I have previously written about upgrading and moving Reporting Services to SSRS/2008 R2/SP2010, and also on upgrading to the new Service application in 2012. Both of these deal with moving prior versions of Reporting Services running in SharePoint mode to more recent versions, also running in integrated mode. What has been lacking from Microsoft until now was a mechanism to help move an organization from Reporting Services in Native mode to Reporting Services in integrated mode.
The solution to date has been to go back to the source projects in BIDS and redeploy them to the Integrated Mode server. This of course assumes that BIDS was used for report design (not Report Builder), and that the projects are available. You also lose all server side configurations (like subscriptions) with this approach.
On Friday, April 20 2012 Microsoft released Version 1.0 of the Reporting Services Migration Tool, which allows you to do just that. It’s a high level tool that brings all of the artifacts out of the Native mode instance, and at a later point in time, import them into the Integrated Mode instance. Ultimately, the stated aim of the tool is to allow a file system level backup of your Reporting Services Instances, be they Native or Integrated mode.
It can be run either by command line, or through a GUI. A snapshot of the GUI screen can be seen below.
The tool is definitely version 1, and has several limitations which I’ll outline below, but it does work. It does so by connecting to either the WMI provider, or the Reporting Services web services, then extracting all of the available content, and then building a PowerShell script which can be run to place the backed up content in a SharePoint document library that has been properly configured to support the Reporting Services content types.
Operation of the tool is relatively straightforward, and is adequately documented on the download page, so I won’t go through a step by step, but I do want to share a few observations.
Firstly, migration is from Native Mode to Integrated Mode only. The stated objective of this tool is to support both modes on either end of the migration path, but for now it’s a one way trip. For the moment, it does limit its ability to perform as a backup tool. However, if you examine your output folder, you’ll find all of your report files, connection files (etc), so if you’ve built your reports with BIDS, and lost the original source project, it’s a great way to get them out of the Reporting Services database.
I have also been unable to get the WMI provider to work at all. I’ve tested with both SSRS 2008R2 and SSRS 2012 Native mode sources, but the tool can’t seem to find the WMI instance. The tool still works in this configuration, but it will not back up passwords or history snapshots. I’ll update this post if/when a solution to this can be found.
UPDATE – Thanks to Tristan in this MSDN forum thread – The WMI provider is working. I have added the paragraph and image below.
The Instance Name field is mislabelled. It should be SERVERInstance for non default instances, or just SERVER for default instances. Unfortunately the nowhere in the help is the requirement for SERVERNAME mentioned. Essentially, you should treat this field the same as you would the Server field when connecting via Management Studio. The image above has been updated to show the correct value for Instance Name (In this case, although not necessary, I have included the name of the default instance).
As outlined on the download page, the tool does not back up Reporting Services security information, or role information – which makes sense when moving to a new security model. Also, linked reports aren’t supported in Integrated mode, so they’re not backed up at all.
For a complete list of constraints and instructions, visit the download page.
For it’s limitations, this tool is a very welcome addition to the toolkit. Migrating from Native Mode to SharePoint Integrated mode Reporting Services no longer needs to be painful.
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