Next Tuesday – 29 januari 2013 – my colleague Valentino (blog | twitter) and I will give two sessions on the topic of Reporting Services deployments at the Belgian SQL Server User Group. In contrast with SSIS and SSAS, there isn't much available to automate this, so we'll be spending some time exploring how this gap can be crossed. Each of us will present a different method. Mine is about MSBUILD, an idea presented to my Jamie Thomson (blog | twitter), who pointed me to one of his blog posts: Deploying Reporting Services reports using msbuild.

Here are the official abstracts:

You have just finished your dazzling SSRS report project and you can’t wait to show your visual cleverness to the users. But, the DBA hasn’t given you permission to directly deploy to the production server! Instead, this paranoia person asked you to deliver him deployment scripts! What are you supposed to do? In the following two sessions, Valentino and Koen will show you two different methods to get the job done.

Automating SSRS deployment using built-in SQL Server tools

Have you always wanted to find out what the RS Utility is all about but never dared to ask? Then this session is what you’ve been waiting for!

Join Valentino to discover how rs.exe can be used to automate SSRS report deployment!

Speaker: Valentino Vranken
Level: 300 ****

Leveraging MSBUILD to automate SSRS deployments.

Unlike SSIS and SSAS, Reporting Services doesn’t have an easy way to automate deployments. You can work your way around with VBScripts, but isn’t there an alternative?

Yes there is! Koen Verbeeck will show you in this session how the MSBUILD platform can be used to deploy your SSRS projects to the server.

Speaker: Koen Verbeeck
Level: 300

All of this goodness will take place in the Ordina Belgium offices. Catering will be provided. This hasn’t been confirmed yet, but it might be pizza and beer 🙂 I will put my slides and demo material online after the session.

More information and registration (there’s still room left) on the SQLUG.be website.

UPDATE: It has been confirmed there will be pizza! 🙂