Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

As you can see , I’ve started to gradually blog my notes that I have gathered so far with regards to installing SSRS 2008 in an integrated mode with MOSS 2007 , also including the solutions and workarounds if possible. Here is a tricky one:

Before we performed the integration , we had provisioned a SharePoint Web application and extended it to an internet zone. We used domain user account for the application pool of this Web application ;therefore for its extended Web application. Default zone was configured to use Windows Authentication and extended zone with our custom auth provider.

** Snapshots are from an environment I used to replicate the issue**

We went ahead and performed the exact configuration steps on both report server and SharePoint WFE server. We also used domain user accounts for services accounts  all the way through as recommended here and verified that integration is in a healthy state. I documented part of our verification tests here.  In the Reporting Services Integration tab in the Central Administration site We specified Windows Authentication.

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Unless you are living under the rock , you’d probably know that since SQL Server 2005 SP2 time frame , you can configure a deployment of SQL Server Reporting Services to work with a deployment of SharePoint – known as SSRS 2008 installation in SharePoint Integrated mode. In the first attempt to combine their Business intelligence and Information Portal technologies together and by releasing SQL Server 2005 SP2 , Microsoft brought two very interesting technologies together and opened up a world of interest to many people including myself . When I first read about SP2 , I was like wait a minute, this is awesome!  Both products that I had been really passionate about for years now are getting much closer! Needless to say that I’ve always appreciated the  efforts Microsoft has put into making the technology , geekyness and weirdness around it transparent to the vast majority of people out there.

When SQL Server 2005 SP2 was released , MS really demonstrated that not only do they listen to their customer feedback, they also care so much about developers and to make their life easier. For example , in the context of SharePoint and SSRS integration , now you can potentially hire a report developer,they can build the reports (in much easier way) and publish them into SharePoint and basically hand them over to the  user community and business users. From here , they can take the wheel, manage and interact with these reports (high level) without having to know what the hell is going on under the hood! Isn’t that amazing that how two completely different technologies can be combined to make things much easier for everyone? Remember, easier something is, more people will use it. More people use it, more popular you’ll become! Microsoft ,for sure, has proved that they’ve learned this very simple rule of life…

The only thing that tipped me over the edge at that time was when I first attempted to bring the the best out of both products in a “real” integration project with a very “difficult-to-get-along” kind of client! (I still have the  nightmare of those two days) .  I really don’t want to talk about those issues here , but what made it difficult for me was no  proper documentation , no active community around both products  and , to an extend,  the immaturity of the integration . Things certainly have changed since then and obviously I’ve learned my “integration” lessons as well! Not that I don’t face any issues these days, but nowadays it’s much easier to find an answer – and yes , I find the answers to the majority of my questions in the blogs of those who are blessed and willing to SHARE their POINTS with the rest of the world!

When SQL Server 2008 and SSRS 2008 was RTMed , I didn’t make the same mistake I had made back in 2005 🙂 . I decided to to gain some home-based lab experiences before I go live with this in real engagements (Didn’t I just tell you that I learnt my integration lessons? 😉  ) Surprisingly, every installations I had at my home-based farms from a single stand-alone installation to a scale-out SSRS  along with a large SharePoint Server farm went really smooth without big stucking points. Documentation around the integration is much better this time around, but I am still not happy by the coverage of SSRS 2008 and SharePoint integration by MS people and community! Let’s hope it gets better soon.

Speaking of SSRS 2008 Add-in for SharePoint, here is one question that I frequently get asked :

I have configured report server in SharePoint integrated mode. I have installed SharePoint Web front-end components on the report server computer.I have downloaded and installed the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies on my other  Web front-end servers (including the one that hosts the Central administation site) , but Reporting Services section doesn’t appear in the Central Administration site;therefore I cannot complete the integration.  Where did it go?

Well , the answer is : You need to activate a site collection-scoped feature called Report Server Integration Feature on the Central Administration site.

This feature has two different behaviors when gets activated on Central administration site than other sites. When activated on the Central administration site , the feature does all of the things it does for other type of sites , plus it adds a section  called Reporting Services under the Application Management. This section must be used to make sure SharePoint is aware of my SSRS instance existence. Here is where the fun part starts 🙂 .

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Here is a nice Pre-Weekend surprise:

After an [Unwanted!] Windows update which restarted my computer the night before , I turned on one of my Windows 2008 machines and Windows froze at the start up progress bar. Basically , it shows the progress bar which is a good sign (Control has been handed over to the OS) , but immediately after that the screen goes black and Desktop never appears. I noticed that one of my hard disks goes grinding for 3 seconds , silent for 2 seconds and so on and so forth- I mean the same annoying sound pattern kept happening forever! Sounds like something is corrupted in my File System.

