Reporting Services Lauch -- Live notes from Omaha, part one
Reporting live from the Reporting Services launch event here in Omaha. Kudos to the Marriott for providing wireless access. Main speakers Cheryl Stepney and Joe (see next post) from Quilogy.
Interesting points
- Sigh -- nobody is using Notification Services here yet. Might be a good topic for our users group to cover.
- 5%-10% of the users would use Analysis Services, 15%-25% are "information explorers", the rest of are information consumers. That 60%-80% is where Reporting Services fits.
- Microsoft's BI Vision -- "Make business data available to the masses."
- Three parts: Authoring, management and delivery
- Complements Operations Manager (MOM) and Systems Manager (SMS).
- One topic that I've had a bit of hard time explaining to folks -- the meta data data base -- was explained here quite well: just think of it as a catalog of reports and report parts.
- Why require VS.NET as the authoring tool? MS belives that the first wave of report development efforts will be done by developers. Cheryl talked about Cizer's product the most.
- "We're not here to compete with Crystal Reports, we're here to complement." They won't offer migration or conversion tools. She did mention that they are on the page. "Microsoft will likely never have (offer) a migration tool."
- Drats! Technical difficulties. This is why I would hate having a canned presentation to give that I didn't create myself. Yes, I understand the need for consistency between presentations, but you don't have much margin for error if something goes screwy and it makes it look like its a product problem if (when) it does.
- Oh great, Larry brought up PDF not printing in landscape and Excel exporting of sub-reports. More stuff we need to document.
- Potential security issue to consider: if you pass the parameters in a URL (GET method), they may show up on page prints. That might not be a good thing for obvious reasons! That said, paper shreders are cheap.
- Talked about a bad way to migrate from development to production. More on this later.
- Good coverage of caching and report snapshotting.
- Cherly needed to mention that Data-Driven subscriptions are an Enterprise Edition Only feature.
- It is increasingly clear that people don't understand the concept of meta data, let alone the meta data data base.
Some of answers that to questions that come up made me nervous: they are making this sound easier than this is (especially the question about personalized reports.) Persisting the personalization data isn't trivial just yet.
Break time, so I'll post this now.