A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Do It Yourself (DIY) PLM and Microsoft Excel Services

Do It Yourself (DIY) PLM and Microsoft Excel Services
Oleg
Oleg
26 November, 2011 | 2 min for reading

Many of the engineers (and not only) are using Microsoft Excel. People are literally lives inside of Excel spreadsheets. When it comes to PDM and PLM, I prefer to call it DIY (Do It Yourself) PLM. If you really on the DIY path, I think you need to be aware about so-called Excel Services available in Microsoft SharePoint since version 2007. In 2010, Microsoft improved significantly the capabilities of Excel Services.

You can read more about Excel Services by navigating to the following link. In addition, I found a very interesting video interview with Jon Campbell, program manager within Microsoft Excel services team. It was made almost a year ago. At the same time, I found it still something you use to educate yourself about SharePoint Excel Services.

Note, Excel services are very sophisticated. I was screening another article about Excel services – Excel Services in SharePoint. Here is the set of recommendation how to use Excel services to build a custom application:

Custom Applications: Excel Services help create custom applications—for example, ASP.NET applications—that can:

1. Call Excel Web Services to access, parameterize, and calculate workbooks.

2. Open, refresh external data, set cells or ranges, recalculate, participate in collaborative editing sessions with other applications or people, save, and save as.

3. Use custom workflows to schedule calculation operations or send e-mail notifications.

Above all this, in multiple server configurations, Excel Services load-balances requests across multiple Excel Calculation Services occurrences in a farm configuration. If your installation includes multiple application servers, Excel Services will balance the load in an attempt to help ensure that no single application server is overloaded by requests.

What is my conclusion? SharePoint is wide adopted by manufacturing enterprise companies. To use Excel as a platform to develop you DIY PLM solution can be an interesting option. However, I want to warn you about an appropriate resource planning and service budge allocation. DIY normally on the expensive side. SharePoint is not an exclusion from this list. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
27 May, 2011

What do you think about standards and PLM? For the long time, I thought about standards as toothbrushes. Everybody needs...

17 September, 2009

I want to touch and discuss an issue of data protection. When thinking about Product Lifecycle Management and related disciplines,...

8 June, 2016

I’m attending PTC LiveWox 2016 event these days in Boston. An impressive gathering of ~4000 people sharing and learning about...

28 January, 2012

What do you think about the future designer workspace? I assume some of my readers remember drawing board in multiple...

12 April, 2011

Following my yesterday post about Facebook and data centers infrastructure, I thought it will be an interesting to discover more...

24 December, 2015

Written by Mike Thomas & Oleg Shilovitsky  Holidays is coming and this is a good moment to experiment and bring...

26 March, 2014

Collaboration is inspiring. It is very overloaded word in engineering space. Collaboration is often used in the context of CAD,...

21 January, 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of industrial processes, the digital transformation has become a pivotal focus. This shift demands a...

8 April, 2021

Digital Thread is a new catchy phrase you can hear often these days. Very often, Digital Thread is used by...

Blogroll

To the top