Publish reports to SharePoint

general discussion
1

We’re attempting to distribute reports, in Excel or PDF format, within a SharePoint portal. Has anyone accomplished this beyond using a folder/tree structure?

wcrossman (BOB member since 2012-05-29)

2

Check this thread:

Not sure what you mean by “Folder / Tree” structure though?

HTH

mcnelson :uk: (BOB member since 2008-10-09)

3

Thanks for the recommendation. I apologize for my very short description. Let me go a little more in depth.

We’re moving to a SharePoint intranet portal. The desire is to publish reports to SharePoint rather than emailing them. We’ve had success publishing to a document library, so that hurdle has been cleared.

The business challenge we face is organizing the reports and using SharePoint alerts. We know that we can create document libraries in a way to mimic a folder/tree structure. In this scenario, each report would have its’ own document library. However, when it comes to SharePoint alerts, users would have to define an alert on every folder. In effect, we would be replacing emails with report attachments with alert emails.

We have one user that receives over 80 reports, some monthly, some weekly, some daily, and a few hourly. The trick is navigation beyond one report per document library. Our consulting partner suggested a custom webpart that would interrogate file properties (i.e., Title, Keywords, Category, etc) of the workbook. The custom webpart would then use dropdown selectors to guide the user to the appropriate report(s). The final selector was time, so they could retrieve “last month”, etc. The challenge with this solution is that I’d have to add custom code to populate the File metadata because out-of-the-box scheduler doesn’t appear to support this functionality (not surprising to me).

We’re researching the license impact of deploying the BI Launch Pad within a webpart. We’re weighing pro’s and con’s.

The point of my post was to see if anyone had tackled deploying reports to SharePoint without using a series of document libraries.

wcrossman (BOB member since 2012-05-29)

4

Hi,
I’m no Sharepoint Expert, but you could fulfill your metadata issue by using Sharepoint workflows on the target document libraries - when a new item is added, trigger a workflow to add certain Metadata based on the time, date, library, name of report, etc.

It’s always struck me that there’s a lot you can do within Sharepoint; it’s easy to get your documents into a Document Library, using Sharepoint workflows you can do so much more to them after the fact, to make up for what Business Objects maybe can’t do. If you’re using Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise, take a look at the Document Center & Content Organizer functionalities.

HTH

mcnelson :uk: (BOB member since 2008-10-09)

5

Thanks for the input. I was wondering if I should approach it from SharePoint. Certainly something to pursue.

I’d be surprised if the scheduler could dynamically populate this information, but I have to do my due diligence.

Thanks again!

wcrossman (BOB member since 2012-05-29)

6

We have a publication that sends its output to a windows folder. Then a batch job populates the Sharepoint folders.

RikDeclercq :belgium: (BOB member since 2006-09-28)

7

What we did is setup an incoming E-Mail for the Library and Scheduled our BO WebI Reports to that E-Mail. Under Library Settings, select “Incoming e-mail settings”. Since it doesn’t have to exist in your regular E-Mail server, call it anything you like. Like lib1. It shows you the rest of address for your SP server like lib1@sharepoint.yourcompany.com. Use this email when scheduling your report. Be sure to use PDF or Excel for the WebI Format when scheduling.

pcgeekus :us: (BOB member since 2003-10-16)