Cloud PowerPivot: Free Trials for the Public

***UPDATE:  I am no longer working at Pivotstream and do not endorse their services.  All links are removed from this article but feel free to look them up if you are interested.

Want to see (and share) your workbooks on the web?

For a few months now we’ve been running free 30-day free trials where you can:

1. Upload workbooks to the Pivotstream cloud
2. Interact with them in the browser
3. Securely share them with colleagues, even if they don’t have PowerPivot or Excel 2010 installed

But we’ve been doing so in “low-profile” mode.  Meaning, if you contacted us, you found out about the trial.

I’m pretty stoked

I’ve been itching to announce the free trials so that you folks can try it out for quite some time.  But I’ve been held up on two things.  One is that we needed a revised and updated version of our brochure/tech specs document.  It’s done now and linked below.

The other obstacle was a debate over the perceived need to “qualify” people as business opportunities before providing a trial.  I’ve been pushing for a much more open process and eventually won people over.  If you try it out now and decide that you don’t need something like this yet, no problem.  I’m happy to expose people to the benefits of the web publishing experience, period.  And I know that later on, when your org is ready, you’ll likely remember us.

Besides, this stuff is just fun

Caveat:  No PowerPivot V2 Workbooks Until Next Month

Because we operate a service for thousands of users, we have to be very careful about rolling out new software on the servers.  There are a million moving parts in a software project like PowerPivot 2012 and we can’t just flip the switch – we need to validate many production scenarios in a test environment first.

That whole validation process is underway right now, but it takes time to do it right.  Sometime next month, we will be able to offer trial sites where your V2 workbooks function properly.  For now, all workbooks need to be produced in V1.

So if you’d like to sit tight and wait for V2 support on the server, I get that.  I will make another announcement here when it’s ready.

Getting Started

Download brochure from here for more info on the full solution (not just the trial).

View some live demos here, on a live cloud PowerPivot site.