Practical Business Intelligence

More pain when trying to configure the Reporting Services Addin for SharePoint 2007 today. In this case it was in a SQL Server 2008 environment, but I am willing to bet the same issue occurs when using the 2005 addin.

The issue is that the addin appears to complete its installation correctly, but once completed there is still no Reporting Services configuration section in the Application Management page of Central Administration.

After trying twice, I had to troubleshoot. To see what the installer is actually doing, you can call it from a command line, as recommended on Microsoft's instructions, by running the command:

rsSharePoint.msi SKIPCA=1

This copies all the required files to the computer without installing the solution to SharePoint. You need to do this on all the SharePoint farm servers which are going to be involved in Reporting Services - at the minimum that will be your Reporting Services server and your SharePoint web front end.

Once the installer finishes on all the computers, navigate to your temp directory (C:\Documents and Settings\<your username>\Local Settings\Temp) on the SharePoint server from a command line. You should see a file named rsCustomAction.exe - this is the executable which deploys and activates the Reporting Services feature to SharePoint. Run it with the command

rsCustomAction.exe /i

and watch as the installation proceeds.

My installation was failing when trying to activate the feature in the root site collection - the Administration site. The error message posted was:

******* user does not have permission to add feature to site collection

Although I was signed on with an account which was a Farm Administrator and a member of the Administrators group on the server.

However, the SharePoint server had been installed and set up by someone else, and when the Admin site collection was created my user was not added as a Site Colleciton Administrator on it. I ensured I was a Site Collection Administrator on all the site collections and ran

rsCustomAction.exe /i

again. The installer proceeded without a problem.

So, the moral of the story: your user must be a site collection administrator on the Administration site collection as well as any other site collections in order to install the add in.