While working on some questions for a project I am working on, I ran into an issue with Report Manager today.  I haven’t had the pleasure of running into this issue in a while and thought I would share the issue and the resolution because it affects both Windows 7 and Vista.

Between this time and the previous few times I’ve dealt with this, I’ve spent more than time that I should on it and it does telegraph well into a second issue that I’ll talk about at the end.  And the easiest way for me to remember things is to write them down.

Your First Time

When going into Report Manager for the first time after installing it on my laptop I got the following screen:

Not a very exciting screen.  Reporting Services is nice and secure because, as a user, I couldn’t do anything.  But since doing something was what was needed, figuring this out was required.

I started by going out and checking the Reporting Services configuration.  When the configuration tool is opened in Windows 7 and Vista it asks the user if they want to allow the program to make changes to the computer.

Ah-ha! Security?!

I never setup any security for Reporting Services after the installation.  By default, Reporting Services makes the BUILTIN\Administrators account an administrator to Reporting Services.  I was running Internet Explorer but I wasn’t running it as a user, not as an administrator.  So while I was using

Setting Up The First User

To get started, start up Internet Explorer as an administrator.  To do this right-click on Internet Explorer in the menu and select “Run as administrator”.  BTW, you should check out Live Mesh if you haven’t it’s great for synchronizing folders.

Next go to Site Settings and select the Security tab.  You’ll notice that only the BUILTIN\Administrators have access after the installation.  This was the problem initially because Internet Explorer from regular launch didn’t acknowledge these permissions.

Select New Role Assignment and add yourself in as a  System Administrator.

Next go to Home and select Properties and go to the Security tab.

  Select New Role Assignment and add yourself in as a  Content Manager.

Now close Internet Explorer and open it back up.  Browse to the Reporting Services site and you should be able to do everything you expected to be able to do before.

Bad Default Behavior?

Now, you might be thinking this is all pointless and definitely a bug.  Truthfully it’s not, Internet Explorer is running under minimum permissions which you really want it to do.  The lower the permissions that you are cruising the internet with, the better.  Unless you like viruses then the worse.

Also, the BUILTIN\Administrators account should be removed as a user and administrator from Reporting Services as soon as the “real” administrators have been added.  No sense leaving a whole in your Reporting Services site for administrators from other systems to get access to reports that they shouldn’t have access to.

Microsoft has announced that the Beta exam for 71-680: TS: Windows 7, Configuring has been opened up.  Beta exams are free to take are if you are planning to take the exam at a later date, now is as good a time as any… well a little studying first might help.

It doesn’t appear that the outline for the exam is up on Microsoft Learning yet, but you can get a lot of information from the Windows 7 – Learning Portal.

The beta exam is open through May 18th and I really recommend taking it to help vet out the exam and… well, it’s free.  Be sure to be as wordy as possible in the exam comment section the people that work on the exam put a lot of time into reading comments and adjusting the exams around those comments.