Excel Services introduces many new features for the IT professional user. Several of these new features originate in SharePoint Server but directly affect all of the shared services. New shared features and the exclusive features that are added when you deploy Excel Services are discussed in this section.

• Unattended Service Account   Excel Services provides a low privilege unattended service account for customers to use as a single “get data” type of account. Customers can use this as a privileged account in Microsoft Office 2010. Excel Services relies on the Secure Store Service to store the encrypted unattended account. The unattended account credentials are stored or cached as needed per session or connection so that when a workbook is loaded that contains a data connection for the unattended account this account is called from the Secure Store and used. The Secure Store stores the Excel Services secured data and is present on all SharePoint Server farms. The Secure Store functions regardless of how authentication is configured in a farm.

   

• Manage Service Applications   The SharePoint Central Administration Web site contains a link to the Manage Service Applications page, which lists all of the services the user has rights to administer. Essentially, all available services for a particular user or role are collected on the Manage Service Applications page. Each service has its own administration page, for instance Manage Excel Services.

   

• Windows PowerShell   Windows PowerShell is capable of a complete Excel Services deployment, as well as the unattended installation and deployment of SharePoint Server Technical Preview. Administrators who need to look up Trusted Locations and user-defined functions are now able to do this by using a single Windows PowerShell key. All Stsadm commands used against Excel Services–specific settings will fail; instead use the SPServiceApplication Windows PowerShell command.

   

• Trusted Locations   Trusted locations are now provided by default; no administrator action typically is needed. However, if Universal Naming Convention (UNC) types of trusted folders or locations are used with Excel Services, the administrator must create new trusted locations for these.

   

• Multi-user Collaboration   Multi-user collaborative environment provides multiple users with the ability to edit any workbook simultaneously. (When user is active, the polling rate is determined by an adaptive algorithm executed on the ECS. All edits are processed in the order in which they are received by the ECS so the last edit overwrites any previous edit to the same workbook cell.)

   

• Delegate Services Permissions   SharePoint Server contains a new shared service infrastructure that allows the central administrator to delegate permissions to manage other services to users.

   

• Slicer feature   The Slicer feature is a new type of data filter in Microsoft Excel 2010 that is interactive, flexible in design and layout, and always conveys the current filtering state. With these data filters more people benefit from the power of analyzing data using PivotTables and OLAP Functions. The Slicer feature gives Excel 2010 authors the ability to easily write OLAP data models and build rich, interactive reports around them. The reports can then be published to Excel Services and will display and interact just like they do in the Excel client. The Slicer feature also is parameterized by other Web Parts in BI dashboards.

  The Slicer feature does manual filtering only and does not provide advanced filtering such as label, date, value, and top-10 types of filtering. The Slicer feature can be connected to multiple PivotTables and act as a common, shared filter so selections made in this Slicer feature are automatically propagated to all PivotTables that are connected to it. Additionally, the Slicer feature can be formatted by applying styles.

   

New Excel Services custom applications