Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure Vol 2 part 12 pps

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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-25
Preventing the Double-Hop Issue

Key Points
The double-hop issue is one that is a particular problem for BI implementations. It
occurs when users successfully present their credentials to SharePoint 2010, but
find that Internet Information Services (IIS) does not pass these credentials to the
BCS, so the call to the external data source fails. NT LAN Manager (NTLM)
authenticates only the client and not the server, so end users would not know
whether their credentials were passed to a valid service.
To avoid this scenario, you should plan to use the Secure Store Service to access
external data.

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11-26 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Lesson 3
Planning SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence
Solutions

The three core BI services for SharePoint 2010 are Excel Services,
PerformancePoint Services, and the Visio Graphics Service. As part of your design
for BI, you must understand how and when you should use each of these. You
must also understand the security architecture of each, so that you can maintain
security governance over business-critical information.
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
• Describe the key planning options for Excel Services.
• Describe how to plan Excel Services security.
• Explain the function and use of PowerPivot for SharePoint.
• Describe the key planning options for PerformancePoint Services.

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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-27
• Describe how to plan PerformancePoint Services security.
• Describe the key planning options for the Visio Graphics Service.


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11-28 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Planning for Excel Services

Key Points
Excel Services is a multifaceted service application. This means that there are
several components that integrate to deliver the Excel Services functionality. The
components are described in the following table.


Component Description
Excel Calculation Services The service that is responsible for loading Excel
workbooks from trusted file locations, executing any
workbook calculations, calling any user-defined
functions, and refreshing workbook references to
external data sources.
It also creates, maintains, and closes user sessions to
the service. You can configure it to cache open Excel
workbooks, calculations, and data query results for
improved performance.
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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-29
Component Description
Excel Web Services The developer interface to Excel Services. You can

create applications that call the service to perform
custom tasks on a workbook.
You can also use Excel Web Services to incorporate
server-based workbook logic into an application.
Excel Web Access The component of Excel Services that is visible to
information workers. This renders Excel workbook
information into a Web browser.

This division of functionality will affect the physical design of your Excel Services
implementation, because you will need to define the capabilities of both
application and Web Front End (WFE) servers. Excel Services provides all of the
visualization and computational analysis functionality that you usually expect to
deliver through a personal computer. Your SharePoint 2010 servers deliver these
loads, so you must be sure that you understand the loading effort that is involved.
To do this, you must review the number, size, and complexity of the workbooks
that you expect to manage in Excel Services. These are highly subjective metrics, so
it is important that you pilot any environment and assess the performance of Excel
Services for users.
Large and complex Excel workbooks are processor-intensive applications, so you
may find it fruitful to dedicate a server that has powerful processing capabilities as
a dedicated Excel Services server. This high processing requirement also makes it
preferable to dedicate a server to Excel Services, rather than share the hardware
platform with other service applications.
Identifying the Need for Excel Services
You must identify the reasons for including Excel Services in your design, and you
must base these reasons on business requirements.
You can regard Excel Services as the mass reporting version of Excel 2010. Excel
Services makes it simple to use, share, secure, and manage Excel 2010 workbooks
as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout the enterprise. Excel Services
is not a multiuser version of Excel 2010; users can interact with workbooks, but

they cannot create new ones in Excel Services. This is an important distinction and
may not be obvious to users. A key advantage is the ability to store a workbook in a
central location and make it available to many users.
You can also use Excel Services to create dashboards, which reflect current
workbook statistics or metrics directly to a user Web page.
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11-30 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Users often have complex business logic in Excel 2010 workbooks. In SharePoint
2010, you can access this business logic programmatically through a Web service–
based interface. Users would be unlikely to make such a request, so you need to
identify where key business logic is held. You may find that business analysts are
more attuned to this type of business solution.
Many users, particularly those in financial services, are comfortable with the
traditional spreadsheet reporting layout. You can use Excel Services to generate
reports to include BI information, or any other data that you use in Excel Services.

