A few days ago, SQL Server 2008 SP1 has been released. Except for the pile of hotfixes that it contains, I find this release particularly interesting because of a couple reasons:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

As far as SharePoint is concerned, I’m looking forward to the new version of the Reporting Services Addin that was released together with the service pack. The new Report Builder is also included, so your users can finally edit their reports from within the SharePoint site. I’ll post my findings on this one very soon!

Recently I've been struggling with the integration of Reporting Services 2008 and SharePoint 2007. One of the fundamental steps in getting this to work, is to grant the Reporting Services service account (domain user of course) the necessary rights in your SharePoint databases. The provided addin is supposed to do this for you. However, in my farm setup I cannot get it to work properly. Every time I'm greeted with the following error: "Unable to connect to the Report Server WMI provider". It seems that the server hosting the Central Administration website cannot connect properly to the SSRS server.

One way to get around this, is to install the Central Administration website on the SSRS server - at least temporarily. But as you add content databases in the future, you must follow this scenario again.

Therefore I recorded all steps that this function performs:

1) adds the SSRS service account to the WSS_WPG group on the Reporting Server

2) Grants the SSRS service account the following rights on your SharePoint databases:

• Contentdb for central administration: db_owner & WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• Configuration db: WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• For every other content db: db_owner

That's all there is to it!

SQL Server 2008 is finally released. I hope that means that SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 is imminent...

Take a look at the official announcement, the new features and the complete documentation.

UPDATE: don't install it on your development machines yet, as Visual Studio 2008 RTM does not work together with the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. We'll have to wait for SP1 of VS2008.