Excel Services Architecture

Excel Services offers new alternatives for publishing and analyzing corporate data in spreadsheets.

Excel Services, a spreadsheet server that ships with SharePoint Server 2007, supports a thin-client architecture for analyzing corporate data (top). Excel Services consists of three components: a calculation engine that loads and calculates Excel files stored in SharePoint document libraries or file shares; a Web Part called Excel Web Access that delivers results of calculated Excel workbooks to interactive users via a browser; and a Web services API that can deliver results to other applications (e.g., a portal page or a custom forecasting application) via XML delivered over Web services protocols.

Illustrated in the lower left, the Excel 2007 client application is the primary tool for publishing Excel files to Excel Services and specifying how users will be able to work with those files. A menu gives publishers the option of saving (or publishing) an Excel file in a SharePoint Server 2007 document library. Once published, Excel Services makes the file accessible to browser users and external applications via the Web services API.