Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 32

PowerPivot for SharePoint PowerPivot for SharePoint is a feature of Excel Services that executes
queries and renders PowerPivot in Excel workbooks on demand in a browser. It requires you to install
Analysis Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode and register the Analysis Services server in the Excel
Services service application. You can also install the PowerPivot for SharePoint Add-in to include the
following features: scheduled data refresh, PowerPivot Gallery, Management Dashboard, and the
BISM file content type. PowerPivot for SharePoint provides a link between self-service BI and team BI.
Business users—usually power analysts—can publish their PowerPivot in Excel workbooks to
SharePoint either in a standard document library or in a specialized document library that displays
thumbnail images of workbooks by which users can find the workbook they want without first open-
ing it. Just as with Excel workbooks, administrators and workbook owners can control access and
restrict users to online viewing only, thereby protecting the data contained in the workbook.
Beyond making it possible to share information with other team members and supporting con-
current access in a scalable environment, PowerPivot for SharePoint has several other benefits for
business users. PowerPivot workbooks do not maintain live connections to the data sources, so a
periodic refresh is necessary to keep the information as current as possible. PowerPivot for SharePoint
can manage the data refresh process on a schedule and send out notifications if a problem occurs. In
addition, PowerPivot for SharePoint can become a data source for another PowerPivot workbook, a
Reporting Services report, and any other tool that can use Analysis Services as a data source.
PowerPivot for SharePoint has features for IT professionals, as well. Often, any information that
is managed by users rather than IT can go undetected. A user might create a report to answer a
one-time question, and then under certain circumstances, the report suddenly can become a mission-
critical application that IT knows nothing about. PowerPivot in Excel gives users the freedom to
compile information as they see it, while publishing the results to SharePoint gives IT the ability to
use management features in PowerPivot for SharePoint to maintain some oversight over the users'
activities. IT can see what data sources are being used, which workbooks are popular, and how many
server resources are necessary to render a report for the team community. When appropriate, IT can
recommend that a proper BI solution take the place of a PowerPivot workbook.
Excel Services Excel Services can be just as important to a team BI community as it is to an orga-
nizational community, if not more so. To support this community and encourage power users to
develop content, IT can supply a set of data source connection files in a data connections library.
Power users can then create workbooks, with or without PowerPivot models and Power View sheets,
and publish them to a SharePoint document library. Business users are able to view and interact with
Excel workbooks, PowerPivot's pivot tables and charts, and Power View sheets in Excel Services.
Reporting Services As with Excel Services, a good strategy for IT (or power analysts) to adopt in
support of team BI is to create and publish reusable content that users can access for team content
development. In the case of Reporting Services, three types of content support this strategy: shared
data sources, shared datasets, and report parts.