Microsoft SQL Reporting Services
To be successful in today's competitive marketplace, organizations need to
extend information beyond the walls of their organization and seamlessly
interact with customers, partners, and suppliers in real time. Microsoft SQL
Server Reporting Services enables organizations to transform valuable enterprise
data into shared information for insightful, timely decisions at a lower total
cost of ownership.
SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive, server-based solution that
enables the creation, management, and delivery of both traditional,
paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports. An integrated part of
the Microsoft business intelligence framework, Reporting Services combines the
data management capabilities of SQL Server and Microsoft Windows Server with
familiar and powerful Microsoft Office System applications to deliver real-time
information to support daily operations and drive decisions.
Full Reporting Life Cycle Support:
SQL Server Reporting Services supports the full reporting life cycle,
including:
Report authoring. Report developers can create reports to be
published to the Report Server using Microsoft or other design tools that use
Report Definition Language (RDL), an XML-based industry standard used to define
reports.
Report management. Report definitions, folders, and resources are
published and managed as a Web service. Managed reports can be executed either
on demand or on a specified schedule, and are cached for consistency and
performance. New in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, administrators can use
the Management Studio to organize reports and data sources, schedule report
execution and delivery, and track reporting history.
Report delivery. SQL Server Reporting Services supports both
on-demand (pull) and event-based (push) delivery of reports. Users can view
reports in a Web-based format or in e-mail.
Report security. SQL Server Reporting Services implements a
flexible, role-based security model to protect reports and reporting resources.
The product includes extensible interfaces for integrating other security models
as well.
Key Reporting Scenarios:
SQL Server Reporting Services combines a single, complete reporting platform
with a scalable and extensible architecture to meet a wide variety of reporting
needs, including:
Enterprise reporting. Enterprises can use Reporting Services for
their operational reporting or business intelligence applications. Using
Reporting Services, corporate IT staff can design a variety of reports and
deploy them to individual throughout the enterprise.
Ad-hoc reporting. SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes
Report Builder, a new ad-hoc reporting tool that enables business users to
create their own reports and explore corporate data. Report Builder incorporates
a user-friendly business query model that enables users to build reports without
deep technical understanding of the underlying data sources.
Web-based reporting for partners and customers. Organizations can
deploy interactive Web-based reports to deliver information to customers or
partners over extranets of the Internet. Reporting Services isolates report
consumers from the complexity of the underlying data sources, while providing
personalization and interactivity.

Massey
Consulting