PowerPivotGeek

If running on Windows Server, make sure you have ‘Desktop Experience’ feature turned on

powerpivotgeek — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:30:43 +0000

Oh the joys of SharePoint again. I just responded to an internal posting where someone was raising the issue that “Path not found” errors were being reported when Excel Desktop tried to publish a workbook to SharePoint. Again, this isn’t PowerPivot directly, but it can be reported as a PowerPivot problem if the workbook contains PowerPivot data.

The issue is that on Windows Server machines (Window Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2), the ‘Desktop Experience’ feature contains a required component for Excel (or any application posting content to SharePoint).

Normally you don’t see this because on a Windows client machine (Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP), Desktop Experience is turned on by default – but not for Server OS’s. The underlying component at issue here is WebDAV. Excel desktop need it for the publishing process because they post content to SharePoint as if SharePoint was a remote file share. Thus if you are going to run Excel desktop on a Windows Server OS and publish content to SharePoint – then you need ‘Desktop Experience’ turned on.

Enjoy!

Using a SharePoint list as a data source

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:10:48 +0000

So . . . here I am playing around with PowerPivot to get ready for a demo. As this is a group from the SharePoint dev team (actually SharePoint Online), I wanted to include some cool SharePoint functionality into the demo. Trying to be cool and ‘wow’ them, I decide to use a SharePoint list as a data source. I want to show the data mashup capabilities of PowerPivot so I have the bulk of my demo come from the Contoso sample database (the three product catalog tables) and the 4 million row Sales Fact table.

I create my SP list by extracting the 11 distinct manufacturers – and I assign them to a ‘shipper’ that I made up.

When I go to SharePoint an click on:

PowerPivot comes up but it returns an error:

"For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document. To enable DTD processing set the ProhibitDtd property on XmlReaderSettings to false and pass the settings into XmlReader.Create method."

So it turns out that I forgot (it happens to the best of us) to install the ADO.NET Data Services 3.5 SP1, located here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3e102d74-37bf-4c1e-9da6-5175644fe22d

Which I would have known if I had taken my own advice and read BOL beforehand. Read the “New server” installation notes here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210708.aspx#nextsteps

So the moral of the story is: RTFM

After installing ADO.NET Data Services on my SharePoint site, I was able to bring up the data feed in PowerPivot – setup the relationship between the Manufacturer field in the SharePoint list and the Manufacturer field in the Contoso database and I was off and running . . . I also setup daily data refresh job . . . and I could see the Gallery snapshot changing as I entered new data into the SharePoint list . . WOW!

Enjoy!

Incoming emails to a PowerPivot Gallery

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:08:39 +0000

From time to time you run into something on SharePoint that is a known SharePoint ‘issue’, but you wouldn’t necessarily see PowerPivot being impacted. After all SharePoint is this huge juggernaut of a product and PowerPivot is just this one small little app in the corner. Well, here is one that I ran into today. We had a bug report that the incoming email setup for a PowerPivot Gallery was missing the ‘incoming emails’ link –> after some searching, I found this interesting posting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/malag/archive/2010/02/15/incoming-email-settings-link-disappears-from-document-library-settings.aspx

One of my customer had created a custom document library deriving from OOTB document library. They are able to create their document library from custom list definition properly without any issues. But when in the document library created using custom list definition, if you go to list settings page, it does not show "Incoming Email settings" link under "Communications" column. Incoming Email settings are setup properly and OOTB document library has got incoming email settings link and it is getting emails properly. Just libraries created from their custom list definition does not have Incoming Email settings link!

So what is causing the issue?
Digging into SharePoint, found that this is hard-coded and SharePoint will only show Incoming Email settings link for OOTB lists of type Announcements, Event, Document Library, Picture Library, XML Form, Discussion Board, Posts.

Now all is explained. Gallery derives from Document Library, but it is not Document Library. Remember, all things PowerPivot run through SharePoint!

Enjoy.

Installation error: Running the wrong version of SharePoint

powerpivotgeek — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:53:03 +0000

(Well, maybe you are – maybe you aren’t . . . How can you check directly?)

