For the past two years I have struggled with being a Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2000 and 2005 administrator.  A lack of tools makes managing enterprise implementations of this product very challenging at best.  Our setup consists of four individual instances of SQL Reporting Servers 2005 (upgraded last year from 2000).  This includes environments for development, quality testing, user testing, and production.

Having multiple environments creates the first problem - how do we migrate or promote large quantities of reports from one environment to the next?  The second largest problem that we face is updating the data source for each report once promoted.  This isn't for every case, but it does happen on a regular basis.  A couple of days ago I had enough with the frustrations and went on the hunt for a new tool to help us out.

I looked at command line tools and GUI based tools and finally I stumbled upon SSRS Explorer on CodePlex. This tool covers them all - SQL 2000, 2005, and 2008.  SSRS Explorer makes your implementation easy to navigate by creating an explorer style view of each instance you connect to.  You can simply highlight and right-click a group of reports that you wish to download, then connect to the next instance and bulk upload them.  Easy as that.

You can also select multiple reports and then set the data source for all of them, which sure beats loading up the details of each report through the browser and manually setting the new data source.  The tool also allows you to download folders, so that you can recreate the folder structure somewhere else.  Each object in the explorer allows you to view its properties and permissions, making administration a snap. 

You can also create, delete, and rename folders, reports, and data sources.  Don't take my word for it - try it out!