One of the cool things about having Excel Services in your toolbox is that you are able to deliver some very powerful ad hoc reporting against Analysis Services data.  Do this in a single server virtual environment and all is pretty simple and straightforward.  Try it in actual (production) distributed environment and you are bound to run into configuration issues.  Because of this, I have passed along Tom Stegemans' multi-post instruction reference to several frustrated SharePoint implementers.  I thought I would share the link here to spread the good word.  Read the details here .  There is even an image of his overall architecture as a reference (see screenshot below).  Getting things up and running is only half the battle…

Read more from the original source:
Quality Reading — Using Analysis Services Data in Excel Services