In my previous post, I discussed what shared schedules were and how you could use them. With that knowledge under your belt, I can now show you how to create one using the enhanced report manager released with 2008 R2.

Step By Step

Fire up your internet browser and connect to your report manager (http://servername/reports) and navigate to Site Settings as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Report Manager - Site Settings

Select the Schedules tab as shown below in figure 5. If you do not have any shared schedules set up on the report server, you will see similar results to the below. Click on the New Schedule button to create a new shared schedule.

Figure 5: Site Settings – Schedules Tab

When you click on the New Schedule button you will be prompted for details on the shared schedule. Figure 6 shows that I created a schedule named Daily 6 AM that could be used to deliver or process report subscriptions. I have set this schedule to run Sunday – Saturday at 6 am. Alternatively, I could have chosen to run it every Hour (or minutes for that matter), Weekly, Monthly or Once. If you choose to create a weekly schedule, you could set it to run every N week’s (where N represents a number, like run every 3 weeks).

Figure 6: Scheduling Screen

After you enter the details of your schedule, click OK to save it. If you have been following along, you have now created a shared schedule. In part two, I will show you how to use shared schedules and show you how to check to see what reports are using them. That way, if you ever decide to change the schedule, you will be able to see which reports will be affected.

In the next part, I will show you how to create standard subscriptions using our new schedule. So be sure to check back for my next release.