SSRS Reminded Me of the Time Microsoft Retired TMG

Reading that SQL Server 2025 shipped without SSRS took me back to 2012, when Microsoft announced end-of-life for TMG — our perimeter firewall, web proxy, and SSL inspection. It had run quietly for years until it suddenly needed a plan.

Within weeks, vendors found us. Demos, a steering committee, a three-month project plan. We weren't done in three months, and looking back we made nearly every mistake available.

The vendors made the timeline feel urgent — even though TMG had mainstream support until 2015, extended until 2020. We ran unscoped demos and agreed to milestones before we understood what we were actually migrating. We'd never audited what we used TMG for: about a third of our firewall rules hadn't matched a packet in over a year, including one for a server decommissioned in 2007. We spent weeks arguing over feature matrices for capabilities we didn't need.

Every vendor pitched more than a replacement — a whole Next Generation Firewall platform, “since you're going through this anyway.” One demo was genuinely impressive, for a product our team had no path to operating. We ended up choosing something that did more or less what TMG did. Boring choice. Right choice. We did the ambitious network redesign two years later, on our own timeline.

We also gave ourselves six weeks for a migration that had two months of evaluation before it, and cut over right before an audit. Both mistakes.

SSRS is the same shape: a quiet workhorse, an end-of-life announcement, vendors in the inbox before you've had time to think. Same instinct to move fast. Same reason not to.

SSRS mainstream support runs to 2027, extended to 2032 — any urgency you're feeling is coming from a vendor's pipeline, not your deadline. Before any demos, pull your access logs and see which reports anyone has actually opened in the last 90 days. In most places I've seen, a third to half the catalog is dead weight — built once, used a few times, forgotten. Don't migrate it.

And if you're on SSRS, Power BI Report Server on-premises is probably the boring, right choice: it runs on what you already have, costs nothing extra if you're licensed, and doesn't force retraining mid-migration. The exciting option will still be there when you're actually ready for it.

Marko Coha

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