With my Google hat on, I found out that I am not alone in this , but most of the reported issues were related to the corrupted drivers. For what it’s worth , I never installed any new driver! Attempted “last known good configuration” , but no luck. Both safe mode options available in Windows 2008 also froze at crcdisk.sys command. I am like , WTF! I was just hoping that it was not the system drive that kept failing on me.

Finally opend up the case and took out the two non-system drives and rebooted. It booted up!… tried each drive with a new reboot , until I found the faulty drive. I took out that corrupted drive and put it into an SATA enclusure and hooked it up to the same box. Starange enough the OS reconginized it , but I couldn’t access the drive. Formatted it and put it back into the case and everything got back to the normal life before the crisis!

<Confession>Man, things like what happend to me on Friday scares the shit out of me. When do I want to learn the Backup lesson?!</Confession>

If you are among the millions who adore the most recent release of Microsoft Windows’ server line of operating systems , Windows Server 2008,  you have completely shifted [at least] your SharePoint dev environment to this great server platform.  First of all it is the most stable OS ever. Why would u want to develop anywhere else? (Real man only develops on Server OS not something like Vista 😉 ). Secondly every single driver and program I use works perfectly ; Needless to say that I ONLY work on x64 machines all the way through and all Vista x64 drivers works just fine for me. Okay , admittedly I have one issue in my development environments though. It is the MailServer!

Let’s say you are developing Workflows , event handlers , alerts or generally any SharePoint custom dev that requires sending (and receiving) emails. Obviously , you will want to be able to test the email generating functionality.right? Truth to be told , there are couple of issues here:

1. Not every developer is spoiled by having Exchange and AD on their dev machine or [if they are too much spoiled] on their dev farm!, but again many of us develop in virtualized environments and the question is why would we want to run a resource-intensive application such as Exchange Server on our Windows 2008 dev system  where every free bits matter?
2. Okay what about POP3 ?! Well, fortunately or unfortunately POP3 mail protocol is no longer shipped with Windows 2008 Server , so even at organizational level if you happen to be using POP3 , once you migrate over to Win 2008 you will have to use other applications such as Exchange or Small Business Server (SBS) ,so Pop3 is out of question too.
3. Windows 2008 Server is shipped with SMTP Service , but it is still running in IIS6 mode. Truthfully, once you go for IIS7.0 , you can’t go back to IIS 6.0 again . It is like driving a mountain bike after years & years of owning a yellow Lamborghini Gallardo! Just as a side note , I WANT that freaking chick-killer car (I have no idea if there is such an expression as chick-killer in English , but anywho!).I just need someone to teach me how to save my money 🙂
4. You certainly don’t want to send mail traffic via company SMTP server or Exchange as well- no dice!

The best news is that there are many free standalone Mail Servers out there that can get you setup in a heart beat! In this blog post , I am demonstrating how you may use  SmarterMail – a fully RFC compliant mail server package with a nice ASP.NET-based administrative console. I have been using this mail server since I shifted the gears to Windows 2008 and it works pretty slick for me.

1) Install SmarterMail Version 5.x which is available here.Their free version comes with many features , truthfully way more than what you may need.

2) Installation is pretty straightforward and it installs the administrative Web console at port 9998 by default, so go ahead and Log into SmarterMail with username admin and password admin.

3) You can override the default installation setting using SmarterMail Web Server Config utility which is shipped as part of the installation.

4) Right after you log in , you must change the default admin password. Type the new password and Click Next.

5) In this wizard,  you need to specify the IP of Primary DNS and Secondary DNS. Let’s just go ahead and only point the Primary DNS to 127.0.0.1. Leave all the other wizards with default values and Click Finish.

6) Once you logged into the administrative Web console , in the Manage tab, choose All Domains node from the left tree view and click on New icon on the right pane.

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Just a quick note to let you, PoSH lovers , know that if you are adding managed paths to an SPWebApplication object using PoSH ,  for adding an SPPrefix object to the existing SPPrefixCollection , you need to specify one of the following arguments (without space), otherwise you get a conversion error  to type “Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPrefixType” due to invalid enumeration value:

1. “ExplicitInclusion”
2. “WildcardInclusion”
3. “Exclusion”

In the following example, I am creating a sample Web application using the best defaults that SharePoint can determine (Thanks to SPWebApplicationBuilder!).I don’t care about setting any properties for my SPWebApplication. I then go ahead and immediately after the web application is provisioned (appears in IIS as a site) I add a managed path. Again , DO NOT forget to call Update() method on SPWebApplication object to serialize its state and propagate changes throughout your server farm. No different than when you write managed code against the SharePoint object model!