Note This document is based on the original spoken Support WebCast transcript. It has been edited for clarity.

Hello. I'm Rob Wickham and I'm really excited to be here, but unfortunately Wally Mead is not, because he broke his ankle. So I'm glad to fill in for him. I feel pretty comfortable with the content. I just noticed, on the system that shows my slides, that the SMS Available Programs Manager icon is showing. I thought that was just an interesting observation, that SMS is everywhere.

So let's get right to the Web Reporting Tool (slide 3). We released that on February 15. We'll be running through the different aspects of its functionality and a little bit about futures. Specifically a little introduction of it, some points about the installation, its standard reporting features, custom reporting features, where you go to modify existing reports, a bit about troubleshooting, and as I mentioned, some futures.

Now, for an introduction. This is a freely available utility, just for SMS 2.0 sites running any service pack, but we much prefer Service Pack 2 at least. What the utility provides is about 150 built-in reports that run the range of data reporting for site hierarchies, site status, inventory and many other aspects of the data. However, there are no actual reports that are scoped against advertisements, as an example, and we've taken some feedback about that already.

When you load this tool, some of the things that you get are the SQL Views for the SMS database, which if you're an SMS 1.2 customer who's migrated, you were probably quite comfortable with the existence of numerous SQL Views. So now we have them for SMS 2.0 as well.

I should note that the views themselves are just as supported as the SDK. However, the Web Reporting Tool is considered unsupported or best effort support. What's interesting about the SQL Views is the significant performance improvement over running queries straight through Windows Management Instrumentation, WMI. So what we have now is an interesting hybrid of high-performance data access, as well as the normal things that you see through the Admin Console when you actually need to perform change requests and actually write changes into the system.

In addition to the views, you can build your own reports. You can use the views to create reports outside of the Web Reporting tool itself, such as Access and so forth. You can configure any Crystal Reports that you have today to go and talk to the new views that are in place, rather than going through the ODBC driver for WMI, which was relatively slow.

Some prerequisites (slide 4) for installing this tool, first of all, you have to know where to get it. You can just go to the Download Center. The link is here in the slide, http://www.microsoft.com/smsmgmt/downloads/ and you can also go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/, right to the Download Center. You can search for all tool downloads for Systems Management Server 2.0. You'll see the Web Reporting Tool come up in that list. There is a direct link to that entry from the SMS home page on smsmgmt/downloads.

System requirements include Windows NT 4.0 SP6 or later, IIS 4.0 or later, Internet Explorer 5.01 or later. You need to have the same kind of access to the SQL Server and the SMS site database that you did when you went and installed those two items, to have a functioning SMS site. We do require SQL Server™ 7.0 or later, although SMS 2.0 itself does allow SQL 6.5. So be aware that you'll want to work through a plan of migrating to SQL Server 7.0 at least, if you want to start using this reporting functionality.

Another dependency that we have is within the Web Reporting Tool, you have the means to generate some really easy charts, graphs and so forth for the reports. In order to do that, we're using an Office 2000 charting component that is not a part of the standard install of Office. If you do a full install, you get it. It needs to be on the system that is running the browser rather than on the IIS machine. You can tell if you have it or not by running the setup for Office 2000 and expand the branches down to the Office 2000 Web components. There will be a particular entry there for charting. You want to make sure that you have that included in your configuration for the charts to work. Of course you can use transforms and things of that nature to actually deploy Office, so that this is its default configuration for your en masse Web reporting users.

Now, we covered the prerequisites. Let's talk about installing this thing (slide 5). Download the executable. It is code signed. When it comes up, you'll be prompted for various things, namely the SQL Server name and the SMS site database name. This is because the Web Reporting Tool doesn't actually interact with the site server itself. It is exclusively interacting with the database through an IIS machine that you're running the setup against.

What the setup will do, is it will run off and create some views and stored procedures in the SQL Server. There are about 130 views and about 170 stored procedures that it will put in place. It will also create an smsschm_user as an ordinary SQL user account that is the context through which all of the reporting functions will occur. That gives you the means to stipulate the specific security that this user will have. We default it to have the read-only access to the views and that is a fairly good default security case.

The installation can optionally create a task that will regenerate the views periodically in the event that you have extended your inventory schema through customizing the Sms_def.mof file, for example, to go after some additional chassis information. The views will not always reflect that until the regeneration script has been executed. So there's a wizard page in the setup where it will prompt you for the machine name that is running your SMS site server and the site code as well.

What it will do, and this is described in detail in the release notes for the tool, is create a task that will run every Sunday for you, for free, that will automatically regenerate your views, so any inventory changes that have occurred that extended the database will be accounted for. It will also create an SMS Reporting Users security group that, anytime you need to add somebody new to have access to these reports, you can just stuff their account or security groups they're a member of into this group, and they'll end up with access to the reports.

