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Some further thoughts from Microsoft
Danny Khen, Program Manager, Excel Services Development Team, Microsoft
- What areas of the Excel Services have received the most positive feedback?
- The manageability and security aspect (being able to have IT control over spreadsheets in SharePoint; controlled access to spreadsheets) are by far the most popular. Being able to use the web service to integrate Excel models into applications also resonates very well.
- Which received the most negative? (or maybe what were you disappointed to leave out this time round)
Some people are disappointed by the lack of support to the entire range of existing spreadsheets. Some would want more interactivity and authoring capabilities. Some mention the lack of shared multi-user collaborative sessions. And developers are disappointed by the lack of support to Excel’s existing extensibility models.
For us, most of those were really just things we did not get to this time and unfortunately had to leave out. An exception to this is Excel extensibility. We really believe that it is not the right way to go, to deploy native code on a server environment. We want to provide a cross client/server managed extensibility framework at some point. I don’t think we will go in the direction of directly supporting XLLs, for example. The security and manageability aspects of those in a server environment do not make sense to us. We want to believe that, while some XLL-based solutions will still be deployed to the server by employing managed wrappers as can be done right now, developers will gradually migrate those solutions to pure managed code if and when we give them this better option.
- How do you see Excel Services fitting with the emerging market of "Spreadsheet Data Management" (see www.clusterseven.com) - given a lot of the features you already offer then Excel Services is surely going to make a big impact on this market?
- Yes, we think that Excel Services as it is can already be used to some extent in the context of spreadsheet data management. Solutions such as ClusterSeven do things beyond what can be done with Excel Services right now, since they look inside the workbook in a very granular way. Still, even for such environments, the ability to store the final approved workbook in SharePoint and share it with the rest of the organization through Excel Services is a big advantage, since it reduces the amount of private Excel islands in the organization. We hope that Excel Services will start playing a role in this market.
Danny Khen, Program Manager, Excel Services Development Team, Microsoft