Update to the SRS madness

As an update to my experience of migrating SRS 2000 to SRS 2005 I have tried a different approach, using a freebie scripting tool called Reporting Services Scripter.

Backing up a little, we still haven't moved our production reports over to SRS 2005 due to some other priority projects - it doesn't look like it will happen now to the New Year. Therefore I hope to install SRS 2005 with almost all the default options so I don't have to do any of the jiggery pokery that I had to go through last time and use the scripting tool instead.

In practise the scripting tool is a little buggy and rather fussy about poorly designed reports but it does work. I won't go into the ins and outs of how to use it but here are a couple of pointers: If you run it from your 2005 server the .rss (VBScript files that rs.exe uses to create the reports and subscriptions) you will need to do a search and replace to replace all instances of a method called SetReportDatasources to SetItemDatasources as the former is deprecated in 2005 it seems; for the subscriptions to be created on the destination server you will need to have the datasources configured and with the correct passwords set - even then the scripting tools log will still complain about datasources not be available.