What is New in the Next SQL Azure Reporting CTP?

[Paulo Correia]

What is New in the Next SQL Azure Reporting CTP?

Microsoft has extended its best-in-class reporting offering to the cloud with SQL Azure Reporting, enabling you to deliver rich insights to even more users without the need to deploy and maintain reporting infrastructure.

As a selected SQL Azure Reporting CTP customer, Microsoft is pleased to inform you about the next phase of our CTP of SQL Azure Reporting in September 2011, which allows you to try out the completed product prior to its commercial release and provide Microsoft with feedback that is important for you and your business.

This upcoming CTP is the last prior to SQL Azure Reporting’s commercial release and we have completed all the feature work for the first release of SQL Azure Reporting. For the CTP, we have enriched the Windows Azure Portal experience with new features:

• User and report management functions.
• Enabled a self-provisioning function so you can create a SQL Azure Reporting server by yourself.

In addition to the enriched Portal functionalities, we have improved availability and performance of the SQL Azure Reporting service and are rolling out the CTP to all Microsoft datacenters around the world.

STEPS TO PREPARE FOR UPCOMING CTP:

1.      You will need a Windows Azure Platform account in order to participate in this CTP. If you already have an account, proceed to step 2.
If you do not already have an account, please visit the "Start Now" section on http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazure/database.aspx. You will find Free Trial offers which will allow you to participate.

2.      SQL Azure databases remain the supported data sources in the upcoming CTP. If you have already created a SQL Azure server in any Windows Azure subscription, you may create reports against it in this CTP. If you do not have a SQL Azure server, please proceed to the Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) and create one.

NOTE:

1.      This upcoming CTP will be deployed to a different environment than the current Limited CTP.  Your reports will NOT be automatically migrated to this CTP environment by Microsoft. We recommend that you republish the reports from your Business Intelligence Development Studio project to the new Web Service endpoint URL that you will get from the new portal once you provision a new “server”.

2.      After the upcoming CTP is deployed, we will replace the current “Reporting” page on Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) with a new Reporting portal experience. But from the new portal page, you will not be able to access the information for the current CTP, e.g. old Web Service endpoint URL and Admin user name. If you want to continue using the current CTP, please make sure to copy and keep the information somewhere else.

Sincerely,
The SQL Azure Reporting team