Monday, March 19, 2012

Creating a Portal over RS 2005 server

We would like to create a corporate reporting portal. It must be reasonably quick and customisable with our corporate logos and look and feel.

We have a RS2005 server and a number of reports.

We also have a number of other reports that we would like to display that are in various formats (.pdf, .asp, .aspx, .xls etc).

I like the security model of RS2005.

Is it possible to create a good flexible portal driven by the content and security of the RS server, that will also display PDF, XLS, ASP etc?

Has anyone done this - code samples or commercial product?

I did try sharepoint at one stage buit found it a bit slow and could not modify the look and feel sufficiently. I am willing to try it again if people can vouch that a good result can be achieved that way.

The company I work for has built many portals using both Sharepoint and custom ASP.NET.

If you are looking for a document managment solution with many other features plus a reporting portal option and tight integration with Office I would suggest Sharepoint 2007 & Reporting Services.

If you would like to have a reporting portal with a logo, custom look-and-feel, a display of reports, and custom security based on Reporting Services, I would suggest using ASP.NET & C# to create a custom solution. I can't post the code for our solutions as they are custom for each client. There are quite a few examples out there on how to use the Reporting Services Web Service interface.

Here's one...

http://www.odetocode.com/Articles/95.aspx

if you would like to contact me ( email andrew(dot)sears(at)t4g(dot)com) with details regarding your implementation I can give you further information.

cheers,

Andrew

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Thanks Andrew,

That was helpful. I looked at the code in http://www.odetocode.com/Articles/95.aspx and have written some code based on this but it still does not address all the issues I have.

We are also going to investigate MOSS, as others in the company are starting to use this. This will take some time I think.

I think there is scope for a book or at least a whitepaper in this area.

I already have the title: "Creating a Reporting Portal using SSRS and MOSS"

Perhaps Microsoft will pay you to write it and me for the idea.

Some of the areas that need addressing are:

. How to manage security with different groups of users who are allowed access to overlapping sets of reports.

. How to deal with linking reports from another folder when the main report uses subreports - I tried this and the subreports dont get loaded because SSRS tries to get them from the folder where the link is.

. How to best publish links to other web resources (e.g. .asp and .pdf) so these are dealt with in a consistent manner.

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