SharePoint Use Cases

While working with a client yesterday we noticed users could not view Excel files in browser. A quick analysis of ULS logs revealed the following issue: There was an error in communicating with Excel Calculation Services http://server_name:port/2a7905259ea644f3a2d8ebd2bcf1ee9f/ExcelService*.asmx exception: An error has occurred. ServerSession.GetNextServerHealthBased: There are no healthy servers although the number of available server in the farm [...]

Paul Grenier is witting an impressive series on EndUserSharePoint.com on how to use JQuery to improve SharePoint look’n’feel. Few weeks ago I emailed him with a challenge: “…create a script to resize EWA [Excel Web Access] web part automatically to match content inside.”. Excel Web Access web parts are great, but if you are using [...]

I had a lot of trouble with Excel Services. I wanted my Excel file to refresh data from SQL database. However, the following error appeared constantly: Unable to retrieve external data for the following connections: Connection_Name The data sources may be unreachable, may not be responding, or may have denied you access. Verify that data [...]

Last week I was busy setting up BDC, Search and Excel services for my company intranet site. I will be posting a series of posts on these topics but today I will put a few notes on SSO. You will definitely need SSO for BDC and BDC Search; for Excel services there are some workarounds. [...]

As a follow up to my previous post, I would like to refer you to a very nice blog about technical details and usage scenarios of excel services. This post very vividly explains the difference between ”Open in Excel“ and ”Open Snapshot“ features of Excel Services.

When I first saw Excel Web Access (the ability to convert Excel documents to web pages on Sharepoint 2007) I was very exciting. However when I realized that one cannot edit a spreadsheet from a browser, I was rather disappointing. So are these files read-only or not? Well, the truth lies somewhere in-between. You cannot [...]