I’ve used SSRS multiple times in the past and know of at least one instance where I’ll be using it again in the future so I was quite pleased to stumble upon Paul Litwin’s recent article regarding the current state of SSRS.
We’ve all heard that version 3 of a Microsoft product is when that product really hits its stride. And while I’m not sure of the truth of that software urban legend, I do have to say that Microsoft, with the release of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (which happens to be its 3rd major version), has released a gem of a reporting solution that is sure to please users of prior versions and bring more converts into the Reporting Services fold. The newest version of SQL Server Reporting Services is faster, can handle larger reports, supports a wider variety of browsers, and is more flexible thanks to the new Tablix data region, support for rich text content, and Microsoft Word as an output format.
One of the biggest, yet mostly invisible, changes Microsoft has made to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for SQL Server 2008 is that it has decided to ditch Internet Information Services (IIS).
I was dismayed to find that Reporting Services still doesn’t support a form-based security model out of the box.
One of my favorite improvements to SSRS is hardly mentioned by Microsoft but I know it will be very exciting for organizations like mine that need to support multiple browsers and platforms: the HTML rendered by Reporting Services renders nicely in most major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.
Speaking of rendering, Microsoft made a number of other improvements in this area too, including improved output to Excel and Text formats.
However, the big story here is the newfound support for the Microsoft Word format.
The Visual Studio-hosted report designer has gotten a significant makeover in this version.
Reporting Services textbox control now supports rich text formatting… Now imagine using the rich text support in SSRS to replace all of your desktop-based mail-merge solutions. In fact, when combined with SSRS support for scheduled subscriptions and the Word output format, one can easily envision a mail-merge operation that runs in the middle of the night and e-mails the “merged” documents to users or drops the documents in a network share folder. The only thing left to do is to print the documents!
A number of new chart types are also supported by the new release including stepped line, polar, Gantt, funnel, pyramid, histogram, and box charts.
via CODE Magazine – Article: SQL Server Reporting Services Hits its Stride.
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