This is quite a simple little thing that really hasn’t been mentioned yet, maybe because it is so simple, however nevertheless less worth mentioning. You may have the requirement to be able to allow your users to forecast from where ever, and security permitting, this is a very easy thing to set up. All communication between Excel and PPS happens over basic HTTP web services, this lends itself very well to configuring PPS for remote working.
To set it up you need to open a port on your firewall to allow communication over the PPS port (46787), and then simply point your connection to your Domain that is pointing to the correct server… and it all works, no issues. So in short, PPS works over the Internet, SSL is the next challenge. Initial testing against SSL, i.e. HTTPS, looks very possible. So to begin this add a new SSL port to the setting in IIS and create a new certificate in IIS, I chose to use 46797. for testing purposes it is as simple as adding a connection to Excel PPS add-in and testing.
So, PPS can be deployed over the Internet, using SSL. This therefore also means that all PPS functions can be secured with SSL and accessed over the Internet.
