Bill Baer /bɛːr/

While on vacation, yes working ;-), I was asked to look into an issue where Excel Calculation Services was deployed in a cross-forest environment; specifically where Excel Services is deployed on server A residing in Forest 1 and the clients requesting workbooks reside in Forest 2. Forest 2 does not trust Forest 1; however, Forest 1 trusts Forest 2. The Excel Calculation Services topology in this scenario was fairly basic where Excel Web Access, Web Services, and the Calculation Services are distributed across two network load-balanced web front-end servers and Excel Calculation Services and any UDF assemblies are hosted on a separate application server also servicing the Office SharePoint Server Search indexing service.

The following information is a reference guide to configuring Trusted File Locations for Excel Calculation Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Your configuration may vary due to performance and hardware considerations; you should test configuration parameters for performance and scale before application to a production environment. Open your Shared Services Administration site and select Trusted file locations under Excel Services Settings. Click Add Trusted File Location to add a new Excel workbook file location considered trustworthy.

Two (2) new articles have been published centered on Excel Services programmability with accompanying sample solutions available in the Microsoft Download Center. The first article demonstrates how to extend List and query tables on Excel Services and includes content detailing external workbook references, SQL write-back and user-defined functions. The second article provides a more in-depth approach to developing UDF’s for Excel Services. Article: Extending the Excel Services Programmability Framework Accompanying Solution: