Absence makes the install grow fonder
As I mentioned in a previous post, our program manager Sudhir is blogging up a storm on all the great new features in Orcas, including remote Analysis Services and Sharepoint. You can also use pre-installed and configured Sharepoint instances, if your company already has one set up. Brian Harry recently posted the final TFS 2008 feature list, and I'm very pleased to say that you can also use a remote Reporting Services instance in the final version! Note that this was not available in time for Beta2, unfortunately. We still need to have some SQL assemblies on the application tier during setup so we can use the API, but that can be acheived by just installing the workstation components.
Having played around with remote capabilities a bit, I must say that I'm really pleased with the update. I've seen many requests for it on the forums and so believe you'll be pleased with it as well. In any case, I wanted to let you know a bit about how to set up our install to use a remote SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It's very similar to our Analysis Services Flexibility. You'll have to copy the installation folder onto a local disk from the media where you can edit the msiproperty.ini file.
- Open the MSIProperty.ini file located under InstallMedia\AT directory
- Change VSTF_RS_SERVER property to indicate the machine that the Reporting Services resides on.
- If you Report Manager virtual direrctory is located at a different path than the default https://[reportserver]/Reports, set the VSTF_RS_REPORTS_URI to point to the correct location.
- If your Report Server virtual directory is located at a path than the default https://[reportserver]/ReportServer, set the VSTF_RS_REPORTSERVER_URI to point to the correct location.
Note that you may have to open some firewall ports on the remote SSRS machine for our installation to complete successfully.
Happy installing, and please do let me know what your experiences are with remote components, good, bad, or ugly!