SSRS – Have you used it yet?

While there are several BI technologies and more coming into the foray every day, SSRS has remained a key player in this area for quite some time now.  One of the biggest advantages of SSRS reporting is that it involves the participation of the end user and that is very intuitive to use.

Let’s go back few years when excel was the go to tool for dash boarding.  Every time a director or VP wanted a report, he would go to his developers to extract information from the database to help him make dashboards for his meetings.  The end user had to rely on the developers to extract information and had to spend several minutes if not hours to make a dashboard.  This all works ok when the meeting is scheduled for a specific day of the week or month.  We all know this is a myth and most meetings happen impromptu.  In such cases, there is not enough time to extract data and to extrapolate that information into graphs.

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Here is why SSRS came in as a key player.  With a strong foundation of Microsoft, SSRS brought in some of the best features and much needed features:

• Easy connection to databases
• User friendly interface allowing users to design reports and make changes on the fly.
• Report generation on a button click.
• Subscription based delivery to deliver reports on a specific day and time of the month.

While these features may not look ground breaking in the first look, these features actually bring in a lot of value.  These features save a lot of time and that time in business directly translates into revenue.  The developers can design dashboards once and deploy them to a server.  The VP or director can press a button to get these reports on his machine.  Furthermore, the reports can be exported in several formats.  What I really like about the reports though is the look and feel.  Microsoft retained the aesthetics of MS excel reports and by that I mean that you can have a pie chart in excel and in SSRS look exactly same.  This is a great feature especially for the audience since it most people do not like to see the look of the reports change over time.  Another great feature is that SSRS has fantastic security options and one can implement a role based reporting.

In summary, SSRS is a power packed tool and you should reap benefits of the great features that come with it.