Stephen - SQL Server Reporting Services comes with MS SQL Server but is heavily integrated with MS SharePoint. None of this MS stuff is strictly required to deliver secure, authenticated and personalised IOK Reports, so two questions:

1.) Do you have both MS SSRS & SharePoint deployed, or only SSRS?

2.) Can you be more specific about the advantages you see in interacting with the MS stuff?

Hi Tom thanks for your reply.

We currently only have SSRS deployed although in the future we may use sharepoint as our main repository. As it stands our historic method of deploying reports to the business has been through SSRS. They have a link through the intranet and can run the reports as and when they like through this central repository.

To keep all reports in the same location we thought it would be good to upload iok files into SSRS so that our users can access the reports in the same way. This works a treat as the user clicks the report and Omniscope opens the file. Incidentally we have the potential for upto 1200 users accessing the reports.

Unfortunately this is a manual task and becomes increasingly problematic when you have to do this on a daily basis. Delivery of reports to date has been via e-mail but we want to start empowering internal users a little more.

I appreciate that this isn't the best way of delivering iok files and we could try and get them to access them in a different way but it is actually an effective way of integrating Omniscope with existing architecture.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

MS Reporting Services is really 'closed' and designed to create reports from data stored primarily in SQL Server, either relational, MDX multi-dimensional (SSAS), or XML-based. MS Reporting Services does not even support delivery of Adobe PDF files, which are analagous to Omniscope interactive data-bearing IOK files in this context.

I would not wish SharePoint on anyone, but in this case, it looks like MS wants more money for SharePoint to let you deliver non-MS documents/files using the combination of Reporting Services and SharePoint.

There may be a way to 'fool the system' using Web Start JNLP links that trigger delivery of both the Report IOK file and the free Viewer. Ask the person running the Report Manager component that provides the Reporting Services browser interface if they can add arbitrary web/document/file links to a given authenticated/permissioned Report Manager page?