How to make SSRS reports available to users?

Question

I've been thinking of the best way to present reports to the end user. We've accumulated several dozen reports. Some are subscription-based and are exported into Excel or emailed out regularly but a large number are run on-demand.

There's the option of sending the users the direct link to the reports. We don't do this because it's not easy to find (they have to dig through emails or bookmark the link) http://server/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?myreportrs:Command=Render

We've been embedding reports in sharepoint (or simply adding a link to the report). We're not using Sharepoint Integrated Mode. This has become a little unorganized where we have a large number of links to reports. I'm not sure what other solution exists..

SQL 2008, Sharepoint 2007

Answer 1

Depends on how much maintenance effort and instruction you want to provide. Some likely options include:

• Use a SharePoint content page and hardcode a page with links to different reports.
• Create a Sharepoint URL list linking to the different reports.
• Create an SSRS report that is acts as a central index. This could either be a static page (a report without any data source, just many static text boxes.) or a dynamic list of reports. Depending on requirements you could query the SSRS databases and use that as a central list.

My clients have generally found that a one of these, the Report Manager interface (/reports/), and emailing of specific report urls to be adequate.

Another option I once used: we created a formula (happened to be in Excel) that would create a url with the appropriate custom parameters to return just the data the user was interested in. Passed the parameters to SSRS as part of the URL. (Search on SSRS URL access.)