both papers were accepted, and a small incubation team was created to explore the concepts fur-
ther. This incubation team existed during the SQL Server 2008 R2 development wave, writing speci-
fications, plans, code, and tests under the codename Gemini for what is now PowerPivot. PowerPivot
for Excel 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint were released in May, 2010 as part of Microsoft SQL
Server 2008 R2.

In the latest release, PowerPivot and Microsoft Office have been drawn into an even closer rela-
tionship. As discussed in Chapter 4, “Using PowerPivot in Excel 2013,” and Chapter 6, “Business intel-
ligence with Excel Services 2013,” PowerPivot and Office are much more integrated. In PowerPivot for
SharePoint 2013, there isn't much new exposed functionality, but it was completely redesigned under
the hood to make it more reliable and scalable.