SharePoint Excel services – a primerSeptember 14th, 2009
Excel Services is part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Excel Services is built on ASP.NET and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technologies. There are three core Excel Services components:
- Excel Web Access
- Excel Web Services
- Excel Calculation Services
Excel Services handles communication among the three components and load-balances the requests made to Excel Calculation Services.
The Excel Web Access, Excel Services, and Excel Calculation Services components can be divided into two major groups: the components on a front-end server (also known as the “Web front end”), and the component on a back-end application server.
Excel Web Access
Excel Web Access is an Excel Services Web Part in Office SharePoint Server 2007 that renders Excel workbooks on a Web page, and allows the user to interact with those workbooks and explore them. Excel Web Access does not require anything to be installed on the user’s client computer.
Excel Web Services
Excel Web Services is the Excel Services component that provides programmatic access to its Web service. Applications that call Excel Web Services to calculate, set, and extract values from workbooks, as well as refresh external data connections.
Excel Calculation Services
The role of Excel Calculation Services is to load workbooks, calculate them, call custom code (user-defined functions) and refresh external data. It also maintains the session state for interactivity. Excel Calculation Services maintains a session for the duration of interactions with the same workbook by a user or caller.
Business data integration with Excel Services
Seamlessly integrate external data into your applications using the Business Data Catalog (BDC), part of Office SharePoint Server 2007. The BDC simplifies the process of discovering and accessing data residing within back-end line-of-business applications. Discover back-end data quickly using SharePoint search and interact with data through a set of Business Data Web Parts.
With the BDC, you can: Search your business data as easily as you search your other content repositories. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an integrated, Enterprise Search experience across your enterprise data ranging from file shares, Web sites, Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Notes and line-of-business applications.
