February 23, 2017 at 11:58 pm
I have created an SSAS cube and would like to create and excel report based on this cube.
The data should be real-time so data refresh must be available.
The problem I have is sharing this excel doc - how do I share this with external clients (not on a domain) and still
give them the real-time refreshed data? A connection to SSAS can only be made with Windows Authentication and my clients are
at different premises.
I have tried a power pivot which imports the data into a data model, but then the data is static.
So I am unsure how to give the end-user and interactive experience with real-time data
Is there a better option perhaps using SSRS?
February 24, 2017 at 7:32 am
A few questions: Is your cube hosted on a server inside your network (i.e. behind your firewall)? If it is, your external clients will not be able to get to it anyways...unless they are connected via VPN. Is your data sensitive? If it is, then sharing it by distributing Excel files is a pretty risky choice.
The only way to provide access to a cube outside of your network via Excel, is to host the cube on a server in the DMZ. You should then be able to create a local Windows account with access to the cube, and use those credentials inside the Excel file that you distribute. Sharing data in a cube this way is EXTREMELY RISKY, and I wouldn't recommend doing that unless the data is non-sensitive and public knowledge...in other words you don't care who gets access to the info.
A better way to provide visibility into the cube data would be the use of a reporting tool (SSRS, Power BI), creating the necessary reports and/or visualizations they would need. If you use Power BI and assign O365 accounts (and Power BI licenses) to your external users, they would be able to analyze the data in Excel which could provide similar functionality to what you have in Excel right now.
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