As you will see by the dates in my screenshots, I wrote them quite a while back while touring the world mastering the art of Ultimate Fighting. Yes, I consider it a form of art. Maybe that is why I forgot about this in my blog pile. One too many hits to my skull that is! 🙂 At any rate, my beautiful wife, (who was going to be training some people in TSQL and SSRS this week) asked me if I had any blogs or articles about it and I said that I did. Only to find out that I never actually posted them! Well, it’s now or never! So here we go…

Reporting Services allows us to create subscriptions on reports that we have access to. For this four part blog series, I am going to show you how to create shared schedules that can be used as a quick way to select a commonly used schedule when creating your subscriptions. For example, let’s say that you have certain reports that are delivered every morning (Monday – Friday) at 7:15 AM. Or perhaps you would want to have your weekly reports delivered at 9:00 PM on Sunday. You could create shared schedules to meet these needs and then set your subscription to use them!  As an example, I have created a few shared schedules using SSRS 2008 (2005 will be identical) that can be seen in figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Shared Schedule Screen

Figure 2 was taken in the updated report manager in SSRS 2008 R2. Also note that you can Delete, Pause or Resume schedules as well!

Figure 2: Shared Schedule Screen in 2008 R2

Alternatively, you can create and manage these shared schedules using SQL Server Management Studio. You’ll just have to connect up to the reporting services instance (if you need help on this, see my brief blog on connecting here) and then navigate to the Shared Schedules folder as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: Shared Schedules Using SSMS

Now in order to create shared schedules, you must have the permission to manage shared schedules. If you’re an admin on the report server, then you won’t have any problems creating them. If you’re an end user with limited permissions, you’ll need to be given appropriate rights to create these (most environments may not do this). I particularly would just have the admin create several shared schedules and then just be sure that anyone that needs permission to view the shared schedules be given this access. See books online for more information on permissions.

So, now that you know what shared schedules are and what they look like, in my next blog post I will show you how to create one using the enhanced report manager released with 2008 R2.

Here are links to the other posts in this series in case you want to keep reading:

• Part 1 - Introducing Shared Schedules

• Part 2 - Creating Shared Schedules
• Part 3 - Creating a Standard Subscription
• Part 4 - Shared Schedule Management

I hope that you have enjoyed this post. If you did, please take just a moment to rate it below! Also, if you don’t already, please be sure to follow me on twitter at @briankmcdonald. Also note that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my blogs or find me at any of the below methods.