Excel Services

I've been working with Excel Services in SharePoint 2007 lately and I must say there is some massive power here.  Microsoft has done a good job at laying out the usage scenarios with this powerpack of services and I'm even impressed with the performance so far.

Essentially, Excel Services are broken down into a few sub components, Excel Calculation Services (the main grunt worker for calculations and back end data refreshing), Excel Web Access (which displays Excel worksheets in a browser using DHTML - feels almost like Excel) and Excel Web Services (the api open for us to create our own apps based on these services).

Excel automation has always been possible, but never on a server.  Now we have it...enabling a whole bunch of additional features.  Along with these features comes a bit more complexity in configuration (I hate configuration hell, reminds me too much of BizTalk) - but it seems manageable so far.

More to come later.