Now you'll also be prompted for the folder name that you want to install these reports into on the IIS machine. It defaults to a folder name that is unique to the site code of the site that you are installing to. There's a reason for that, because you can actually use one IIS machine to host the reporting features for more than one site database. So you can really leverage the performance of IIS and SQL Server through a single reporting server.

The slide indicates something about 5 megabytes (MB), but I'm not quite sure what that means. The key here is the download itself is about 500 kilobytes (KB). After it's installed, it's going to consume about 400 KB of your IIS disk storage. So it's an extremely light application.

Now, off to some usability (slide 6). One thing that we found out right away after we released this, was that it was not creating a favorite or an easy means for you to get back at the reports after the initial browser was opened when you clicked that Finish button from setup. So you need to remember that you have a URL to get at these reports. An example of that is shown at the top of the slide, the IIS server name and then the folder name that you originally installed to (http://iisserver/SiteDB_SMS_site/). So if you get totally lost, you can open the Explorer on your IIS machine and just start drilling into the file folders and rediscover the folder name and from that, the URL that you can then publish to your reporting users.

Now some of the options at your disposal for when you're using the reporting features is the host of standard reports, as well as we have two Dashboards, the basic Dashboard and an advanced Dashboard, which is kind of a nice snapshot of what's going on within the site. Then you have your custom reports. You can then export reports as well. There's a means to access the ones that you've exported. Software Audit is a very interesting feature. We'll get into that a little bit more later. Finally, you have a menu option for help and support.

So let's look at the first item here, Standard Reports (slide 7). The Standard Reports option, from within the pick list of the reporting interface, allows you to run any existing report, whether it be standard or custom. Then once you've run that report, you have the means to export that into a .csv text format that you can then import into a variety of other applications for other use. We have three top-level report categories, the standard ones, custom reports, and filtered reports.

You can also view the specific computer details in a report view. So if you know the name of the machine that you want to take a look at, you can just click that option, type in the machine name. Then you have all of the reports that are intended to be focused on a particular machine, and you can get at them all right there. It's kind of a replacement for the Resource Explorer that you're accustomed to in the SMS Administrator console.

Off the Standard Report categories (slide 8), we have about 12 groups and 60 reports for hardware inventory and four groups and 12 reports for software inventory. The SMS site has 3 groups and 16 reports, and status messages come in with 12 groupings and 29 actual status message reports. You can run custom reports from in here, but you can't modify custom reports from in here. This is just a convenience item.

Filtered reports are interesting, because they actually let the database resolve the prompted value for you, so you can pick it from a list. However, the filtered values are only available for the standard reports. For your custom reports, that is a limitation: You can't have a prompted value for a custom report at this point.

Now, how do you run reports (slide 9)? Well, you drill through the tree control on the left side of the browser and get down to the report that you want, clicking the expand buttons as needed, and you can find the report. There may be a filter available for that report. You can click that, and as I mentioned, it will pull back data samples for you. There's the Display button that will let you look at the actual results of the report. Then there's also a button called Properties that you have for standard reports so that you can actually look at the query that's going to be involved in getting this report for you. That's pretty handy, because if you want to go off and build a custom report, this is your means to get at a nice starting point for your customized version.

Once you have the report opened (slide 10) and you're looking at the data that's there, there are a number of things that you can do. Some of the options in the Report window are you can Close the thing, of course, but there's Copy, which will post everything onto the clipboard. You can Export. You can Print. You can then Save it for future reference. You can make it a Favorite in your browser favorites list, and then you can distribute that as well, kind of build a library of your favorites. Then there is Chart, and I mentioned the dependency on some Office 2000 Web charting components that you need to do that. Charting's pretty handy. It's very easy to go back and forth between different chart formats for the data that you're looking at.

Off to the Dashboard (slide 11). The idea of the Dashboard is to provide an integrated, high-level view of the site status, quite similar to the site status that you can get from the SMS Administrator console, but with more granularity, and I think some more useful information. You can get counts of clients by site. You can get a breakout of clients that are assigned, installed, and reporting by site. You can also count up the client versions that are out there, counting up the operating system types and, if I'm not mistaken, you can also chart these from the standard reports that the Dashboard items are based on. So if you go back over to standard reports and drill into the reports there, you'll actually find the queries that this Dashboard is using. From there, you can get charts of these items. You also have the site status, which is coming from the standard SMS status messages, client errors, server errors, and we have some views that support some detail in a Summary view.

Then there's the Advanced Dashboard (slide 12). You have to be in the Dashboard to see the Advanced Dashboard option. You just click it and it toggles you over. What you see here are, in some cases, there can be some fatal errors coming from some client components, and those are just based on standard status messages that are coming up.

Now, let's talk about creating custom reports (slide 13). Custom reports allow users to generate SQL queries to get at the SMS data through the SQL Views. These are pure SQL commands, so any database administrator will really see the value of pasting in standard SQL queries here. The Query Builder itself allows you to navigate through the different tables and columns that are exposed through the views. Then you can click on those and quickly build an actual query without doing a lot of typing. If you click on the arrow, it gives you a list of the values. This is similar to the filter behavior; it actually gives you a list of the data behind that particular attribute, so that you can do an equivalency check or something, and that can be very convenient.

