Creating dashboards using Reporting Services

Dashboards are becoming commonplace in both large and small business. It's possible to create dashboards in SharePoint so that we can use Reporting Services reports for its information.

It does so through the use of web parts. Web parts are self-contained pieces of functionality that you can place onto a SharePoint page. After configuring Reporting Services into SharePoint a new web part will become available, one for SQL Server Reporting Services.

Using these web parts we'll create a new page and add three reports to it in order to form a dashboard.

Getting ready

There's quite a bit of setup work to do for this recipe. We'll need to create three reports that will be contained on our dashboard. For two of the reports we will recycle reports we created earlier in the book.

For the first, open Report Builder and follow the basic instructions found in Chapter 2, Authoring Reports with SQL Server Data Tools . In this version, simply embed the data source...