paul.murray (3/17/2013)

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Hi All,

I am from a small software company that sells products exclusively for the mining industry. We have decided as a business that we need to have a new SSRS based reporting product (to supplement our existing Excel based one).

We have discovered fairly quickly that to have a competitive product we will need to have our own custom front end and that it will be based on SQL Server 2008 R2 (as that is what most of our clients have already).

We have our own in-house SSRS expertise so we already have a fair idea on HOW we can do it.

What I would like to ask is this:
1) Has anyone done this before, as a professional product that can be released as an out-of-the-box solution to multiple clients? (i.e. not intranet)
2) If so, how long did it take you to develop?
3) Is there a best practice for launching/starting reports when not using the standard SSRS interface?
4) Has anyone done anything around building and displaying parameter controls on the fly based on the report that is selected?
5) From my research it seems that everyone that needs to do this is doing it themselves from scratch. Does anyone know of any third-party products/libraries/APIs that can be purchased (preferably with source code) that already do this that can be customised?

Thanks,

Paul