Tutorial: Setting Permissions in Reporting Services

Reporting Services uses roles and role assignments to control access to report server content. By creating role assignments, you enable other users in your organization to view and publish reports and other items on a report server.

There are two categories of roles: system-level and item-level. System-level role assignments specify a collection of tasks that apply to the report server site as a whole. Item-level role assignments describe tasks that apply to content, including permissions for publishing reports, generating models, viewing reports, setting properties, creating subscriptions, and so on. System-level and item-level role assignments are used together to provide a comprehensive set of permissions; even users who require limited access to a report server will benefit from having a system-level role assignment.

What You Will Learn

This tutorial will teach you how to use Report Manager to define role assignments that grant access to report server content.

This tutorial assumes that you are a local administrator, configuring report server access on a new installation for the users in your organization. Reporting Services uses Windows Authentication by default. If you are using forms authentication instead of Windows Authentication, specify group or user accounts that are valid for the custom authentication extension that is deployed on your report server.

This tutorial is divided into three lessons:

Note

This tutorial uses Report Manager to create role assignments. In contrast with previous releases, you can not use SQL Server Management Studio to create role assignments. Report Manager is the only tool that supports the creation and management of role assignments on a report server.

Requirements

This tutorial requires that you know how to use Report Manager. For more information about how to find this tool, see Tutorial: How to Locate and Start Reporting Services Tools.

You must have administrator permissions on the local computer.

The report server must be running in native mode.

You must have installed the AdventureWorks2008R2 sample reports and sample database, and published the sample reports to a report server. For more information, see Initial Installation (Reporting Services).

Estimated time to complete the tutorial: 30 minutes.

Note

When reviewing tutorials we recommend that you add the Next and Previous buttons to the document viewer toolbar. For more information, see Adding Next and Previous Buttons to Help.