Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Chapter 9. Advanced Deployment Techniques

Once a report has been created, it must be published to SharePoint so that it can be viewed by end users. In previous chapters, you learned how you can use Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder to publish your reports and other content to a report server instance configured in SharePoint integrated mode. Truthfully, there are more proper ways to publish and deploy your reports. Publishing and deploying a report doesn't have to be done from within Visual Studio! This leads to a question: What is proper and improper in publishing reports using BIDS?

First of all, BIDS is a development tool that's familiar to most report developers, but people who deploy reports and other content are not necessarily report developers; commonly, they are infrastructure people. Second, a lot of customers do not allow BIDS to be installed on their production infrastructure. Third, BIDS doesn't offer any automation capability, and this inflexibility poses particular challenges during the application's life cycle for report developers and IT administrators.

NOTE

This chapter uses the term solution to refer to the solution package mechanism specific to installation and deployment in SharePoint. The term feature refers to a new addition to the SharePoint product that facilitates adding or updating functionalities into existing SharePoint sites. The term SharePoint web application refers specifically to a web application based in Internet ...