In an earlier post (http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/03/04/installing-the-right-version-of-sharepoint/) I spoke about the way that PowerPivot determines if you are on the right version of SharePoint. Cory Retherford reported some errors and after investigating it for a few days we found the solution.

Here is some more info:

The SQL setup rule checks for the guid of installed SharePoint. We have two guids that correspond to the SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition SKU. If the guid in the registry doesn’t match one of our guids and a farm is configured and the bits for SharePoint exists then the rule is triggered.

What is the value of the following registry key?

SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\InstalledProducts\{90140000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

The installed guids we are looking for is either one of these:

"D5595F62-449B-4061-B0B2-0CBAD410BB51"
"88BED06D-8C6B-4E62-AB01-546D6005FE97"

If your guids do not match these then we believe that the installation is not SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition and you see a validation error.

It turns out that in Cory’s case, there is an interesting SharePoint bug that you might run into. There was a bad early SharePoint Server 2010 FIS distribution made available for download, see KB2143810 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2143810), that impacted the guids installed on the system. Cory installed the right ‘version’ of SharePoint 2010, but not all of the features were activated and the wrong guid was being reported.

At least now, if you get a “wrong version of SharePoint installed” error, you have something to check.

Hope that helps.

Client: What happens if I install the wrong ‘bitness’?

powerpivotgeek — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:07:35 +0000

Recently ran into this situation: Customer installed the wrong PowerPivot bits on their machine. They were running on a 64-bit OS with Office 2010 x64, but installed PowerPivot for Excel 32-bit. Everything installed OK, but when they clicked on the PowerPivot tab in Excel; then the PowerPivot Window they received the following error:

Embedded Analysis Services Engine: Could not open embedded PowerPivot data
Click OK
Embedded Analysis Services Engine: Could not open embedded PowerPivot data
Unable to load the VertiPaq engine (HRESULT 0×0800A03EC)

Solution: Uninstalled PowerPivot for Excel and installed the x64 bit version of PowerPivot. Everything now works.

Modifying the SharePoint v4.master page for the PowerPivot Gallery

powerpivotgeek — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:06:37 +0000

Attempting to use a modified version of the SharePoint v4.master page is a great way to style our SharePoint site. If you interested in doing this, then the first thing to do is to make sure that you go to the right place:

Go to Site Settings -> Site Collection Features -> Make sure “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” is activated.
Go to Site Settings -> Manage Site Features -> Make sure “SharePoint Server Publishing” is activated.
Finally then on the Site settings page, you should get an entry for Master Page under the “Look and feel” section.

Modifying the master page works fine for the landing page, document libraries, calendar and other pages—but causes an error with the PowerPivot Gallery. The error is—“The referenced file ‘/_layouts/Gemini/ReportGalleryView.ascx’ is not allowed on this page." The problem is that the page cannot load because the control ReportGalleryView.ascx is not marked as a safe control. To mark report galllery view as a safe control the following like should be added to web.config on "SafeControls" (under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\/ section

Enjoy.

Uninstalling PowerPivot does what ?? Arg!!@@!!!

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:06:52 +0000

(With my thanks to Fernando Delgado, our excellent setup dev for working up this solution)

After uninstalling PowerPivot for SharePoint, Excel Services and other features in the PremiumSite feature will be disabled. At a certain level for “new server”, this makes sense since turning on and configuring of Excel Services et. al. was part of the “new server” installation. But for “existing farm”, this is a huge NO-NO and will cause considerable aggregation. Fortunately it is easy to fix. In order to re-enable the feature in all the sites in the Farm where it was previously enabled you just need to follow a simple set of steps. If there is a small number of sites, just re-enable them manually with the regular UI. If you would like an automated way, then the following step will scan through the SQL Server log file, pull out those sites that were disable and re-enable them (this is great if you have a large number of sites or if you don’t know which sites to enable manually).

