Windows SharePoint Services and RS 2005

In RS 2000, users had a lot of grief to get RS to work on the same computer as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).  The reason for this is that WSS version 2.0 effectively commandeers the computer.  We provide a trouble shooting document for these here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/RSinstall/htm/gs_installingrs_v1_9fdy.asp

In RS 2005 we've done some work to make this *MUCH* easier.   So much so, that RS 2005 no long requires many of the instructions listed in the specific article documentation.  We have added two key things to setup and the configuration tool (WMI provider) to make this possible:

  1. RS setup creates an application pool on Windows 2003 Server – this creates process isolation between Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and RS.
  2. RS setup configures the exclusion paths for report server and report manager.

When you do these operations in the configuration tool, we set the exclusions for you and we allow you to create an application pool for RS.

Further, we have made changes to mitigate most of the effects of not enabling session state.  In RS2000, if you had session state disabled, you would get a nasty error message. In RS 2005, we've eliminated virtually 100% of the issues with session state being disabled - most importantly it doesn't fail out right. As such the session state instructions are optional.

When session state is off (the default for SharePoint) only Report Manager users who switch between List and Details view are affected. Due to session state being turned off, the user view preference is not always preserved. This does not affect functionality of the view and the user can always explicitly choose their view.  It is annoying but livable.

As such, the message for RS and SharePoint on the same computer is that you should not need to do anything at all and things should just work :-)

Take care and good luck,

-Lukasz