Keep your Report Server in Native Mode!
Do not use the Report Server add-in for SharePoint. There is no need to use it, it has only given me a headache. All you need to do when you are running the Reporting Services Configuration Tool is to add the Reports and ReportServer Virtual Directories to the SharePoint site. I know, this seems too simple right, well it works. Please keep in mind that i am using SSL and i have not tried this otherwise. When I first started research this I came across the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint tutorial from here. It says to setup the Report Server on the default web site in IIS under a different port. Well this didn’t work for me so I read up and others told me to create a new sub site named something like reports. So I made reports.ourwebsite.com and SharePoint was on portal.ourwebsite.com. So now I install the add-in and I think everything is good. Then we moved our web server to a different box that was not a domain controller. Well this made problems because we had the site setup for windows authentication. While on the domain controller the website only asked for the username and password, now that IIS is on a separate box it asks for the domain\username and password. That won’t work because our customers will not know the domain name. So I moved us to Basic Authentication. The issue with this is the Report Server Add-In for SharePoint will not work with Basic Authentication. Now I am stuck having to put the Report Server back to Native mode and have our customers click a link from our portal to reports. The issue now is our customers now need to double authenticate, first to portal then to reports! Then I was recommended from a co-worker to try and just add the Report Server application pools to the SharePoint site. So I tried it even though all the documentation I’ve read seemed to completely veer away from that idea. It worked!! I added my link in the page viewer web part and it is flawless. I am able to use basic authentication and have the report integrated into my SharePoint webpage. I am kind of upset because the Microsoft website steered me on the wrong path. If you look a couple of posts down you will see a picture of the integrated Report Server in SharePoint, my new setup looks exactly the same as this. If you have any questions at all please leave me a comment and I will defiantly try and help.
- Kevin C -
Hi Kevin..
I used the same tutorials to set up the reporting services on the sharepoint site which you used but didn’t get any luck however if i try your way then i am not sure how to view the report deployed to the report server.
I set up the report server in the native mode and deployed my reports there but i am not getting any idea of how to use that report in to our sharepoint site. Kindly help me regarding this . It would be very helpful to me .Thanks in Advance.
Regards,
Jatin
Jatin,
When you go to the http://www.yoursite.com/reportserver you should see a list of reports you uploaded to /reports. What i do is click on a report and copy/paste that link in a page viewer web part in SharePoint. For someone to view your report you need to make sure they have permissions to do so. The way you do this is by managing the permissions in http://www.yoursite.com/reports. You can click each individual report and specify permissions for each. I gave my viewers “View” permissions. Also make sure that you add “Read” permissions in your SQL database for the user as well or it will not work.
- Kevin C -
Kevin,
This kind of integration (native mode) has always worked. The problem is that we are hosting business intelligence applications for another company that uses various software developers. Most of these use (or want to use) Reporting Services integrated with SharePoint. Because a diverse community of users connect, we need to use basic auth. to guarantee a proper auth.
We have found that basic auth. does work as long as the reports are deployed to the root of a web application and you implement the “quick fix” as noted on my blog.
You just need to switch /_vti_bin/ReportServer to integrated auth. while leaving the rest at basic. There is a proxy web service living there that SharePoint connects to before connecting to the actual reporting services web proxy endpoint. The user does not need to connect there, only SharePoint itself. So using integrated on that vitual dir is not a problem. But as I said, with this fix, reports need to be in the root. Quite an annoying limitation.
Regards
Geert (http://blog.baeke.info)
Geert,
Thank you for your suggestions. Since we now are live on our site using native mode on reporting services I have no way to test out your method. I will soon be setting up a test machine where I can try this out. I do understand your business needs and I am glad you found your solution. I do encourage others to try your method. My point in posting my method was really because it’s easy and works great. So if you insist on using integrated mode please try out Geert’s method, if you don’t care to use it you can get the same functionality with less hassle by using native mode.
Thanks!
- Kevin
Kevin -
I understand the concept, but would like to ask if your reporting services server and WSS server are seperate? I have two servers that will be in the same domain, but differing sub-domains (ie report.foo.com and wss.foo.com). We are successfully using Forms Authentication, and would like to know if this works, and how to add the RS’s app pool to the WSS server.
Shawn
This is specifically what I am interested in:
“Then I was recommended from a co-worker to try and just add the Report Server application pools to the SharePoint site.”