Note: All these steps must be run as administrator

Go to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Sql Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Log\
Look for the directory with the modified date corresponding to your uninstall procedure. If no other SQL component else has been installed or you have not run repair, then this should be the directory with the latest date.
The directory names will be something like YearMonthDay_HourMinutesSeconds choose the newer one and navigate to that directory.
Copy Detail.txt to a known location like C:\LogFiles
Copy the file Post–KJUninstall.ps1 (see below) to the same location as the Detail.txt file
Start the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell as the Farm Administrator account.
From the shell run the following command (assuming both files are in C:\LogFiles): (as an administrator)

PS C:\LogFiles> C:\LogFiles\Post-KJUninstall.ps1 –UninstallLogFilePath C:\LogFiles\Detail.txt

That should reactivate the PremiumSite feature for all the sites where it was previously enabled.

File: Post-KJUninstall.ps1 :

Param($UninstallLogFilePath)
$file = $UninstallLogFilePath

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

$powerPivotFeatures = @("1a33a234-b4a4-4fc6-96c2-8bdb56388bd5", "e9c4784b-d453-46f5-8559-3c891d7159dd", "f8c51e81-0b46-4535-a3d5-244f63e1cab9")
$premiumSiteId = "8581a8a7-cf16-4770-ac54-260265ddb0b2"

#Remove PowerPivot features
foreach($featureId in $powerPivotFeatures)
{
    if(Get-SPFeature | where {$_.Id -eq $featureId})
    {
        Write-Host "Found feature $featureId"
        Uninstall-SPFeature -Id $featureId -force
    }
}

# Verify if the premium site feature was indeed removed
$premiumSiteFeature = Get-SPFeature | where {$_.Id -eq $premiumSiteId}
if($premiumSiteFeature -eq $null)
{
    # Re-install the feature
    Install-SPFeature -path PremiumSite
}

switch -regex -file $file
{
    "de-activating feature"    {
                    # This will return every entry in the file for feature deactivation
                    $Url = $_.Split() | ?{$_ -match "http://([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)([\.][[a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)*(\:[0-9]+)*(/\S*)?"}
                    #Remove the period at the end
                    $Url = $Url.Substring(0, $Url.Length – 1)
                    # Match the Guid for the feature
                    $Id = $_.Split() | ?{$_ -match "([0-9a-fA-F]){8}-([0-9a-fA-F]){4}-([0-9a-fA-F]){4}-([0-9a-fA-F]){4}-([0-9a-fA-F]){12}"}
                    if(!($powerPivotFeatures -contains $Id))
                    {
                        Write-Host "Re-activating feature $Id on site $Url"
                        Enable-SPFeature -Id $Id -Url $Url
                        trap
                            {
                                Write-Host "Could not Re-activate feature $Id on site $Url"
                                Write-Host $("Exception: "+ $_.Exception.Message);
                                continue
                            }
                    }

                    continue
                }
}

Installation failure: “Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.dll’ . . .

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:42:21 +0000

We’ve been hearing reports of this failure for several weeks, but we’ve not been able to get a good repro until a week ago. And it was the most “most reported bug” at TechEd — if there is such a category — but it looks like we have a solution after many hours of hard work.

(With my thanks to Fernando Delgado, our excellent setup dev for working up this solution)

(RTM build 10.5.1600.1) As a picture is worth a thousand words, here is the error:

This failure occurs when installing PowerPivot (either “existing farm” or “new server”) after a previous SSAS installation has been done on the machine.

Cause:

In SQL Server 2008 R2, the msmdsrv.exe process (which is the SSAS engine) includes a reference to the PowerPivot SharePoint integration dll (as do other components). Since the normal SSAS installation does not include the SharePoint integration dll, the registration marks the .NET assembly cache as failed. Later on, when you install PowerPivot, we copy the SharePoint integration dll to the right place, but the .NET assembly cache has already been marked failed from the previous SSAS installation and .NET does not attempt to load it (and you get the error message above).

Solution:

A. Best solution: If using “New Server” PowerPivot installation option then delay installing any instances besides SQL Server RDMBS until after you have PowerPivot installed and configured. That way you never hit this error condition. Doing a SQL Server RDBMS installation only for “existing farm” is OK – it is the installation of other non-RDBMS components that is the root cause of the issue.

B. If you have an RDBMS only instance(s) installed and are getting ready for a PowerPivot installation (“New Server” or “Existing Farm”): Save the following text to a file named setup100.exe.config (no .txt extension):

Save the following text to a file named setup100.exe.config (no .txt extension):

b. Copy the file to the folder: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\SQLServer2008R2\x64\ and install PowerPivot for SharePoint.

C. You have already installed PowerPivot and gotten the “Could not load file or assembly” error above, then:

Uninstall the PowerPivot instance of Analysis Services, this will also uninstall PowerPivot for SharePoint components.

Reboot the machine

Run scripts to re-enable PremiumSite feature. See http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/06/14/uninstalling-powerpivot-does-what-arg/

Reboot the machine

Copy the setup100.exe.config file, as outlined in (B) above, to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\SQLServer2008R2\x64

Install PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Changing service accounts and handling password resets

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:29:00 +0000

While this is technically a pure SharePoint posting, we have found it useful in our labs. We have password resets all of the time and this cheat sheet was developed to make it as painless as possible. I hope you find it as useful as we do.

Step 1: Start Services.msc

For each service using the machine account, update the password and start the service

Step 2: Start IIS Manager. Under Application Pools, select each of the app pools that use the account that you are changing:

Click Advanced Settings
Click Identity
Set the username and password
iisreset

Step 3: Start SharePoint Central Admin, click on Security

Select ‘Configure Managed Accounts’
Edit the account
Enter ‘Existing Password’

Step 4: If RS is installed, start ‘Reporting Services Configuration Manager’

Select ‘Database’
Select ‘Change Credentials’, click ‘Next’ to get to the Credentials page
Enter new password
Take the defaults of the rest of the pages and finish the wizard

And for more details, look in BOL under: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210642%28SQL.105%29.aspx

Updated: 21-Dec-2009 –> note that you also might have to update the PowerPivotUnattendedAccount if you have done a NEW FARM installation. In NEW FARM, we create this account in Secure Store and assign it the Farm administrator’s username and password. If that is the password that has changed, then you will likely also have to go into the PowerPivotUnattendedAccount application in Secure Store and enter a new password.

Updated: 14-Jun-2010 –> depending on your configuration you might also have to change the password for the SQL RDBMS, AS instances or auxiliary processes such as SQL Agent. (I just got burned on this today when I had a password change, ran through this list of items to update and forgot SQL Agent and the RDBMS).

Enjoy.

Why is allocation always selecting the same machine?

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:19:28 +0000

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 default) – This algorithm selects first one app server; then the next; then the next; until it loops back around. Since the actual marker for what is “the next” is kept in the proxy for the PowerPivot service application, the net-effect of this in practice is that the selection looks different from what you would expect. The behavior is a lot closer to random rather than sequential. Being random, and with a low number of servers to pick from (for example, 2), you should naturally expect that one app server might seem to be biased. Add more servers and you will see less bias.
Health-based – This is the one that most large shops will likely choose. The idea behind health-based is that the system will decide which is the ‘best’ app server for a machine. So when the allocation appears bias, it seems like health-based isn’t working. In reality, health-based may be doing exactly what was intended. If all machines have memory available (i.e. none of them are under memory pressure), then health-based uses CPU to break any ties, i.e. which ever CPU has the most CPU free wins. Let’s take an example:Suppose you have two machines “A” and “B”. Both are running PowerPivot. They both have 32GB on them with four quad-core processors. Rather than being dedicated to PowerPivot, “A” also doubles as the backend app server for Excel Services. Likewise, “B” doubles as the backend app server for PerformancePoint Services. So long as Excel Services and PerformancePoint consume similar CPU time, then databases will be loaded back and forth between “A” and “B” as one is more lightly loaded than the other. However, if PerformancePoint is lightly used and “B” is consistently less loaded (CPU-wise), then you will see PowerPivot databases being allocated to “B” until it becomes under memory pressure, and then allocation will shift to “A”.

All-in-all, health-based is still the best algorithm for large shops. Remember that the PowerPivot engine is an in-memory system. Our first goal is to get databases allocated wherever memory is available – balancing across the farm is not a priority.

Enjoy.