8.1. Preparing Your SharePoint Environment
Reports can be deployed to SharePoint using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and Report Builder. BIDS is mostly used by developers, since BIDS is a shell version of Visual Studio as explained in Chapter 4, "Overview of Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS) 2008." BIDS is more of a developer-oriented tool since it allows developers to create advance reports using code. Report Builder is mostly used by end-users to create ad-hoc reports on the fly and has a much simpler approach to deploying reports to SharePoint.
Typically, the development process happens in two stages. First the reports will be developed by developers and published to SharePoint using BIDS. Then, if needed, organizations can empower their power users to update the published reports using Report Builder. Report Builder can also be used by power users to create reports that do not require any development.
For example, if the user wanted to change the company logo or the title of the report and save it with a different name, they could easily accomplish this with Report Builder without having the need to request for developer hours. Later in this chapter you will see how developers can deploy reports to SharePoint using BIDS and how end users can make changes and save their changes to SharePoint without having a report development environment by simply using their workstations.
Before you start deploying reports to SharePoint, it is a good idea to prepare ...
