If you’re wondering about using reporting services with Sage 200, this can easily be done. Sage 200 uses a Microsoft SQL Server to store the data now anyway so adding reporting services functionality is easy as it will either already be installed or be available to download and install from either microsoft.com or your SQL server CD.

Why use reporting services over the standard reports? For a start you can create reports that make use of additional field information in S200 (analysis fields for example), you can easily export reports to excel, CSV or PDF and you can also provide data to users who are not S200 users and save yourself the license costs in the process. A good example is an aged debt report, you could have a credit controller who doesnt actually need a user licence but give them access to a report which gives them all they need to chase money!

If you have ever encountered this error when using Visual Studio 2005 to build reports there is a hotfix available which should fix the problem. It is very annoying and is one of those problems that can manifest itself occasionally or multiple times in one day. You can get the fix here and you can use your passport sign-on (i.e. hotmail sign-in details) to access the download area.

You may have a problem running an SSRS report and get the following error “For more information about this error, navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors”. Now chances are if it is a production report server you wont have machine access to run the report as a local administrator. So the only other option is to enable remote errors. How do you do that? Simple! Download this file and then from a command prompt enter the following;

rs -i EnableRemoteErrors.rss -s http://servername/ReportServer

Now when you run the report you should get detailed enough information to allow you to find the problem.