Upgrading and Moving Integrated Mode Reporting Services With SharePoint

Dec 192011
 

There is a plethora of instructions out there on upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, but relatively little on doing the upgrade where Reporting Services has been set up in SharePoint integrated mode. Given that there are a few gotchas that you can run into when doing this, I decided to put together this step-by-step, complete with the gotchas.

The most common scenario that will be encountered, given the vintages of the products will be an RS upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 R2. In addition, the in place upgrade is relatively painless (in the short term….) so I’ll be walking through a DB attach upgrade, which is just as applicable to RS as it is to SharePoint. Finally as I’ve written about previously, in a small farm, it’s likely a better idea to add the Reporting Services bits to a SharePoint front end server, than to add the SQL server to the SharePoint farm, and that will also be a part of our scenario.

The first question to answer is “why bother”? One of the advantages to using RS in SharePoint Integrated mode is that unlike Native mode, the reports, data connections and models are stored directly in SharePoint. It is therefore possible to just create a new RS database, and move forward. However, since subscriptions, schedules, and cache profiles are still in the database, it’s likely worth it to do the upgrade.

Step 1 – Back Up The Asymmetric Key

Reporting Services itself uses 2 SQL databases. One of the databases is for temporary operations, but the other database stores a number of important, and sensitive items for this reason, all sensitive items in the database are encrypted with a key. If we want to get access to these items, we need the key. To do so, we need to back it up from the source server before we move ahead.

Run the Reporting Services Configuration Manager on the source RS server, and select “Encryption Keys”. Click the Backup button, select (and remember) a password, and then save the key to the file system. 

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Once saved, copy the key file to the destination RS server (likely your SharePoint 2010 front end server).

Step 2 – Back Up the Reporting Services Databases

Run SQL Server Management Studio on the Server where the Reporting Services databases are located. Run full backups of the two RS databases. When complete, copy the backups to the destination SQL server (likely the server that will host the SharePoint 2010 databases).

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Step 3 – Restore the Reporting Services Databases

Using SSMS, restore the two databases to the host SQL server. Once restored, it’s likely a good idea to set the recovery model to Simple, and the Compatibility level to SQL Server 2008. These steps aren’t required, but are recommended, unless you have a reason for not doing so.

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Step 4 – Run the RS Configuration

If Reporting Services hasn’t yet been installed on the SharePoint server, do so, otherwise, proceed to configuration by running the Reporting Services Configuration Wizard on the destination RS Server. Configure the basic steps, and then when it comes to Database configuration, select the option to choose an existing database.

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Select the server where you restored the files in step 3, and select the primary RS database (the one without the word “Temp” in it”).

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Complete the configuration wizard.

Step 5 – Connect SharePoint to Reporting Services

From SharePoint Central Administration, select General Application Settings, and then Reporting Services Integration.

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Complete  the integration configuration, and then select OK

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So far so good – now we’re ready for some gotchas. If you now click on the “Set Server Defaults” link in the Reporting Services section, you likely get a rather nasty looking error. You’ll also experience this error if you access ewither of the two RS URLs defined in the RS configuration wizard. The error is:

The report server installation is not initialized. (rsReportServerNotActivated)

This error happens when the server can’t access configuration information, and the most common cause of that is that it can’t decrypt the content. In our case, it can’t because we haven’t yet restored our key.

Step 6 – Restore the Asymmetric Key

On our new RS server, we need to run the RS Configuration Manager, Select Encryption Keys, and then click the Restore button. You will be prompted for the file that you created and copied in Step 1, and this is where remembering the password comes in very handy.

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Once this is done, we can close the configuration manager and return to Central Administration. However, now when we try to access access any aspect of RS we get a new error:

The feature: “Scale-out deployment” is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services. (rsOperationNotSupported)

The reason for this error is that when we restored the key, it added an entry in the Keys table in the Reporting Services database, causing RS to think that we’re using multiple Reporting Services servers. This is what’s known as a scale-out deployment, and is only supported in the Enterprise version of Reporting Services. Obviously this isn’t a problem for anyone running Enterprise, but if not, it’s a showstopper.

The way to fix this is to remove the old server entry in the Keys table. Using SQL Server Management Studio, connect to the Reporting Services database, and open the dbo.Keys table. The old entry should be easy to spot as it will have the old server name. Simple delete the row.

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Once the offending entry is deleted, RS should be good to go.

7. Fix up the content type names

I have posted about this already, but often, an upgrade will break the Content Type names for the Reporting Services content types. Just follow the steps in this post to clean them up.

8. Reconnect Reports with Data Sources And/Or Republish

In addition, moving connection files and reports around in SharePoint can cause them to be disconnected from each other, or for the connection files to be disabled. It’s a good idea to navigate to all of your reports to make sure that they are connected, or better yet, to republish from the source if you had previously used BIDS to publish reports.

How To Fix Broken Reporting Services Content Type Names

Dec 092011
 

Recently, after helping to upgrade a customer from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, we noticed some oddities around the Reporting Services content types. The RS content types are deployed into a  farm when the RS add-in is installed. The observed problem was that the names of the content types, and the content type group was all messed up.

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The names displayed were the internal names that are used to support multilingual installations. What I believe caused this problem was the the content database had been upgraded to 2010 prior to the add in being installed on the farm, so the English names could not be resolved.

All existing items using the types continued to work, and reports could still be deployed using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). However some UI dependent functions, like Report Builder could not be used without the proper names. Luckily, the fix is relatively straightforward. All that we need to do is to set the correct names manually. To get the correct farm, all that is necessary is to inspect an unaffected farm to see the section below.