Now, it's important to note here, when you're building these reports, that the browser here in this interface is not going to be validating your SQL query. It makes an assumption that you know what a valid SQL query looks like and that you're going to be including the appropriate WHERE clause and so forth. So it's technically not a Query Builder. It helps you with some items in a pick list and some actual data examples to pull into that. Once you've built that, then you just click Display. You get the results, and from there, you can do a save, a print, chart, copy, or export the data.

Now once you've made one, you can go back in and modify that report (slide 14), but you can't go in and modify the standard, built-in reports. What you can do is take a standard report and copy and paste the query into a custom report. Then you can go and add columns and modify the formatting and things of that sort.

It's important to note that if you do go in and make changes to the standard report definitions, that if you ever do an upgrade, for example, if we fix some bugs in the tool or add some reports to it and then re-release, and then you upgrade, or if you take the current version that you have now, and for some reason you want to run it again to correct some corruption or something that may have occurred on the IIS machine, the file copy process is going to replace the standard report files with the factory settings. So it's important that you use your custom reporting functionality, because those files will not be replaced by the upgrade, that is the data files that store the custom reports.

After you have some custom reports, then you can click Go to Manage Reports. That's where you can modify the particular custom report. What we've found is that if you go into managing these reports and you clean out the default ones, the sample that we've included, that can lead to problems in the tool allowing you to save the custom report that you're currently working on. So for now, what we're seeing is the need for you to not remove that default report, because it can lead to problems saving other custom reports. Of course, you can rename or delete these reports, using the Update or the Delete button.

All right, off to Exported Reports (slide 15). This is handy, because you can export your reports to a .csv text format, which you can then pull into Excel or other programs to then perform some analysis on. If you want to do this, then you just click on the report, display it, and click the Export button. You get to pick the file name that you're going to use. It will be stored into the path indicated here, the ExportData folder. Enough said there.

Let's talk about Software Audit (slide 16). This is a really handy feature that we took a lot of feedback about from customers, saying that they wanted to be able to define a machine template for common systems configurations and then start tracking deviations from that baseline, and then essentially start doing audit reports against folks who are deviating from that. So this allows users to identify the software products or files that are going to be used for the actual audit process, by using a template approach.

Now, it doesn't actually report on files, but it generates the data for the standard reports to then access. To get to that, navigate through Standard Reports, Software Reports, down to the Audit node. That's where you'll find the reports for that feature.

Software files enable auditing of individual files and the designation of them as being authorized or not. What you'll probably notice is that there is a toggling effect that isn't as complete as you might expect. There are cases where you can turn on auditing, but you can't turn off the auditing after you're turned it on.

Now, off to this last bullet. The software products enabled auditing of inventoried applications and their designation of authorized or not. This is the companion to the previous bullet, where you can do this in terms of files or actual software products. Products are basically defined by the manufacturer data that is embedded in the headers of the files that are inventoried through the SMS software inventory.

Now off to the last button on the browser, on the far right-hand side. This is Help and Support (slide 17). There's a lot of good information here. First off, we have the online help that provides information about installation, administration, and troubleshooting. It also has some information about building some custom reports and the schema that you need to know about in order to build those reports.

I would like to point out that back in the Query Builder UI, there is a pick list on the left-hand side. That is a static list that is defined in some XML files that are included with the Web Reporting tool. If you have extended inventory schema, through custom MIFs, for example, the SQL Views will reflect the extended inventory, because of the regeneration task that I mentioned earlier. However, that extended inventory will not be reflected in that pick list. That's a current limitation of the tool. What you need to basically know about is the inventory that's been extended, the table names, and the column names, as described by the views, and then manually account for that when you're trying to build a custom report based on extended inventory data.

At some point, we hope that we can either adapt the tool or that our next product release will account for the dynamic nature of the inventory and have a better Query Builder. I can't offer any more specific information about that particular point right now, however.

Next here, in help and support, we have some release notes, which are really important information about the support boundaries that you need to be aware of when using this particular utility, as well as updates to the Help and some additional information. There are a number of links to MSDN® content, some things that you can read about that relate to making sure that the way that you deploy this tool is the most secure that it can be from an IIS point of view. There is pretty valuable information in those release notes I have to admit.

We also have the EULA (end-user license agreement) that you can read, a link to the EULA right there, other links as well, to Microsoft Web sites that we think are interesting. We have a feedback alias, mswish@microsoft.com. Click that; it will pull up an e-mail window for you and make getting some feedback to us a little bit more convenient for you. Also, here is the button you click for managing your custom reports.

Lastly, we have a Settings button, which is kind of like Help About the Windows apps; you can get at some specific settings that are in place that can help you if you have to call PSS, for example, with a question, and they're able to accommodate that. Because this is basically a best effort support model, they may want to know some more information about versions and so forth.

