In my two previous blogs in this series, I discussed shared schedules and walked you through step by step instructions on how to create shared them. In this post, I am going to show you how you can create a subscription using the new shared schedule.

If you missed my previous posts or need a refresher on how to create them, you can read them by navigating to the links above. Since this blog is part 3 of a series, if you want to follow along, I encourage you to do so. J I will be continuing on where I left off.

So, let’s get started.

Step by Step

For this step by step walkthrough, we are going to create a subscription to an existing report using the revamped Report Manager included in 2008 R2. Open up your browser and navigate to your report manager (http or https://servername:port/reports). Then navigate to a report that you can subscribe to as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: Subscribe to Report

After clicking on the Subscribe link, you should be taken to the Subscriptions page. This is where you choose how to deliver the report. You can choose Email or File Share in this type of subscription. When creating data driven subscriptions, you have one other option available which is NULL Delivery Provider. In my example below, I have chosen to save the file out to a UNC file share path. If you have created a shared schedule, select the option to process the subscription “On a shared schedule” and select the shared schedule as I have bubbled in figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Subscriptions Screen

Click OK to save your subscription. Your results may look like that shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: Report Subscriptions

Great! Now we have at least one subscription using the shared schedule. So in my next post, I am going to show you how to determine what reports are using our shared schedule. Which is very handy, should you ever have to notify the recipients that the time will need to be changed! J

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.