ConfigMgr Reporting Services Permissions, Step-by-Step

I have seen a lot of information out there about setting up permissions on ConfigMgr SQL Reporting Services, but most of them seem to be confusing to me and point to many other locations. I hope to put together a simple Step-by-Step to configuring permissions to ConfigMgr Reporting Services. This assumes that you already have the Reporting Services Point up and running and functioning for your ConfigMgr Admin account.

(NOTE: If you are using Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, you may have issues accessing the reports. The simple solution is to run IE as Administrator. Their appears to be some issues with UAC and accessing Reporting Services on the same host.)

These instructions will walk you through creating a group with permissions to view and run all reports published to Reporting Services.

1. Create a Group in AD (like ConfigMgrRSUsers)



2. Click the "Home" link in the upper right hand corner to return to the main screen and select the properties tab.





3. Here we select New Role Assignment, enter the group name, and select the "Browser" role.




4. Your almost done! Users should now be able to access your ConfigMgr reports that you have published to Reporting Services, but they will get an error with you execute the report. (rsProcessingAborted and rsErrorOpeningConnection).


This is because the user/group does not have read access to the database. We can solve this a couple of different ways.

• Create a service account that will be used to access the database by SRS.
• Grant the user/group db_datareader permission on the database.

The link below provides the information needed to create either a service account or can be used to grant a group db_datareader permissions on the database. I would venture to say that using the service account may be a more secure method as you are not directly allowing users read permissions to the database.

References:
http://blog.coretech.dk/confmgr07/config-mgr-inventory-and-reporting/configuring-sql-reporting-services-user-permission-for-configuration-manager-2007/