SQL Server Reporting Services

Why Use Reporting Services?
No one questions the value of getting the right information to the right people, at the right time. For many businesses this is a challenge – people who need access to information may be distributed throughout and outside the traditional organization, with a wide range of skills and expertise.

Reporting Services helps makes it easy to create both traditional and interactive reports and deliver them to a wide range of people, using flexible subscription and delivery mechanisms. It also provides the security and manageability to handle complex and demanding business environments.

Reporting Services offers a unique combination of attributes:

• A complete, server-based platform for reporting: Reporting Services supports the full reporting lifecycle, from authoring to delivery and ongoing management of reports.

• Flexible and extensible reporting: Reporting Services supports both traditional and interactive reports of numerous formats, with extensible delivery options. It can be integrated easily into any environment or solution using open APIs and interfaces.

• Scalability: The product's modular, web-based design scales easily to support high volume environments. You could create a reporting server farm with multiple report servers accessing the same core reports, serving thousands of web-based clients.

• Integration with Microsoft products and tools: Reporting Services ships with SQL Server and integrates easily with familiar Microsoft tools, such as Office and SharePoint Portal Server, without requiring programming and customisation.

Ways to Use Reporting Services
Because Reporting Services combines a single, complete reporting platform with a scalable and extensible architecture, it meets a wide variety of reporting needs.

• Enterprise reporting: Enterprises can use Reporting Services for internal reporting and BI applications. Many companies create data marts or warehouses to aggregate operational data. Using Reporting Services, corporate IT staff can design a variety of reports and deploy them to individuals throughout the enterprise, using a combination of e-mail distribution and publishing on a corporate portal. For the enterprise, Reporting Service provides significant value as a comprehensive reporting solution integrated with the Microsoft BI platform.

• Embedded reports: Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can use Reporting Services to deliver pre-defined reports as part of a packaged application that runs with Microsoft SQL Server. The customer's IT organization can access these reports as-is, or use Reporting Services to customize reports or create new ones for specific business needs. For the ISV, Reporting Services offers a simplified way to embed flexible, interactive reports in an application.

• Web-based reporting for partners/customers: Organisations can deploy traditional or interactive web-based reports to interact with customers or partners over extranets. Reporting Services isolates report consumers from the complexity of the underlying data sources, while providing personalisation and interactivity.