Since a lot of components exist to access or administer Essbase, there are also a couple of client tools available. End users typically use the Excel Add-In or SmartView nowadays. While the Excel Add-In talks to the Essbase server directly using various ports, SmartView connects to Essbase through Provider Services using HTTP protocol. The ability to communicate using a single port is one of the major advantages from SmartView over Excel Add-In. If you consider using Excel Add-In going forward, please make sure you are aware of the Statement of Direction for this component. The Administration Services Console, Integration Services Console and Essbase Studio are clients, which are mainly used by Essbase administrators or application designers. While Integration Services and Essbase Studio are used to setup Essbase applications by loading metadata or simply for data loads, Administration Services are utilized for all kind of Essbase administration. All clients are using only one or two ports to talk to their server counterparts, which makes them work through firewalls easily.

Although clients for Provider Services (SmartView) and Administration Services (Administration Services Console) are only using a single port to communicate to their backend services, the backend services itself need the Essbase configured port range to talk to the Essbase server. Any communication to repository databases is done using JDBC connections. Essbase Studio and Integration Services are using different technologies to talk to the Essbase server, Integration Services uses CAPI, Essbase Studio uses JAPI. However, both are using the configured port range on the Essbase server to talk to Essbase. Connections to data sources are either based on ODBC (Integration Service, Essbase) or JDBC (Essbase Studio).

As for all other components discussed previously, when setting up firewall rules, be aware of the fact that all services may need to talk to the external authentication sources, this is not only needed for Shared Services.