Now, off to the SQL Views slide (slide 18). Firstly, make sure that the views have been refreshed. You have control over how often this can happen. The tool's installation makes it convenient for you to pick whether or not you want to automate that process by having a task added to the SQL Commands node of the SMS Administrator console under Database Maintenance. After it's done that, you're free to go into that property page and make adjustments. For example, if you don't want it to happen on Sundays, if you'd rather have that happen Wednesday night at midnight, you can make that adjustment right there. However, you can manually refresh it yourself by opening a tool such as the SQL Query Analyzer or isql, and simply run the stored procedure listed here, sp_RenewSMSSchemaViews. What this task will do is, it will go off and walk the tables, the group map entries, and the schema definitions that are maintained by the system, and from that, rebuild the views as necessary.

SQL Views part 2 (slide 19). The help files document the views in more detail. There is also some more information in the Resource Guide, Appendix B. It talks about class and attribute values. I want to note that the WMI schema for SMS is documented in the Platform SDK. There's a link here for that. Why that's interesting is that it is the basis for the schema documentation for these views. So for those of you who have long wanted to know about schema that's being used in the SMS product, the visibility of that schema is now available through the views and for quite awhile has been available through the Platform SDK, although it's mostly the programmer/developer types who would have known about the Platform SDK.

To make that a real intuitive path for you, we have just prefixed the view names with V_. The remaining definitions conform to the attribute and class definitions in the Platform SDK. So if you want to understand more about a particular advertisement, you have the means to go into the Platform SDK and really look at the detailed level of what a particular column value represents to the system. In some cases, that can be a cryptic value, and we have some information that lets you decode some of those cryptic values as well.

Also note that the SQL queries are similar to WQL queries that are the ones that use when you're inside the SMS Administrator console, but they are different. There is functionality in SQL queries that is not supported in WQL. So, there will be limitations if what you want to do is take some of your queries that you've built in the Administrator console and try to cut and paste them into the Web Reporting tool. You'll probably have to make some tweaks to the syntax of that particular statement.

Let's talk about troubleshooting (slide 20). There are some checks that are built into the installation script, the setup wizard. One of them is that it requires non-integrated security to be in effect, either standard or mixed. That's important, because when the views get installed, the views have to be installed as if by the dbo for the sms database. Because this process is not an integral part of the standard installation of the site, we don't actually have the means to piggyback on that and make sure that the views get put in the right security context, so we have to use sa. In order to use sa, we have to have standard or mixed security available to us, the current limitation of the tool that will be going away in the next product release.

Another thing you might run into for troubleshooting is that you'll get a stored procedure error when you're trying to run a report. We see this fairly commonly if at the point in time that you've installed the Web Reporting tool, and thus the views in stored procedures, that you didn't have the hardware inventory or other tables in the sms database populated with something. So for example, there are certain features that are not on by default after you've installed your SMS site server, and when they are not on, there is actually an absence of schema in the database. The creation of stored procedures requires that the associated schema be available at that time. So to resolve that, you may need to go back and reinstall the Web Reporting tool, after you are certain that you have the necessary data, for example, certain hardware inventory data for CD-ROM, is actually in the database, and then rerun the installation. On a case-by-case basis, you may find that the stored procedures are okay, but you just need to refresh the views. In which case, you can run the script that triggers the views to be refreshed.

Likewise, you can end up running a report that doesn't give you any results back and you expect results. That can happen if you haven't actually generated the inventory that you need. So you want to make sure that your hardware inventory agent is turned on, for example, and the attributes in the Sms_def.mof, that described what hardware inventory is gathered, is also turned on, to the extent that you need for your reports to have access to the data. Help and Support has some information about troubleshooting as well. Of course, use Appendix B of the SMS Resource Guide.

I'd like to mention that I did receive some e-mail from folks with some issues that they've run into. Most of those issues that were reported are known about. Some of them are news to us, and I thank you for sending that feedback in. I will be going through that feedback and making sure that we get some priority assessed to certain issues, and we will try to do a tool update at some near future point. We have to be careful that things we do with this tool don't disrupt the functionality that's going into the next product release. So our emphasis is going to be taking your feedback and making sure that the next version of this functionality is absolutely what you expect it to be.

Let's talk about futures (slide 21) now, on that note. As I mentioned, Web Reporting will be included in the next version of SMS. Some of the main additions to the product for that will include the ability for you to create your own report categories, support for integrated security in SQL Server, and integration into the SMS Administrator console. The browser itself will still be used for showing the results, but there will be some administrative capabilities that are put into the main Administrative console. Of course, the base product supports localized versions. So this version of Web Reporting in the base product will be just as localizable as the base product in all the various server languages.

