First, it seems that it’s best to have SharePoint Services installed before installing (or upgrading to) SQL Server 2008 R2. I found that the following sequence (on a new system) worked fairly well:

1. Install SharePoint pre-requisites (from the SharePoint 2010 install disk).
2. Install SharePoint Server (I chose “Standalone” server).
3. Run SharePoint Configuration wizard.
4. Choose a SharePoint “Template” (I chose “Team Site”)
5. Install SQL Server 2008 R2. (I chose a named instance of “SS2K8R2”).
6. Choose “Install the SharePoint integrated mode default configuration”
7. Start SharePoint Central Administration from the Start Menu.
8. Click “General Application Settings”
9. Under Reporting Services, click “Reporting Services Integration”
10. Start Reporting Services Configuration Manager and click on Web Service URL. Copy this value to the matching field in the Reporting Services Integration dialog.
11. Choose an Authentication mode.
12. Provide user credentials. Be sure to fully-qualify the User Name with the domain (or system) as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Setting the Report Server Web URL and credentials

Once properly configured all you need to do is get the reports loaded into the Reporting Services catalog. Too bad there isn’t a tool to move an existing catalog over to the SharePoint Integrated Reporting Services catalog. This means you’ll not only have to redeploy all of your reports and all of your user’s reports but you’ll have to recreate all of your schedules, subscriptions, roles and rights—which are all handled differently than in the “native” Report Manager. And no, Report Manager will be disabled once you enable the SharePoint Integrated mode.

Visual Studio 2008 R2 BI Tools

There is no Visual Studio 2010 implementation of the BI tools (yet). This means that your existing VS 2008 (SP1) installation is overlaid with a new set of SS2K8R2 BI tools to support the new Shared Datasets, Report Parts and catalog version features. That is, when you first start a new BI project you get to choose the backend Report Processor version (at least between 2008 and 2008 R2). This is an essential feature and I suggest that it be continued as each new version of RS is release.

There is also a new Report Project properties page as shown in Fig. 2. It supports paths to the new Shared Datasets and Report Parts folders as well as the Target Server Version. Note that the settings shown in Figure 2 are for a “native” implementation—not for SharePoint.

Fig. 2: Report Project Property page.

Unfortunately, this dialog is not sizeable so it’s really tough to fill in or inspect the property settings—even with a lot of time-consuming scrolling. Once you start adding the  URL paths to these settings (as when you use SharePoint integration), the dialog becomes even more troublesome.

Figure 3: Report Project configured for SharePoint deployment

Note that you have to add the Target Server URL to each of the target paths when using SharePoint integration. Folks (at Microsoft) don’t you think it would make sense to have a way to specify this Target URL once and have all of the other paths be set relative to that path. Imagine if you got one of these wrong—parts of the deployment would be sent to one catalog and parts to another.

Microsoft: Please fix this.

Again, the “help” examples and the prompts in the Report Wizard do not consider that most sites use Reporting Services and SQL Server engine instances which must  (in some cases) be referenced here in this dialog.

Site Settings

The Central Administration page “Reporting Services: Set Server Defaults” link takes you to a page that permits you to set options that in native mode you would need SQL Server Management Studio or Report Manager Site Settings to configure. These include:

• Report History Snapshots—limits number of snapshots in report history
• Report Processing Timeout (global setting)—limits processing time
• Report Processing Log (not exposed in “native” mode).
• Windows Integrated Security toggle.
• Ad-Hoc Reporting to enable Report Builder
• Client-side printing
• Custom Report Builder Launch URL. This is blank and defaults to Report Builder 3.0. Don’t bother changing it as Report Builder 2.0 is not supported with R2 (2010) RDL reports.