Ian,
I am not sure many of the major BI vendors are keen to work closely
with RS....after all MSFT has now announced it's intention of 'eating
their lunch'.....remember how low key the first release of RS was? And
no MSFT is 'talking it up' as a real alternative to Crystal Reports now
owned by Business Objects.

I am certainly aware that Business Objects is training up staff to
compete with RS2005.

When an 800 pound gorilla like MSFT steps into the BI marketplace all
vendors are going to do whatever they can to maintain their
clients.....

All those vendors (BO, COGN, MSTR etc) will all work with SQL Server
and position their tools as somehow 'better' than Report Services.....

For the last 7-8 years people have talked about integration of the
development environment between vendors, usually via some form of
metadata hub (for example Ascentials MetaStage and the MetaData
Coalition etc.). However, this has been a pretty fruitless exercise.

The BI vendors are not interested in making it easier to share their
metadata with other BI vendors. Whoever owns 'what is presented on the
screen' owns the client and all of them are trying to protect their
position from MSFTs RS efforts.

Ufortunately IT shops and business users have remained subbornly
ignorant of the fact that 80% of the work is in database design and ETL
and 20% in the presentation layer....and people buy the presentation
layer and not the infrastructure/architecture. This make 'what is on
the screen' even more important to protect.

Best Regards

Peter Nolan
www.peternolan.com

In a data warehouse. In fact tables, surrounded by dimension tables.

Hi JT,
which ones? I have read zip about any good tools that integrate RS into
them...we are doing this work for ourselves...

We have been surprised there is no good browser front end for RS and
that the answer we have gotten back so far is that we must build one
for ourselves...??

Thanks

Peter Nolan
www.peternolan.com