Overview (Reporting Services)

People use reports to communicate information, make decisions, and identify opportunities. Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help people throughout your organization create, deploy, manage, and use reports quickly and easily. With Reporting Services, you can retrieve data from relational, multidimensional, and XML-based data sources; publish reports that can be viewed in various formats; and centrally manage report security and subscriptions. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site.

Although Reporting Services integrates with other Microsoft technologies out-of-the-box, developers and third-party vendors can build components to support additional report output formats, delivery formats, authentication models, and data source types. The development and run-time architecture was purposely created in a modular design to support third-party extension and integration opportunities.