The project I'm attached to has in its list of technical requirements the installation of Excel Web App (EWA) along with PI DataLink Server (DLS). It is not clear what the customer intends on doing with it, but my guess is that it will be used to show PI data to end users using a web-based interface.
The DLS manual describes four user roles, two of which are directly related to Excel: a publisher and a reader. This pretty much resumes what it is designed for: some people, who are PI experts, develop and publish workbooks using a real Excel with PI DataLink, while common end users read them, using a browser. This apparently read-only nature of DataLink Server (which I need to confirm) is an important one, as from my understanding, it is positioned to be a simple web reporting platform.
I've recently had some time to experiment with these web features to try to predict what the developers will end up doing in the long run. I also had the hope of leaving the marketing pitch to marketers and finding what were the real advantages of going in that direction instead of sticking with a deployment based on the standalone Excel application.
I'm not an Excel whiz kid, and I'm even less a SharePoint expert. That being said, after a few mishaps, I've managed to make a proof of concept with DLS and EWA using the most dummy report I could build with my limited knowledge of PI:
The wedding cake dilemma
I'm glad to announce PI Datalink Server works as designed within the Excel Web App. However, when playing with it, I couldn't stop thinking about a three-layer wedding cake. Why? Because you see, pitting EWA against standalone Excel is like comparing that wedding cake to a slab of brownies. Both will easily feed dozens of people, but the wedding cake will take longer to assemble, be more expensive, and each layer will need to be supported by the one underneath (I also think the brownies will be tastier, but that is beyond the scope of this article).
I had no doubt that the combination of the three layers consisting of DataLink Server, Office Web Apps and SharePoint involved lots of other subsystems too. This presentation done by Microsoft last year confirmed my suspicions. IT Operations would have a hard time supporting all that if the dependency hell between all those subsystems ever hit the fan. Understandably, as a systems architect, I wasn't very comfortable in greenlighting the use of DataLink Server at first glance. Is it safe to assume that if an architecture is made like a wedding cake, it better offer something big in return or else it's not worth it?
I think that in that particular case, it will be worth it if your experts use PI DataLink a lot and they need to deploy ad hoc reports quickly to a controlled (i.e. not massive), read-only audience.
Using EWA and DLS for ad hoc reporting
The ugly sample report pictured above is what I would call an ad hoc report: It's a quickie, made in a hurry to fulfill an unexpected business need. These can be done in a matter of minutes and published as a web spreadsheet to be consumed by users who have no technical knowledge of PI. There is no need for these users to have Excel on their client, as everything runs in a stripped-down version of Excel straight in the browser. This could prove extremely useful when dealing with mobile devices in the future as I don't expect Excel and DataLink to be running on the iPad anytime soon.
Furthermore, since you don't have a bunch of standalone Excels running around in the wild, you don't have to:
- Ensure all users have the correct Excel version;
- Install PI Datalink on each of these Excels and maintain this installed base which can be substantial;
- Deal with the security hassles of opening up network access to the PI infrastructure to every laptop in your WAN (you only need to open it to the server running DLS).
Preventing ad hoc report sprawling
Now comes a question: what do we do to prevent "ad hoc report sprawling"?
I think that ad hoc reports should be deployed to VIP users as prototypes, until the time comes to move to something better if they ever need to reach a wider audience. By "something better", I'm talking about a dedicated reporting system such as Crystal Reports for the kind of reports that pull data not only from PI, but also from AF and other sources. The kind of reports that are read daily by people who make business decisions based on their contents. The kind that end up on a printer, to be read to/by upper management.
These official reports should still be designed, deployed and stored on a dedicated platform. Why? Because:
- EWA and and DLS have their limits; my understanding is that they can pull out data only from PI points, not AF (on the other hand, there are ways to combine web parts with DataLink Server, but I'm not good enough to try that out);
- I also have a feeling that using EWA as a reporting solution might cause a performance impact both on your SharePoint and PI infrastructure as nothing will prevent John Doe from pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-F9 (in caps, of course) all the time to be updated on the second. It's much slower on DLS than within the real Excel, so I think there is a performance hit. This impact needs to be evaluated, and thus why I talked about a controlled audience above.
Conclusion
The possibility of deploying ad hoc reports to read-only users who don't need to have Excel at all is the main advantage I've seen up to now to deploying an architecture based on PI DataLink Server, Excel Web App and SharePoint. However, as this might be a complex solution that your IT Operations will need to take care of in the long run, you need to be sure you really need it.
O.
Am I off the track on this? Have any comments? Please post below and I'll be glad to write an update to this article.