So, let's summarize (slide 22). The tool is freely available for you to download. We have some links for where you can go and get it. It adds a lot of value to existing SMS sites, both from a diagnostic point of view, as well as for providing reports to managers about their interest in the system. It lets you customize things and move on to higher performance solutions. It also gives you the views that you can then use for any other reporting solution that you have that knows how to talk to SQL Views. It allows you to build your own custom reports in a rather simple way.

So those are the things that Wally and I felt really mattered to get across, in terms of a good experience of using this new tool. We have a good bit of time left for Q&A, so I'd like to transition back to our moderator, and feel free to let us know what's on your mind.

Jim Coll Thank you so much for that presentation, Rob. I have just a couple of quick notes before we move on to the Q&A portion of the Support WebCast.

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Okay, with those details aside, let's jump into the Q&A. Our first question for Rob is: Is there a reason why we would still want to use Crystal Reports?

Rob Actually there is, because a lot of folks have made some serious investment in creating reports that are based on Crystal. The feedback that we've taken has been that those things just tend to run slowly. What's convenient is that those reports were likely based on the ODBC WMI interface that uses the same schema that's described in the Platform SDK at the links that I've included in this slide deck. So our hope is that a migration path from your Crystal Reports, if you want to use Web Report or the SQL Views specifically, that you can modify those reports to point at the views, instead of the schema through the WMI interface, and get your Crystal Reports running just as fast as the ones that are running through the Web Reporting tool.

Jim All right. Our next question is a little bit long, so stay with me here. Using the drill through option on some reports causes syntax errors in the standard reports. This happens when a value in the drill through variable has a comma or an apostrophe or single quote character in the variable's value, for example, in the software product's manufacturer name. How can we update the stored procedures, like @variable statements, to accept the comma or quote character?

Rob Those kinds of changes are the most interesting ones that we want to account for in the future update of the tool, because in order to correct those problems, we really need to go in and do it in the bits that we actually own as part of the tool. A case in point is the situation in which you are actually modifying a stored procedure could have some real dramatic effects on other reports that are using that stored procedure. In the interaction with the ASP that's running on the IIS machine, we ran into some issues during the development cycle, where we were using some encoding and decoding assumptions that weren't quite right.

What you're seeing with this particular behavior is a specific case where the encoding, the decoding, and the parameter passing needs to be improved just a bit. In fact, I believe that I have a very detailed e-mail on this particular point that I will be getting some feedback from one of our developers that's working on the next version, and get an assessment for how they're accounting for this particular situation in the next release.

Jim Our next question is asking, it's related to the prerequisites for installation, and it's asking, What if you don't have Office 2000 Web components, and you only have Office 97?

Rob The only issue that will arise in that case is the inability to actually chart and graph the data that's coming out of your standard reports. There should be no other effect on your reporting functionality without Office 2000.

Jim Will Microsoft be publishing any information about customizing the standard reports?

Rob We don't have any plans right now to publish that information. The reason why is an impact to the testability of an upgrade path for customers who then purchase the next SMS release. Because our intent is to take the functionality that you are building in through the custom reports, and actually upgrade that into the main product version of the reporting solution, so that you don't have to re-create things. If you go in to modify those standard things, the migration path will be at risk.

So we would much prefer that when you determine that you need some additions made, that you use the feedback alias mswish@microsoft.com. We will go through that and do our best to accommodate changes to the standard reports in a future update and do it in a way that's consistent with the next product release, so that we don't get into an upgrade bind.

Jim Excellent. We've had several questions submitting about customizing reports. Thank you for that answer. The next question is: Is there a way to restrict some users from viewing certain standard reports? For example, we only want a small group of users to be able to view what software is installed on clients, but we want everyone to be able to view other standard and custom reports.

Rob Good question. What's going on in the next product release of SMS, is, in fact, a security model around each report, so that you can look at a report just like you do a package or a query in the Administrator console, and apply security verbs to it on a user and group basis. So it is an integration of the current reporting features into the native SMS security model, which we can't do in this version of the tool. It can only happen in the core product.

Jim If we create our own stored procedures to insert into the standard report section, is there any risk to our usp_<procedure> being deleted or overwritten? Is there a reserver numbering range to avoid, or is that reserved?

Rob This question gets back to the other question about customizing the system. The creation of stored procedures and things of that nature isn't something that we think is a supportable situation. We would much prefer to take your feedback. If you need more stored procedures or more standard reports, let us know what they are, so that we can do it on our end and make sure that you're in a much more supportable situation with respect to the sms database.

Jim All right. Our next question is: Is this tool still in beta?

Rob The public release of this tool occurred on February 15. It is not a beta. It is essentially a resource kit–type utility that offers a preview of functionality going into the next product release. From what I recall, there were some early versions of this utility made available by MCS to a few customers when we were doing some validation. However, there, at this point, isn't a beta, per se. It's the public release of the tool at the Download Center.

Jim Okay. Where integrated security is mandated or implemented, is the current version of Web Reports not available in these situations?