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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-31
Planning Excel Services Security

Key Points
Excel Services enables you to centrally manage not only workbooks, but also the
resources and connections to corporate data that a workbook may contain.
Access Components
The access components include:
• Trusted file locations. Trusted file locations may be:
• SharePoint document libraries.
• Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths.
• HTTP Web sites.
These locations must be explicitly trusted before Excel Services can access

them, because it can only open workbooks in trusted file locations.
• Trusted data providers. Trusted data providers are external databases that you
define as trusted in Excel Services. The service application will only process
data connections to a trusted data provider.
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11-32 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
• Trusted data connection libraries. Trusted data connection libraries are
SharePoint document libraries that contain ODC files. You can plan to
centrally store these files, which you may also use for Visio Graphics Service.
You must store the ODC files in a data connection library, which must then be
trusted by Excel Services.

Authentication
Excel Services supports three authentication methods:
• Integrated Windows authentication. Integrated Windows authentication, or
NTLM, is now used exclusively for IIS Authentication Settings in SharePoint
Server 2010. If you choose to use NTLM, you should also use Kerberos for
added security and as an option to circumnavigate the double-hop issue.
However, you are more likely to use claims-based authentication, because all
Excel Services scenarios use claims.
• Secure Store Service authentication. This supports individual or group
credentials mapping. You may use individual credentials for usage monitoring,
but it is more common to use group mapping.
• None (unattended service account). Excel Services tries to use inbound
connection strings to connect to the database that is specified in the string.
The connection strings are passed to the database provider. If the connection
string contains a user name and password, and if the database authorizes
access, the connection is established by using the security context of the
authorized user account.

Server Communications
You should make every effort to use claims-based authentication because it
improves security and authentication when you deploy farms, Office Business
Applications (OBAs), and SharePoint services in different environments. Excel
Services can use claims-based authentication for all deployment scenarios, whether
they occur in a single server or multiple server farm.
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Planning a SharePoint 2010 Implementation of a Business Intelligence Strategy 11-33
Planning for PowerPivot

Key Points
PowerPivot for SharePoint adds analysis services to SharePoint so that it can host
and process workbooks that you create by using the PowerPivot for Excel add-in.
Architecture Components
When you install the PowerPivot for SharePoint add-in in a SharePoint farm, the
following components are installed:
• PowerPivot System Service and SQL Server Analysis Services service. These services
manage the data in PowerPivot Excel workbooks and handle data queries. The
services run on an application server.
• PowerPivot Web Service. This service routes requests for workbooks in
PowerPivot Excel to PowerPivot application servers. This service runs on a
WFE server.
• PowerPivot service application. This is a SharePoint 2010 service application,
which defines an endpoint for the PowerPivot System Service and enables
centralized security for all instances of the PowerPivot System Service.
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11-34 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
• PowerPivot application database. This is the service application database, which
stores PowerPivot metadata.
• PowerPivot content and libraries. This includes the PowerPivot gallery, which

provides previews of workbooks in PowerPivot and reports in SQL Server
Reporting Services.

You can install PowerPivot for SharePoint on any application server, but you
should pilot the service against your existing PowerPivot Excel workbooks to
monitor and assess loading on server processor and memory. PowerPivot can be a
heavy user of both resources because it offers in-memory server-side processing of
workbooks.
Environment Planning
Your environment planning should reflect pilot and test deployments for
PowerPivot for SharePoint. The three key areas are:
• Storage. All PowerPivot content is stored in SharePoint 2010 databases. Service
application metadata is stored in the instance service application database.
• Networking. Data transfer speed can be an issue for PowerPivot query
processing. Very large workbooks of 1 GB can take over 10 seconds to load
over a 100-Mbps network. This time may be even longer during a save action
because SharePoint is optimized for download. PowerPivot servers use a file-
caching methodology to reduce file reloads.
• Processor and memory. You should plan for high-performance services for
PowerPivot because of the long-running queries that are characteristic of
PowerPivot processing. The minimum specification should include a 64-bit,
dual-core processor and 8 GB of RAM.

Using PowerPivot for SharePoint
PowerPivot is a powerful BI extension for Excel 2010 and Excel Services. A
resource as important as this should be widely available for use across an
organization. If you have requirements for this sort of fast analysis, you should
consider the centralization of business resources with PowerPivot for SharePoint.
However, if you have few users, you may decide to localize resources.
PowerPivot provides extensive analysis services. If you have strong business

requirements for Excel analysis, you should investigate the options of working
with PowerPivot.