PowerPivot security model is flawed!

Question

I finally got the PowerPivot environment to work. None of the documentation and blogs of PowerPivot never say that PowerPivot cannot work on SP without Secure Store service app being configured correctly.

You cannot refresh your data, use slicers or have data update schedule unless the data source is configured to use a secure store app.

But there is a big flaw.

You see that only the farm admin can go and create a new secure store app. Now if I manage a sharepoint farm for several 10000 users and I do a BI for masses by enabling PowerPivot on each site collection.... then people would innundate me with requests to create secure store apps.

This is a flaw because it kills the time of the farm admin. For me its better that I disable the powerpivot service altogether rather than create several 1000 secure store apps (and manage them).

If PowerPivot has to survive.... then it should allow site collection admins to create their own secure store apps.... rather than creating them via central admin. the central admin guy has many other things to do ... rather than answer to adhoc calls to create secure store apps.

 

 

 

 

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MSDNStudent Knows not much!

Answer 1

Hi,

I think this is the question about how to manage these 1000 users to access your site rather than creating 1000 secure store apps, you just need to create one secure store app, then create one unattended account.

If I misunderstand you, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks,
Challen Fu

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Answer 2

quite simply put... if powerpivot is really "personal bi" then the automatic refresh of connections should be configurable by self or by site admin. Why to bring in central admin into the picture?

In my testing i have found that pp slicer and data refresh will not work untill and unless the data source uses secure store which can only be created by central admin.

Clearly this is a product bug because central admin cannot create secure stores for each and every project/team/person requirement.

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MSDNStudent Knows not much!

Answer 3

If you have feedback to the product, you can submit a feedback to Microsoft Connect at this link at this link https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/Feedback This connect site is a connection point between you and Microsoft. Your feedback enables Microsoft to make software and services the best that they can be, Microsoft might consider to add this feature in the following release after official confirmation.

Regards,
Challen Fu

 

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Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.