Contributed By: Cliff Hobbs [MVP SMS]
We're delighted to announce that we've been approached by NetImpress Inc. to review their current (and hopefully future) products.

This first review centres around the Start To Finish Guide to Microsoft Web Reporting written by Scott Stephen, who like myself is a myITforum columnist.

At 129 pages broken down into eight chapters this book lives up to it's name primarily because it's based on Scott's real world experience of installing and using the Microsoft Web Reporting tool which he has documented in a way that is easy to read and reference in the future.

If you're a novice then you'll probably want to read through the book from beginning to end as it takes you through the journey of installing the software, explaining the directory structure and what each of the files does, through to probably one of the first things many people want to do once they've installed the software and that's customise it for their particular company (such as changing the colours used, adding the corporate logo, and giving different groups of users different levels of access - sounds easy but it isn't until Scott explains how).

The book goes beyond the basics though and takes you through how to extend Web Reports by creating your own reports to extract information from the SMS database using SQL Queries, information that's not only useful for Web Reports but in general day-to-day administration of SMS.

In summary this book is a great resource for anyone that needs to use Web Reports, which is probably most people as bosses like fancy reports.  So the next time your boss gives you a hard time about not being able to give them the report they want use this book in conjunction with Web Reports to give them more reports than they thought possible.