Deploying to a Brand New Reporting Services 2008 Install

Having problems deploying to a brand new Reporting Services 2008 install?

There are two kinds of permissions in Reporting Services – Server Level and Item Level.  To get to the Server Level permissions, in Report Manager, go to home, and then click on Site Settings in the upper right hand corner, then click the Security menu item on the left.  If you click, New Role Assignment, Notice there are only two roles here.  You can make yourself an administrator here – although local Administrators is automatically added.  This may be enough.  FYI – it may be a good idea to take the local administrators out anyways so that hardware administrators don’t get administrative rights to the Reporting Services Server inadvertently.

But before you can deploy a Reporting Services project to the server, you have to do one more thing.  You need to have item level permissions as well.  To add yourself, go to Home and then click Properties – the blue tab next to Contents.  If you click New Role Assignment, you’ll see item level roles.  You’ll need to be at least Publisher, but you’ll probably just want to be Content Editor.  Publisher can’t modify folder structure, Content Editor can.

After you add yourself, you should be good to go.

Update: Here is a link to more info on adding Item Level Permissions http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337471(lightweight).aspx

Microsoft’s Gartner Position

Here is an aggregation of all the market research about Microsoft Products.  After having looked at them, Microsoft is in the Leader’s Quadrant in nearly all reports.  Impressive.

PerformancePoint Monitoring Authentication

While deploying Monitoring Server, I was having trouble viewing dashboards from SharePoint, but preview was working fine.  I referenced Nick and Adrian’s book and it suggested using the same identity for the SharePoint application pool for the credentials for the Monitoring Server application pool.  I’m working in an environment where the SharePoint service accounts are already deployed and Monitoring Server is coming in later.  The account names already in use for the SharePoint application pool wouldn’t make sense.

On page 241 on Nick and Adrian’s book, there is an awesome diagram of data/security flow for rendering a dashboard.  (Buy the book – it’s great!)

Just don’t forget that for a preview of the dashboard, it will use the application pool identity of the Monitoring Server, but when you render on SharePoint, it will use the credentials of the application pool for SharePoint.  If they are two different accounts, you’ll need to add them both with read permission to your data sources.

If you care to look and you are using SQL Server or Analysis Server as your data source, fire up Profiler and watch.  You’ll see two different accounts.

SDS Announcement

Looks like SDS is going to support the regular old relational paradigm sooner rather than later:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/03/10/what-s-next-for-sql-data-services.aspx  (Thanks to Neil Wood for the link.)

Now this is interesting.  Now someone could move (without much work) their OLTP system to the cloud and have MS manage it.  All you’d need is a big pipe to the MS data center.  Well – assuming you don’t use features they don’t implement.  All they mention here is tables, columns and stored procedures.  I suppose things like triggers may not be implemented soon, but we’ll overlook that for now.

More straight forward might be moving a big data warehouse to the cloud.  Having MS manage my 1 tb warehouse might make a lot of sense – especially if I get some sort of IOs per sec SLA.

My big question is will they protect users from themselves?  Before putting a large database into production will MS like to have a code review of your stored procedures and ERD?  What about queries that are long running?  Will they kill them if they run for over a minute or two?  Will the be a cap on size?

I’m not knocking this down before it starts – I’m just curious how this will play out.  There is a good reason why companies might like to move SQL off site.  It will probably be cost effective.  This is going to be worth watching.

Farewell PerformancePoint Planning!

Chris Webb has the scoop here: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4133.entry

What a shift in the Microsoft BI stack.  You can’t show the BI Burger to your clients anymore.  Maybe there was not enough demad for the planning peice for Microsoft to justify continuing the development and sales effort around the product.  Now we have yet another example of an acquisition that soon was re-worked and then kill by the acquirer.

I have also heard rumors that Gemini might be something to take the place of the planning piece.  You’d need some sort of workflow engine, but maybe it could work.  We’ll see.

Also, the layoffs affected the sales area in BI significantly so MS is definitely cutting their loss in BI.  I agree with Chris that it is important for Microsoft to publish some sort of new roadmap.  It makes it hard for partners to invest in new Microsoft products if they kill them off so soon after launch.

Wow.