I installed a new VM with SQL Server in it, along with Win 7 and Reporting Services. The plan was to mess with this as a detailed journey through to learning more about SSRS this year.

I was excited to get going on this new install since I hadn’t messed with SSRS much since 2005, and then on one of our test servers for SQLServerCentral. So I fired it up, having run through the installation defaults and browsed to the Report Manager to get:

Seriously? No IIS on a default install, and SS2K8 SSRS shouldn’t require it. I’m an admin on my own box, so what’s the deal. Actually this is a Firefox issue that requires that I clean up a few things and store off the name password.

However, once that was done, I connected and found a blank report manager screen. That was very, very annoying.

At first I was fairly torque’d. After all, this is a dev setup that’s common, and having stuff not work like this really doesn’t do the SSRS brand much good in the eyes of developers.

Now I’m not on a domain, I’m standalone, which is likely not common. It’s also probably that the DBA sets up SSRS on the server and developers connect, but I think lots of them have local instances to test reports against.

So what do I do? I dug around the Internet and found a lot of fragmented advice. The big one was that I needed to setup roles for SSRS, but I had to use Report Manager to do that. And as you can see above, there’s no “Properties” tab above. The final advice that seemed to work for me was a need to log in as administrator. Not an administrator, but as administrator itself.

How do you do that in Vista or Win 7? Administrator is buried on those OSes, and for good reason. Otherwise people would likely use it all the time. I tried running IE as Administrator, but that didn’t work. That was one of the first suggestions I’d see, so I had to log into the machine itself. To do that, first you need an administrative command prompt.

Then you run this: “net use administrator /active:yes”

When you then do a “switch user” and get the login screen, the administrative account is visible. I logged into that, connected to Report Manager, and added my account as a content owner and publisher.

Back to my account and I’m golden. I can now see my main screen.

I’m not sure why the IE-as-administrator did not work, but if it fails for you, this should help.