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SharePoint 2010 revised ULSViewer

From time to time I get questions from folks asking me “What is the best debugging tool for PowerPivot?” – The Answer is that there is clear cut favorite and it is EXTREMELY useful, but I didn’t know that it was released to the public. Well . . . after some investigation, it looks like [...]

What is a “snapshot” when you enable client-side tracing

In getting ready for a recent internal presentation on PowerPivot, I was asked what this button actually does . . . (see below)

The primary purpose for the settings page is to setup diagnostic tracing. The trace file itself is pretty straightforward, it is the regular SSAS tracing subsystem that we know and love . [...]

Why is allocation always selecting the same machine?

If you are running PowerPivot for SharePoint on more than one backend app server, then it is a common issue that folks are seeing only one server being used. It turns out that this might be ‘by-design’ so let’s talk about it for a bit. Let’s look at the two allocation methods we support:

Round-robin (the [...]

Querying data within the PowerPivot Excel client add-in

Recently we have been seeing some users complain about how the PowerPivot Excel client add-in deals with queries. There are three limitations that you need deal with when working with SQL (TSQL, PL/SQL, or whatever) and stored procedures:

The result set must have a name associated with each column. If you are not returning the column [...]

Why PowerPivot requires ‘classic-mode’ web applications

SharePoint 2010 has a new ‘claims-based’ authentication system that allows you to use federated identities with SharePoint. And there are certainly some customers that are excited to start playing around with this capability. That is neat and cool and all . . . but that isn’t the major reason why folks should be getting excited [...]

Giving remote users rights to log on to your domain controller

For all of you that are running a combined all-in-1 system, i.e. domain controller, SharePoint and all of PowerPivot (desktop + server), you will notice that if you are trying to debug with non-administrator accounts that you can no longer remote desktop on to your machine. This is because by default only administrators are allowed [...]

A new Diagnostic Guide posted in the Troubleshooting section

I just posted a new diagnostic guide in the troubleshooting section:

“Diagnostic Guide for Usage and the PowerPivot Management Dashboard” by Ankur Goyal
http://powerpivotgeek.com/troubleshooting/diagnostic-guide-for-usage-and-the-powerpivot-management-dashboard/

Enjoy!

_-_-_ Dave

How to start debugging a PowerPivot for SharePoint installation issue

A number of people have had issues with PowerPivot installation failures in CTP3. Hopefully, we have resolved all of these for RTM, but I can tell you that setup is still a bit tricky. To give you something of an understanding, the “New Farm” installation option is responsible for getting your machine up and running [...]

Could not load type ‘Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.ReportGalleryView’.

A number of people have hit this issue and so it deserves a quick walkthrough of why it (unfortunately) can happen and how you fix it.

The error occurs when you try to select a Document Library of type PowerPivot Gallery (sometimes referred to as Report Gallery). After installing Power Pivot for SharePoint, all new [...]

Why you shouldn’t stop / start Analysis Services from SCM when running in SharePoint Integration Mode

Hopefully this will be my first of many posts as I have been meaning to try and start doing memory dumps to this blog. Hopefully some of those memory dumps also made it into our docs … I tried.

So most people who are used to using Windows based services are used to using Service Control [...]