SharePoint® 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer

21

Developing and Deploying Reporting Services Reports to SharePoint

In previous lessons you have learned how to develop BI solutions, which can then be deployed to SharePoint to be consumed by end users. This lesson focuses on deploying a major piece of the SQL Server Business Intelligence stack, Reporting Services, to SharePoint. Giving end users the ability to view Reporting Services reports from SharePoint completes the SharePoint Business Intelligence puzzle.

Reporting Services without integrating and deploying to SharePoint means end users must go to multiple interfaces to find everything they need for making decisions. With this non-integrated setup it's more likely that the users will choose only one or none of the platforms to view reports.

CREATING A REPORT USING BIDS

Two tools are primarily used for developing Reporting Services reports. The more forward-facing lighter development application is called Report Builder. This tool is not typically used by developers but is instead meant more for power users. Power users are generally people who know the business more than they know the technology but are computer savvy enough to figure out how to design a simple report. With Report Builder a power user can either create a new report or modify an existing one, and simply by clicking Save the report is pushed back to SharePoint.

Report Builder was designed with the end user in mind, so much of what you see with this tool will be to get the report author up-and-running as ...