Once you’ve got a healthy collections of reports hosted in Reporting Services there’s usually a requirement to deliver these out to end users via different methods such as via email, or in our example to a file share.
Delivering to a file share requires account credentials which would have permissions to the specified share. We like to keep things simple and consistent so ideally we’d want to have a single account for all the locations where we may need to extract the reports to.
It isn’t fun to keep entering the same details for each subscription and thankfully in SQL Server 2016 we had a new feature to help with this – the File Share Account.
Setting up a File Share Account
The details for the account are stored within the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. If you drop onto your environment and open this up you’ll see a new tab on the side named ‘Subscription Settings’ where we can set up the account:
In here it’s a simple case of entering the account details like you would for a regular subscription and applying the changes.
Fortunately the file share account only needs to be set up once this way – unless you have multiple SSRS instances or use clustering – and we can re-use it over and over again so once it’s done you can leave the credentials in your favorite vault app / PAM tool / piece of paper.
Using a File Share Account for delivery
Again when we come to use the account for delivery its a straight forward process. We can set up the subscription just as we would usually, but instead of needing to enter the Windows credentials we have an additional radio button to use the file share account which should be defaulted:
That’s all there is to it, leave that option selected, set up your typical parameters, the schedule, etc. and you’re away.
Just remember to make sure that account has access to the file share. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d forgot to check that!
Wrap up
As your reporting capabilities and requirements grow with Reporting Services you’ll likely hit a point where file shares are used to some degree.
Having a single centralised account used for all the reports being delivered in this way can help simplify the maintenance and management of accounts for administrators, ease the setup by the developer, and also secure the credentials a little better than they may otherwise need to be.
At the end of the day I’m lazy enough to only want to enter the details once and forget about them forever more, so just do it to save yourself time if nothing else.
Andy Brownsword 