January 27, 2010

What are the benefits of SQL reporting services in SCCM?

Benefits of using SQL Reporting Services:

1.Ability to export reports to any other formats like Word, Excel, PDF etc.
2.Ability to create report subscriptions that can be scheduled to run at specific times and send out reports to interested people. A good user scenario around this would be to create a report subscription for the Software Updates reports and schedule them to run late on Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning after all the "patch Tuesday" updates are applied to all systems.
3.Report authoring experience is very much enhanced with the tools that come with SQL Reporting Services like SQL Report Designer. You could either create report models or create SQL-based reports and run them off of the SQL Reporting Server.
4.Timeouts can be configured on a per-report basis depending on which reports potentially return large amounts of data.
5.Since the reports are standard SQL Reporting Services reports, they can be easily imported and exported from one SQL Reporting server to another.
6.A common request from customers is to be able to run reports off of a Configuration Manager database replica before enabling them on the production environment. This is a gem of a functionality that can be easily accomplished by simply making the data source for the reports point to any valid Configuration Manager database; in this case point the data source of the reports to the database replica and once they have been verified just change the data source to point to the actual production database. This proves to be very useful for benchmarking environments.
7.Report branding is another frequently requested functionality by many customers. This commonly entails customizing the look and feel of reports by changing fonts, font sizes, custom logos etc. With the ability to create custom reports using SQL Reporting Services, customers can now apply their own report branding to the reports.
8.SQL Reporting Services provides the functionality to enable report caching to facilitate lower execution times on subsequent report execution requests. The cache timeout value can be configured appropriately depending on how often you expect the report data to change.
9.Report snapshots that are an alternative to report caching and can be scheduled to execute at specific times. When you select a report snapshot for viewing, the report server retrieves the stored report from the report server database, and shows the data and layout that were current for the report at the time the snapshot was created.

1 comment:

  1. So, apart from "exporting to Word, Excel, etc" and subscriptions, there isn't a real difference.

    ReplyDelete