TechnologyExcel Services
Excel Services is a Microsoft Office SharePoint technology that makes it simple to use, share, secure, and manage Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbooks (.xslx, .xslb) as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout the enterprise.
Excel Services extends the capabilities of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 by enabling the broad sharing of workbooks, improved manageability and security, and the ability to reuse workbook models through a scalable server-based calculation service and interactive Web-based user interface (UI).
Excel Services provides both a Web-based UI for browser-based access and a Web service API for programmatic access that have options for controlling what data is available to users and applications.
As part of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Excel Services also takes advantage of the other capabilities of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, including enterprise content management features such as checking out, checking in, auditing, and versioning capabilities.
Benefits Of Excel Services
Excel Services enables businesses to securely share workbooks across an enterprise. You can now make workbooks available through a browser with far greater control and manageability than has previously been possible.
From a compliance perspective Excel Services enables organisations to gain greater control over the proliferation of spreadsheets and to better protect corporate intellectual assets.
This server-based model complements the rich Excel 2007 client, enabling the following benefits to the enterprise:
- More secure sharing of workbooks. Workbook authors can share workbooks without exposing any underlying proprietary business logic, and they can prevent others from editing workbooks.
- Business intelligence. Workbooks that are connected to enterprise data sources can be published to the server and used in business intelligence dashboards and scorecards. Users can interact with the workbooks in the browser to explore the data.
- Extensibility. Reusable logic that is contained in workbooks and user-defined functions is available for developers to implement in server-based applications.
- Reliability and availability. There are significant benefits to running calculations on servers instead of on client computers. Offloading calculations to servers frees users' computers and takes advantage of the server's additional computing power for long-running calculations. Calculating on a server provides the high reliability and availability of redundant, enterprise-class systems and dramatically reduces risks that are associated with system failure.
- Protection of corporate intellectual assets. Many End User Computing (“EUC”) spreadsheet-based systems contain proprietary information, methods, models or code which organisations would prefer not to distribute. It is all too easy with desktop spreadsheets for this information to leak out. By embedding these models and code into a server-side solution then you can control who has access to the proprietary information and prevent distribution to unauthorised parties.
This server-side solution enables more secure data sharing and logic reuse across the enterprise, providing a single, centrally managed version of workbook data for a "single version of the truth."
Kynetix and Excel Services
Kynetix are the UK's leading experts in the use of Excel Services. We were the first company in the world to deploy a major business application using Excel Services.
We have been asked by Microsoft representatives around the world to demo this application to their people so that they can see how Excel Services is being used in the real world.
This application is used by a major Hedge Fund organisation to calculate and analyse risk models and it makes significant use of Excel Services to do complex calculations and to display the resulting charts and graphs. It also interfaces to enterprise applications using web services.
Find out how we can help you.
If you want to take greater control of your spreadsheets or you are seeking to build highly performant applications using Excel then please call us on 020 7836 1800 or email us at info@kynetix.com