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In order to fix this, you need to first navigate to the root of your site collection, and then select Site Actions – Site Settings, and then click on Site content types in the Galleries section.

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At this point, you should see the affected section, it will be right at the top. We need to fix the content types one at a time, so click on one of the affected content types. The Content type editor window will appear.  From that Window, simply select Name, description, and group.

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You will then be able to edit the values for Name, Description, and Group.

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For the first one that you edit, you’ll need to select the New Group option, and enter the correct name of the group, as indicated above. For the other two content types, you’ll be able to select the correct group from the existing group list.

Once you’ve edited all three content types, that’s it! You’re done.

Well, sort of…

Unfortunately the name change will only affect new libraries , or newly configured libraries. For libraries that already have these content types attached to them, you’ll need to repeat the process for each library that has been affected. I imagine that it’s quite possible to write a PowerShell script that will do this for all libraries, but so far, the remediation effort hasn’t warranted it.

How to Get SharePoint Data Into a Data Warehouse (And Back Again)

Oct 282011
 

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien……

Yesterday, as part of the ongoing Panellist Spotlight series for SharePoint Shoptalk, I presented a session on how to move your data from SharePoint, and in to a data warehouse, and then consume the warehoused data directly within SharePoint. These presentations are recorded, and posted online, and if you’re interested, you can view the entire presentation below:

In it, I demonstrate how SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) can be used to extract the data from SharePoint, and to store it in a SQL Server data warehouse. Then I walk through the creation of an external content type, and an external list using SharePoint Designer and SharePoint Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Finally, I create a report using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in SharePoint Integrated mode.

Thanks to Jamees Wright for organizing the session, and to my fellow panellist, Laura Rogers.

Why I Love Office 365

Oct 212011
 

OK, so my company is a Microsoft partner, and we’re supposed to like everything that they throw our way right? That’s actually not true. I’ll certainly give most things that they do a fair shot. It’s also true that I’m willing to sacrifice a certain amount of capability for either ease of use, or for the way that Microsoft products work well together, but as I noted in a previous post, I only gave up my BlackBerry when Microsoft came out with a product that was worth using.

My company is small (currently 6 people) and widely distributed. Cloud solutions make perfect sense to us,and we have been using Exchange Online for over 2 years now. Our requirements for SharePoint went beyond what was possible in BPOS’ offering, but since migrating to Office 365 6 months ago, the  new SharePoint online fits the bill, and more and more of our corporate assets live there now.

UnlimitedViz is currently primarily a SharePoint services company focused on Business Intelligence, and a significant portion of those services involve architecting SharePoint environments at a lower level, which involves sizing servers, making resource decisions, etc. I personally love designing solutions and watching them come to life. We are certainly more than capable to maintain our own SharePoint infrastructure, so why would we want to use an admittedly more limited version of the product that is maintained by someone else?

Pretty much because it’s maintained by someone else.

As mentioned above we’re small, and we need to be focused on what we do best, which is providing services to our customers, and building product. Maintaining internal systems, no matter how good we are at it, is a distraction, and a significant cost, both capital and operational. The per user cost of Office 365 is pretty simple to justify from just a cost standpoint, but there are many more benefits that are brought to the table.

No matter what the location of a team member, they can easily access what they need to. Lync brings that down to the voice and IM communication level. No need to mess around with access methods, VPNs, Firewalls, Reverse Proxy servers and the like. We can get to our content easily on site, at home via whatever device we happen to need. Granted, I could set that stuff up on-premise, but now I don’t have to! I also know that my data is safe, and the performance is going to be good. Two months ago, Exchange online suffered an outage for about two hours (the only hiccup I’ve experienced so far). My initial reaction was “what can I do to fix this”, but that was quickly superseded by  “It’s not my problem to fix”, so I just sat back and got other work done.

As we bring more customers onto Office 365, supporting them just gets simpler. A simple client request can be acted upon immediately by launching a browser window, and connecting to their site, seamlessly. With most onsite installations, I need to start a virtual machine, connect through a VPN client, and then hope that the correct tools are installed on the VM, or the client site, depending on the access mechanism. I try to keep a VM image available for every type of VPN client used, which is a hopeless and necessary task due to the incompatibilities between clients. In my opinion, the world will be a better place when VPN clients are eliminated (or at least consolidated”).

Customers using Office 365 don’t need VPN clients, and it makes it that much easier (and cheaper for them) for us to support them.

There a a whole bunch of great features about Office 365 (Shared OneNote files accessed via Windows Phone, browser and client is a good one, not to mention Lync), but the reason that I really like it is that it’s solid, it works, and it lets my business focus on using its tools, not maintaining them.

SharePoint Online Fall 2011 Service Update Starts Oct 20

Oct 132011
 

Today, Microsoft sent out a bulletin to SharePoint Online users notifying them that they would begin rolling out the Fall 2011 Service Update. This is the much vaunted update announced at the SharePoint Conference 2011 that includes BCS services. For those that don’t already subscribe, the list of new features can be found below (copied from the official email).

Feature

Description

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) <WCF Connector> *Enterprise plans only

Enables connecting to external systems via web service based endpoints

External Sharing: Windows LiveID support

Allows Office 365 tenant administrators to invite external users to a site collection. They sign in with a Windows Live ID-based user name and password.

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” (official support and http:// connectivity)

Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango,” now enables both small business and enterprise Office 365 customers to access SharePoint Online lists and document libraries from their Windows Phone.

Recycle Bin: deleted site self-recovery

Self-service ability to recover sites from a site collection’s recycle bin

Browser support: Internet Explorer 9

Adds official support for the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser

Browser support: Chrome

Adds official support for the Chrome browser


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