These days it's so important that business decision makers have access to the correct data quickly. The data has to have the information needed and opportunities to drill down to find additional, supporting information. The Reporting Design Hands-On Lab is a service that enables a company to start or extend their reporting development with a dashboard or Business Intelligence Report from Microsoft. The customer's staff receives training on how to create these reports efficiently, which then allows that customer to become self-reliant for future reporting needs.
How it all works
When a company is interested going ahead with the Reporting Design Hands-On Lab, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer contacts them to have a meeting to discuss what can be done within Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services and how to take advantage of best practices to establish requirements for their report.
After receiving the report requirements, a reviewer call is held for validation. Engineers then work with the client to create the report they requested with either a recommended template view or the template the client is currently using.
Once the report has been completed, a four-hour session is held with any of the client's Business Intelligence staff to examine the report in greater detail. During this session, the engineers and the client will review the important tables, how the SQL statement was created, the data source creation process, and the formatting for the report.
To close out the service, a final call is held to review the report and answer any questions about additional suggested trainings or formats on how to move forward.
Learning Best Practices
During the engagement, engineers review the requirements document and discuss the best ways to develop requirements for future reports. Other discussions during this time include how to highlight the columns needed on the reports, opportunities to do row and column groupings, and totals and subtotals needed for the report or dashboard.
Training the Staff
After the report is complete, a session is conducted to do a detailed review of the report creation process. During this interactive session, customers learn the whole design process, starting with the requirements to the testing and deployment of the report. The review includes creating the SQL statement and a review of the important tables for the module related to this report. Engineers then show the customer how to create a data source to connect to the database. They also show customers how to work through the design in Visual Studio Business Intelligence Studio and show them how to pull different components onto the report, how to create parameters, and how to incorporate design and expressions as needed. Finally, engineers show how to deploy the completed report into the Microsoft Dynamics application.
In order to increase the customer's understanding of the application, their Business Intelligence team is directly involved in the service and learns how to build reports to support their Dynamics implementation going forward.
Deliverables
There are two deliverables for this service. The first is a sample SQL Reporting Services report with built-in requirements the customer requested. The second component is a deliverable document providing a summary of the services and provides content on suggested requirements documents and readiness plans for Business Intelligence resources.
If you feel this is something you and your company may be interested in, feel free to email us at PFEDynamics@microsoft.com.