SSRS tweaks for external facing environment

An external facing (for consumption of non-corporate users e.g. customers, vendors etc.…) SSRS requires some extra tweaking in order to make it functional and compliant with organizational policies.

1. SSRS session expiring even before SharePoint session expires (for SharePoint integrated mode)

SSRS has its own session settings. make sure you have set them at par with SharePoint session settings. I’ve discussed about SharePoint settings in my previous blogs.

In case you do not want confusion between SSRS and SharePoint session settings, uncheck the “Use Session Cookies”. If there is a difference between session timeout settings between SharePoint and SSRS, you might face problems while creating subscriptions. Every time the session expires, you might get errors that subscription list doesn’t exist if you are on manage subscription page.

2. Disable “Open with Report Builder”

When SSRS reports are executed they show “Open with Report Builder” option under action button. In case of external facing environment you may not like it, because mostly external users are non-windows users while the report builder tool works only with windows authentication; so its of no use anyways. To remove this option from under the action button run following SQL query on SSRS main database.

1 UPDATE dbo.ConfigurationInfo
2 
3 SET value = ‘False’
4 
5 WHERE name = ‘EnableReportDesignClientDownload’