SharePoint 2013 and SQL Powered BI

I know i have been AWOL now for some time… i have been heavily focused on bringing up Sharepoint 2013…and also empowering it with SQL 2012. And, actually there’s even more to it than that. One of the benefits of 2013 is that Microsoft has extended the value proposition by enabling the creation of a public site w/o real cost. Not only that…Microsoft says that you can access your SSAS components from that public site. Ok…think about that. That’s really big! That’s what we collectively thought as well.

HOWEVER, there are some caveats. Actually there are quite a few caveats that you can easily stumble into. Going forward, i expect to blog about these as we find them.

The first I’m going to mention has to do with Anonymous access to an excel file. It turns out that while other users aren’t limited (so far as I know today), Anonymous user can’t browse excel files greater than 10 MB! So, for context, we had built a PowerPivot based excel with some 180 MB of data. We published it to the sharepoint 2013 site. We went to the site ourselves (ie. IE knew our identity and passed it to SharePoint. Sharepoint showed us the file in a browser. Yeay! Success!

Hold your horses…check with anonymous! We anonymously logged in to the sharepoint public site, navigate to the Excel file, attempt to open, and ERROR! Arghh! Why would Microsoft do this? Well, it’s money, of course!

See here for more Microsoftian data:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/file-size-limits-for-workbooks-in-sharepoint-online-HA104099212.aspx

 

More to follow!