Reporting On Actual Content (WSS3)- What Tools or Webparts are available?

Question

We have WSS3 and SQL 2005 only and we have a growing amount of content that users would like to report on. I have been trying to find a reporting tool that meets the following requirements/limitations. We are in an environment without the following: Office on the Server (Not Allowed) Silverlight (Not Allowed or Not Installed) Abilty to use Add-Ins to Office

We would like the ability to: Create reports with charts/graphs and tables Print the reports and schedule them if possible. Dynamic headers and footers required! [Does not appear to be supported in Reporting Services 2005 which we do have]

We can develop webparts or purchase 3rd party webparts possibly. If it runs completely in Sharepoint it would be an option. I am not sure if there are any reporting tools that can do this or that will support printing reports as well!! Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You could always stand up a SQL Server Reporting Services instance. From within there, you can connect to Sharepoint lists via web services and create reports with the XML data being returned. This would allow you to schedule report execution and deliver daily reports and charts based off of Sharepoint list data.

Reports can be displayed in the browser by way of the Report Explorer and Report Viewer web parts that are bundled with the RS installation.

Answer 2

I'm from Enesys Software. In case you would like to go with Reporting Services, we have an Extension for Reporting Services (commercial product) that will let you build sophisticated reports out of your your SharePoint data (joining lists, joining lists and SQL Server tables, aggregating multiple lists in an entire site collection, support for multi-value fields, item versions, folders, ...). You can get more information at http://www.enesyssoftware.com. Please note that our extension will only work with Standard and Enterprise edition of SSRS.

I have read your comments regarding Reporting Services limitations and I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Reporting Services approach to report design (through its Report Definition Language) is very flexible. Much more than most Band Based reporting tools available. Besides stepped and matrix reports, you can build dashboards very easily. Not to say, it is perfect in all ways though. Because we have quite some experience designing reports using Reporting Services, I would be pleased to have a look at some sample report you may need and see if indeed we can't get it to work using Reporting Services.