Excel Services help you to reuse and share Excel workbooks on SharePoint Server 2010 portals and dashboards. For instance, financial analysts, business planners, etc. can create content in Excel sheets and share it with others by using a SharePoint Server 2010 portal and dashboard—without writing custom code. The data displayed can be controlled by you. You can maintain a single version of your Excel workbook.

Take advantage of SharePoint Excel Services and other useful features of SharePoint 2010 hosting, SharePoint Foundation hosting or SharePoint Server 2010 – with shared or dedicated hosting by a SharePoint 2010 hosting provider.

Excel Services is built on ASP.NET and SharePoint Foundation technologies and includes the following core components:

• Excel Web Access: Excel Web Access is a viewer page and an Excel Services Web Part that you can add to any Web Parts page in SharePoint Server 2010. Excel Web Access renders (in other words, creates the HTML for) live Excel workbooks on a Web page, and enables the user to interact with those workbooks and explore them.
• Excel Web Services: Excel Web Services is the Excel Services component that provides programmatic access to its Web service. You can develop applications that call Excel Web Services to calculate, set, and extract values from workbooks, and to refresh external data connections. By using Excel Web Services, you can incorporate server-side workbook logic into an application, automate the updating of Excel workbooks, and create application-specific user interfaces around server-side Excel calculation.
• User-defined functions (UDFs): Excel Services UDFs enable you to use formulas in a cell to call custom functions that are written in managed code and deployed to SharePoint Server 2010.
• ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript): The ECMAScript object model in Excel Services enable developers to customize, automate, and drive the Excel Web Access Web Part control on a page. By using the ECMAScript object model, you can build mashups and other integrated solutions that interact with one or more Excel Web Access Web Part controls on a page or an iframe with script on the page. It also enables you to add more capabilities to your workbooks and code around them.
• Representational State Transfer (REST) service: The REST API in Excel Services enables you to access workbook parts or elements directly through a URL. The URL contains a “marker” path, which is the entry point to an .aspx page, to the workbook file location, and to the path to the requested element inside the workbook.
• Excel Calculation Services: The role of Excel Calculation Services is to load workbooks, calculate workbooks, call custom code (UDFs), and refresh external data. It also maintains the session state for interactivity. Excel Calculation Services maintains a session for the duration of interactions with the same workbook by a user or caller.

Excel Services supports many features and scenarios which include the following:

o Business Intelligence Portal and Workbook Analysis: A business intelligence portal displays scorecards and reports, and enables users to explore data by using only a browser. Excel Services participates in the BI Center by providing the ability to calculate and expose Excel-based content on integrated BI dashboards.
o Workbooks Management: The workbook management capability of the Excel services maintain only one copy of a workbook created and changed by a trusted author in a central, secure place. It secures and protects workbook models and back-end data. Excel services also helps create snapshots of a workbook.
o Custom Applications: Excel Services help create custom applications—for example, ASP.NET applications—that
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.

Remember that Watchfire was acquired by IBM early this year? Well, they sure arenďż˝t wasting time as they will now officially release IBM Rational AppScan 7.7. This new improved Web application security tool is based on Watchfire’s AppScan. This product basically identifies, validates and reports on gaps in Web applications. However, the latest version has new features (i.e. Scan Expert and State Inducer) designed to make the product more user-friendly for those who have not much background in application testing. It also includes recorded Web-based training (now that one is useful to me) to instruct users on application security and industry standard compliance.

Source: Eweek

There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.
UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centres have been affected by the outage.
Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.
International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Repairs are on going as you read this. Hopefully full or partial services will be up within the week.

Source

A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document defines services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. In WSDL, its abstract endpoints and messages is separated from its concrete network deployment and data format bindings. Their concrete protocol and data format specification for a particular port type constitutes a reusable binding.

The new mobile browser brings the true internet (like you’d experience from your desktop or laptop computer) to Windows Mobile smartphones. Flash-advertisements, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook – any and all web-pages load in speedy fashion thanks to Skyfire’s behind-the-scenes server-magic. With integrated Flash support, animated/interactive advertisements come to life, embedded videos play in the browser, and Flash-based web-pages are finally viewable.

Available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6. It can be integrated whether your smartphone is touch or non-touchscreen. It is currently still under beta testing.
More info on this site.

Ooh� and who said the internet isn�t exciting? RBN (Russian Business Network), a notorious Russian online gang which has recently closed their St. Petersburg IP address (but has apparently established themselves elsewhere in cyberspace, yet continuously moving to avoid detection), is said to be linked to a November iFrame injection attack of Monster.com an online employment service company. The attack, caused by a NeoSplit or a malware tool, inserted code into pages that then caused systems to download a virus. Monster.com has reported that they�ve already cleaned all the affected Web pages and is now working with law enforcement on the matter.

Source: eweek.com

The information search engine, Ask.com has released AskEraser, a new tool that can be considered as the first step (of many) in handing over the rightful control of privacy to its users. According to EPIC’s Marc Rotenberg, this cool tool prevents from storing any search data. It can completely delete search queries and any other associated information from the siteďż˝s servers. This includes complete texts of queries, IP addresses, user IDďż˝s, and session IDďż˝s. Users can find the link for the AskEraser tool on the upper right corner of the search engine’s homepage and search results pages and can be turned off anytime. AskEraser is available now in the U.S. and in the UK — and will be deployed globally in 2008.

Source: Newsfactor

I remember how excited and at awe I was when I first had internet connection installed to my PC. Of course, it was still dial-up and was prone to a lot of disconnection (not to mention long downloading time). That was only years ago but major IT development later, many people, companies, and institutions now have broadband connection. It has almost become indispensable. Here enters the importance of interoperability so web applications are developed so that different platforms can interact and work together. By using web services to applications, its function can then be published to practically anywhere in the world.

What do web services actually do? One is for reusable application components. I�m sure that all of us, in one way or another, have used an application more than once. For example, since I transact business abroad, I often use currency converters to know how much money I need to deal with. My friend who�s learning Chinese turns to online translators when she needs a little help. Web services can offer application components that can be used over and over again. Web services also connect existing software by giving different applications a way to connect to their data despite using different applications and platforms.

DHTML eliminates the boring elements of static pages without compromising performance and interactivity. It uses the user’s computer to calculate and make effective the changes so that the site does not have to make use of a distant server to load or even reload a document so that text and data do not have to go on a circuitous route that can consume time before it can carry-out the changes. DHTML are also self-contained so no additional support from applications or controls are needed.