Excel Services in SharePoint 2007 and 2010

Over the past couple of weeks I have been helping colleges get their Excel Services working on both 2007 and 2010 so that they can create reports in Excel which source data from an Analysis Services instance on another server.

Given that these have been multiple server environments we have been configuring the dreaded Kerberos authentication to get over the double-hop issue.

What I’ve realised is that the steps required on SharePoint 2010 are pretty different to the steps required on MOSS 2007 – There are a few reasons for this, mainly that MOSS 2007 uses SSPs and SP2010 doesn’t and also because SP2010 uses claims authentication which requires the configuration of the C2WTS service (Claims To Windows Token Service).

More to come on this as and when I get the time however in the meantime here are some useful links if you’re troubleshooting…

SP2010 – http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/02/08/the-data-connection-uses-windows-authentication-and-user-credentials-could-not-be-delegated/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrasg/archive/2010/05/04/setting-up-sharepoint-2010-excel-services-to-get-external-data.aspx

There is also this document http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=196600 – Excel Services 2010 guide starting at Page 89.

Note – Read the document carefully! If you do everything it says you should be ok.  It’s easy to miss something so if you think you’ve done it all and it still isnt working review it again.  Something as simple as not adding a service account to the local administrators group can break the whole thing.

MOSS 2007 – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/martinkearn/archive/2007/04/27/configuring-kerberos-for-sharepoint-2007-part-2-excel-services-and-sql-analysis-services.aspx