Rob That is correct. Integrated security prevents the correct installation of the Web Reporting features until the next release of the main product, where integrated security becomes a supported configuration.

Jim Can I use SMS Web Report without having Office 2000 installed?

Rob Yes. The only functionality that you lose without Office 2000 is the graphs and charts.

Jim Are there going to be any releases to the Web Reporting tool before the next SMS release?

Rob There will be at least one. Based on the issues that we have taken in the form of feedback and discovered on our own, I have high confidence that there will be at least one.

Jim Are there any scalability issues? Crystal Reports supports up to 500 clients.

Rob Interesting question. The 500-client thing with Crystal is more of a guideline. One of the most important bits of feedback that we've taken since the product release is all about the performance of reporting. What we've done by creating the views on this data and exposing them in a Web-friendly way, completely eliminate the bottlenecks that we have seen in all the other reporting solutions that were limited, because they didn't have views to run against. So the only difference now is performance differences that may exist between direct table access and view access, which is probably negligible, versus pumping that data and those queries through the IIS machine, which is also probably a very negligible performance issue as well. If I haven't answered that one well enough, ask it again, because I think I might have digressed a bit.

Jim Absolutely. At this point, I'd like to take a moment to ask everybody to send us some feedback. The feedback we're interested in is any comments you have on this session, comments you have about sessions you're heard in the past or any suggestions you have about WebCast topics you'd like to see in the future. You can send that feedback to us using the e-mail alias, feedback@microsoft.com. If you use that alias, be sure to include "Support WebCast" in the subject line. Thank you.

I'd like to move on to the rest of the questions for today. Our next question is asking: When is the next version of SMS coming out? Now, Rob, we don't want to inappropriately set expectations for product releases, but do you have any general information about the next release of SMS?

Rob I can point the audience to the external SMS home page, where there is some information about the next release of the product, its feature set, and I suspect that there are some timetables. They'll be general timetables, if they're there, but there is some information about the next release at the link that I gave you, http://www.microsoft.com/smsmgmt/.

Jim Excellent. Our next question is: Does software metering need to be enabled for auditing? Is there any better information on the auditing feature than what's in the help?

Rob The software metering feature does not need to be enabled for the Web Reporting Auditing feature to work. The Web Reporting feature set is working against the software inventory database, which is independent from the software metering database.

In terms of better information on the auditing feature than what's in Help, we know that the documentation that exists for the tool today is a bit limited. That's a point of feedback for us to accommodate at some point. I can tell you that the auditing features will be implemented in a different way that will leverage much more of the core product, and the auditing that you see in the Web Reporting tool will look different. So we want to make sure that when we add documentation about this feature, that we don't over-invest, that we cover just what you think is missing from that feature set. So if you could post to the feedback alias, mswish@microsoft.com, a bit more about your concerns with respect to the auditing feature documentation, we can step up to that and try to provide a bit more.

Jim Okay. How do you find the Web page to access the reports and also the setup of this?

Rob How do you find the Web page…

Jim …to access the reports and also the setup of this. I guess they mean the setup of the SMS Reporting tool.

Rob Okay, I'll take the second one first. The setup is on the Download Center. There is a link to it from the SMS home page as well, but you can go to the Download Center and just search for Tool Releases for Systems Management Server 2.0. The Web Reporting tool will be there. You click that link, and it will take you right to some instructions for downloading the tool.

After you've installed the tool, it will open up a browser window that actually points at your specified site and database combination on the IIS machine. What you can do, is you can take that and right away add it to a favorites list, because when you close that browser window, what you'll have to do to go back is either remember what that URL was or you can open Windows Explorer on the IIS machine, and go into the inetpub/www root and look for the folder name that is actually hosting your particular installation of the Web Reporting tool and then just intuitively convert that into a URL. Then you can get back to the Web Reporting functionality there.

Jim Is SMS now a competing product with the Altiris management tools?

Rob My answer there is no. The reason why, is from the point of view of the Web Reporting tool, this is a preview of functionality that has long since been on a track to go into the core product. The current incarnation of this is actually an unsupported solution. Now the SQL Views themselves are supported, but the Web Reporting tool itself is not supported. If what you want is industrial strength product support for Web-based functionality, you would probably want to go to the Alteris solution, because they would fully support their product.

Jim I have noticed a disparity between OS counts reported by the Dashboard as opposed to that reported by the SMS console queries. That is, SMS always reports more machines. Is this a known issue?

Rob I am unaware of that particular issue. I am interesting in looking into that. If you could post that to the feedback alias, that will end up in my queue. I would like to iron that out. We don't want there to be differences in the data that ought to be consistent and accurate.

Jim Is there a Web site for people who have created custom reports to share with others?

Rob I would very much like to see such a thing. I'm not aware of one. However, I am aware of some newsgroups hosted by http://swink.com/, which may be a place where you can go to obtain this or publish your contributions.

