Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure Vol 2 part 12 pps

MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED 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. . Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 20 10 Infrastructure • PowerPivot application database. This is the service application database, which stores PowerPivot metadata. • PowerPivot content and. for SharePoint. The three key areas are: • Storage. All PowerPivot content is stored in SharePoint 20 10 databases. Service application metadata is stored in the instance service application database PROHIBITED 11-30 Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 20 10 Infrastructure Users often have complex business logic in Excel 20 10 workbooks. In SharePoint 20 10, you can access this business logic programmatically