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

Chapter 4. Overview of Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS) 2008

Before introducing BIDS 2008 and its capabilities, let's start by answering what BIDS 2008 is and why you should care about it. BIDS 2008 is short for Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 and is a development tool that allows you to build reports and deploy them to the report server. The tool comes with SQL Server 2008 and is almost always referred to as BIDS 2008.

Although when we talk about BIDS it sounds as though it is a product that Microsoft has created just for report development, in all reality BIDS is just a slimmed-down version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 that has only the Business Intelligence project templates such as the reporting services project templates, analysis services project templates, and integration services project templates.

In this chapter, you walk through the different parts of BIDS, such as the Toolbox, Report Data, Server Explorer, and Solution Explorer. With the help of a walkthrough, you use the new report project wizard to create a new project report. This chapter demonstrates the report layout and preview views in BIDS. You also briefly go over the new functionality such as gauges, now available with BIDS 2008.

Since the audience of this book includes SharePoint professionals, not just report developers, this chapter exists so that readers who do not have experience with BIDS or report development can get a quick start in developing reports that reside in SharePoint ...