Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

3.1. Educating Your Clients about SSRS Reports

Let's use the migration scenario mentioned in the introduction to this chapter to help determine the best practice for migrating reports. Say you are converting the mainframe report that is dumped into a .csv format file to a SSRS report. Do you just copy the text-based report and convert it to a Reporting Services report, or do you try to identify opportunities to make it better? The best practice is to identify the opportunity for change and present it to your client. However, this is not easy to accomplish unless you plan for it.

Even though this sounds like a no-brainer, believe it or not, when there is not a good plan for the report project, mistakes happen over and over again. One of my clients hired a contractor to work directly with the business user to develop custom reports. Since we were using SSRS for the solution we were working on, they decided to use SSRS for these reports since SharePoint 2007 was installed in integrated mode and it was easy to host these reports on their intranet. Since this was not a part of the project, the contractor was managed by the business user who needed the reports. The key part to remember here is that they didn't have a good plan. They just gave the developer the existing report and asked him to convert the report with no guidance.

The contractor doing the reporting development had a formatting question, and as the business user was not technically savvy in SSRS, he pointed the contractor ...