PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 - The Business User’s Perspective

This article continues the series on PowerPivot that started with an overview as well as an introduction to PowerPivot for Excel 2010. We’ll now focus on the support PowerPivot provides for collaboration.

Frequently, business users need to share applications they create on their desktops with a workgroup. As it turns out, SharePoint provides a great platform that is critical for realizing the overarching goal of extending business intelligence technology to an organization:

• Great feature set for collaboration: Given that PowerPivot data is stored within an Excel workbook, whatever support SharePoint provides for sharing documents – versioning, workflow, easier security management, the flexibility of creating sites, sub sites or document libraries, customization of portals, etc. – is automatically available to PowerPivot users.
• Increasing pervasiveness: As SharePoint is deployed in more organizations, business users and IT are becoming more familiar with the tool as well as best practices on how to use it. PowerPivot will extend those tools, processes and learnings instead of replacing them.
• Centralized resources: Business users can depend on an infrastructure that’s around, where they can schedule heavy lifting to happen, where they don’t have to worry about backups or management of servers. The separation of duties that SharePoint enables – IT focuses on infrastructure & compliance, while business users focus on the content – is perfect for enabling managed Self Service Business Intelligence.

Let’s take a quick stroll through a few of the features that PowerPivot for SharePoint enables for business users.

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