Thank you for your active community participation… Yes someone is actually listening!

It is not often that I blog, as a matter of fact it might even be my first time blogging on the RS team blog. But Robert (Bruckner) and I had felt for a while that we needed to get back to you the community about the impact and importance of your contribution.

First, I really want to express a warm "Thank you" for your contribution and feedback on our product. It goes a long way to influence us and the overall product directions.

We know you might often have wondered what happens to your connect post? You might find out if your bug was fixed, by trying the next CU (cumulative update) or major release, but what about DCR (Design Change request), what happens to them? We heard from some of you some frustration about the black hole that MS connect seem to be for you. And we are trying, through conferences and events, with the MVP alias, or any other venue that we have, to share some of the stuff that is going on in the RS team, but I don’t think we are doing it hardly enough.

So this might lead some of you to wonder if anyone is listening on the other side?

Well let me tell you a few things. First, we are listening; not only that, we are actually monitoring the Reporting Services forums and Connect site on a daily basis. We are then analyzing and reviewing monthly trend on vote count every month with the entire Reporting Services leadership team (All Managers and PMs).

So how much has the product benefited from your feedback and posts. Let’s look at a few stats and insights that Robert and I put together, taken since the beginning of MSConnect on May 2007.

Insight 1: We fixed 489 issues with a split of 395 bugs and 79 DCRs.

Insight 2: 157 customers reported 296 of these 489 issues. The highest number of issue reported by a single customer is 52, the second highest is 25. 193 fixed issues didn’t have specific customer details associated with them in Connect. It doesn’t mean it didn’t originate from a customer, it is just that we do not have the customer information for it.

Insight 3: Vote count does matter: we fixed 95% of issues that had more than 1 count. But we also fixed issues even if they have 1 or no vote count. We fixed 120 issue with a single vote and 281 with no vote at all.

Below you will the top 10 list of issues we have resolved over the last 3 years based on customer count:

Insight 4: Fixes found their way to various release: SQL2005 SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4, SQL 2008, SP1, VS 2008, VS 2010, SQL 2008 R2

Insight 5: We are fixing issues in all areas of the product: Controls (40), Data Visualization (22), Documentation (9), Management Tools (26), Report Creation tools (111), Processing and Rendering (211), Server (45), Setup (12), Sharepoint (11)

Processing and Rendering Examples include (with connect ids):

· Expression-based page break: 127050, 125417

· Reset page number on group: 127049, 282569, 426406

· Inline HTML: 127076, 127164

· Renderer-based formatting/expressions: 125384

· Page header: 331435, 231622, 540921

· Shared datasets: 282518

· PDF font embedding: 343496, 125435, 357637

· Excel naming worksheets: 235985, 552982

About 110 of the bug fixes and feature enhancements are related to the report authoring experience and report design environment, such as Report Builder, BIDS, query designers. Some of those are also about simplifying certain types of report designs and improving usability of the client tools.

If I can leave you with one thought from this post: it is that YOU are making a difference and you have a direct influence and contribution on the product quality and future by reporting issues, proposing enhancements and more than everything else by voting on your own issues or other existing issues. So please keep posting, voting and telling your friends to vote….

On behalf of the reporting services team: Thank You!

Thierry D'hers | Group Program Manaer | Reporting Services | SQL Server Business Intelligence | Microsoft Corporation

(thierry.dhers@microsoft.com)