Professional Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Book Review

I wish I had this book a year ago. It does an excellent job of describing the Reporting Services configuration steps to set up SharePoint Integration mode. It can be pretty confusing the first time. It does not have any information on the Report Viewer web parts that come with SQL Server that can be installed and used to run against a Report Manager instance. The last place we tried to set up SharePoint Integration mode we could not get it done because Kerberos had everything hosed up. We ended up just using the web parts that come with SQL Server. The book has several chapters on using Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS). The chapters span beginner to advanced techniques. I have been working with Reporting Services for 5 – 6 years now and have had to learn the hard way that you should plan your report projects. It may be tempting to skip the chapter on planning report projects, but don’t, there is a lot of good advice in it. The authors also include a nice chapter on advanced deployment techniques. It is nice when you can just use BIDS to deploy, but often you need more options, especially in a production environment. They also include a nice chapter on using the gauges. Nowadays everyone wants a dashboard, and throwing in a gauge or two to wow the business owners never hurts. All in all I highly recommend this book for anyone getting into using Reporting Services with SharePoint.