Jim What are the pros or cons of using a central IIS server for Web Reporting for all sites versus using IIS servers at each site, that is about 20 sites total connected using a WAN?

Rob Okay, it's all about the scope of the data. SMS is, in itself, an aggregation model. If what you want is a global view of your data, then you need to access it from the central site's database. However, you may have administrators that are located in a particular geographic region, which owns the site database that has no interest in the data for any other sites that are above it hierarchically. That's the case where they would benefit from their own Web Reporting server. So it's all about the scope of the data, in terms of where you decide to deploy the Web Reporting server.

Jim Can this tool be used for reporting with other SQL databases, or are we limited to SMS only? Is this a future direction?

Rob This particular tool is a bit of a showcase, actually, for using XML to define a schema to store report definitions and so forth. The idea of using IIS and ADO to send queries to a database and get results back into a browser, actually makes this something that, as sample code, which is called out for in the release notes, is something that could potentially be adapted to any number of other databases and other reporting requirements. Right now, the SMS team doesn't have any intentions of adapting this tool to be a more generic solution, however.

Jim Has there been an update of the Web Reporting Tool since its initial release in February?

Rob There has not been an update yet.

Jim In relation to the SMS site server, where do you recommend installing the Reporting tool?

Rob It has to be installed on an IIS machine. That IIS machine can be on the site server itself. It doesn't have to be. It can be on the database server. We do have the recommendation that it be on the database server, but just like any other SMS deployment, you need to look at the performance that you need to have and identify the site system roles that are required for you to get there. It is possible to co-host all the functionality on a single machine, if that machine is big enough. However, we don't suspect that people will really want to put everything on the one machine, and the minimum recommendation would be to have an IIS machine with the Web Reporting functionality and possibly to include that on the system that's running your SQL database.

Jim If I create my own views and then reinstall or upgrade the Web Reports, will my custom views be deleted?

Rob Yes. We've had two questions that are similar to this. Going in and adding stored procedures and modifying the factory settings isn't something that we can really endorse or speak to how supportable or unsupportable that is. The custom reports functionality is the place where we expect you to go to do that. Anything beyond that, you need to let us know what your real reporting needs are, because we want to make the next product release that has this functionality exactly what you expect in a reporting solution. To do that, we need your feedback.

This Reporting tool is kind of a catalyst that lets you look at the functionality, apply it to your business needs and let us know where it's not meeting that. Then we can drive that into the next product release, and in some cases, drive some of your feedback into an update of the tool, where it makes sense.

Jim What are the advantages of using SQL 2000 instead of SQL 7.0 for SMS 2.0, both for reporting and for other features? That's a little bit outside today's scope, but could you just address that in general comments, maybe?

Rob I suspect that there are some Q&As that relate to why SQL 2000 is beneficial to SMS. I don't know a specific link to send you to for that, and I'm not 100 percent sure that that information exists publicly, but my gut tells me that there is some information about performance comparisons from SQL 2000 to SQL 7.0. As it relates to the Web Reporting tool, there is essentially no real difference or impact, in terms of performance and functionality.

Jim When using standards reports to view how many machines are running a certain version of a software product, for example, Internet Explorer 5.5, we get very low numbers. However, when searching on the executable file name, we get more believable data. Are our SMS clients not reporting product names correctly? It could be leaning into support, but again, do you have general comments?

Rob Yes, that's kind of a support boundary case, where you would certainly want to validate your report, your findings, by looking at them from the point of view of the SMS Administrator console and writing a query against the software inventory database and coming up with what the right number is. I would submit to you that the right number is the one that is being reported by the main SMS Administrator console. At which point we can then compare that query to the one the Web Reporting tool is using. Even if you're comparing WQL and SQL, you can get a close approximation of what may be wrong in the query that's in the Web Reporting tool. Forwarding that information to the feedback alias would let us take some action on that.

Jim Can any program written with SQL Query Analyzer generate a Web Report, specifically queries that use templates?

Rob Interesting question. I have not gotten into that space. It is likely. Because the Web Reporting Tool is taking the query that you build and passing it through in its entirety to the SQL Server to execute and then return results, it is possible that what you're after could work. Because I haven't done it myself and it was never in the scope of the tool, I really can't answer your question definitively.

Jim The next question is asking about auditing: Can I report against multiple templates?

Rob My understanding of the functionality is that there is one template. I could be wrong. I haven't looked at this functionality in some time, since the release, so I'm a little hazy on it. That's the kind of thing that would probably require a little investigation.

Jim Mark that up for follow-up, and we can follow-up with that individual a little bit later. For anyone else who's interested, we will post an answer to the transcript.

The next question is: Could you review or elaborate on accessing data in SMS tables generated by a NOIDMIF? Views related to my site specific SMS tables do not appear in the Web views.

Rob Yes, okay, I alluded to this earlier in the presentation. What you find in the pick list for the Query Builder is a tree view at the top you'll see advertisements, and going down the list, what you'll see is a representation of the table names, as exposed by the views. Then as you drill into those, you'll see the actual columns or attributes that are there. That tree control bases its input on an XML file that is installed with the tool, and that's static.

So if you do add NOIDMIFs or IDMIFs or if you have database extensions that are going on, they will be reflected in the views themselves, but because the way the views are defined and the way that Query Builder pick list is defined, they will not always match. The only time that they match exactly is an out of box, non-extended inventory database for the site, and that's probably a rare case. I suspect that just about everybody is using some .mif extensions of some kind, and you just need to account for that and reconcile the view names and manually type those into the Query Builder's query window.

Jim In the next release, is there going to be a way to shut off auditing after it has been enabled?

Rob As I mentioned, the auditing capabilities that are going into the next product release will be handled in a different way. My understanding is that is a significantly better way. I don't know that I can say that turning it on and turning it off, from the point of view of what you're seeing with the Web Reporting tool, is going to manifest itself the same way in the next product release, but we do recognize it as a current limitation of the Web Reporting tool.

Jim Are there any issues, as far as performance with multiple people hitting a Web site?

Rob The nice thing about this is that it almost completely takes any concept of SMS performance out of the picture, in terms of overall reporting speed. It's purely a case of the browser to the IIS machine to the SQL database that applies to any application that uses that type of a design. It's an extremely streamlined, fast design to use.

Jim All right. Our next question is: Can this tool be run from an Administrator workstation and still provide information on data from a central site?

Rob The key behind this tool is that you install some functionality on the IIS machine, and when you've done that, all of your reporting functionality is hosted through a Web browser. That Web browser can run any place, and in the particular circumstances where you want to have your reporting scope to be a central site server, that Web browser can run from anywhere. It can run over the WAN, over a dial-up link, because the inherent efficiencies of using the IIS machine to send the data back and forth really bypasses a lot of the performance issues that you may see with the main Administration console under similar conditions of returning large data sets.

So the answer to your question is it's completely flexible. You don't need the Admin console to be on the workstation, but if it's there, there's literally no interaction, because you're talking about a Web browser for the reporting features versus the MMC for the main SMS Administrator console. They really don't talk to each other or relate to one another on the system at any level. So no dependencies; whatever you want to do is fine.

Jim Okay, great. Our next question is: Will third party products that add views to the database cause problems in future upgrades to the Web Reporting tool or to the SMS database?

Rob Assuming that the third-party products are using IDMIFs or NOIDMIFs or the supported WMI methods of the SMS_def.mofs, compiling .mofs on to clients to extend inventory, and then telling the hardware inventory agent to go get it, all of these are supported mechanisms for extending the database schema. The views that are installed by this tool are intended to automatically accommodate those inventory extensions on this refresh cycle that I referred to.

Now, the views themselves are things that you can report against that this Web Reporting tool can take advantage of, but the restriction is that that pick list in the Query Builder is a static list and won't see inventory extensions. Now, when you go to do an upgrade, just like when you upgraded from SMS 1.2 to SMS 2.0, the inventory data, the NOIDMIFs and so forth, have a tendency to upgrade well or repopulate themselves over the course of time.

So the answer to your question is that they won't cause problems with the Web Reporting tool. If they cause problems with the SMS database, it is actually something to be addressed, either through the third party or through the base product, because we do support inventory extension through .mifs and WMI schema things, such as the SMS_def.mofs.

Jim All right. Is it completely unfeasible to install the tool onto a different server than the database server?

Rob No, it is feasible to install the tool on a system that is not hosting your SQL database. It does have to be on an IIS machine, but you can have the site server on one machine. You can have your SQL Server hosting a database, and that be on a separate machine, and you can have your IIS machine that's hosting Web Reporting on a third machine. You can mix and match at will, basically.

Jim All right. Our last question at the moment is: If the current Web reports require standard security, does that mean in my particular situation, where integrated security is mandated, that I will have to wait until the next release to use Web Reports?

Rob If integrated security is mandated, then the answer is yes, that you would need to wait for the reporting in the next release. I do wonder if using mixed security will be an option. It has been for many customers. However, it's not a requirement to have standard security. It's only a requirement to not be in integrated mode. So that means that mixed mode is an option for most people, anyway.

Jim Okay. With that question answered, we have answered all the questions that were submitted today. So that is going to wrap up our session. I want to thank you all for joining us and for all your excellent questions. I hope this information was useful to you.

I wanted to remind you that our next Systems Management WebCast will be on understanding Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 Management Packs. That will be on Thursday, June 14, at 10:00 A.M. Pacific time, as always. That information is available on the Support WebCast site, so you can add a reminder to your calendar for that event.

Once again, we are very interested in your feedback regarding the WebCast program. If you'd like to submit feedback, you can send it to the e-mail alias, feedback@microsoft.com. If you use that alias, please be sure to include "Support WebCast" in the subject line.

We hope you join us again in the near future. Thank you, and good-bye.