Report Scheduling and AD FS Support in Telerik Report Server

Have you tried the latest version of the Telerik Report Server, which has been available for a week now? If not, go ahead, this is the link. For help getting started, you can also check out our helpful guide.

What’s in the Box?

This release is a big milestone for us, as we’ve added report scheduling to the Telerik Report Server. This is one of the most requested features and we’re very happy we could deliver it in such a short timeframe. We also added capabilities to the report storage and management along with user management, which lets you use active directory credentials to log in. All together this makes access to the reports far more seamless and secure for those that need them, whether in your company or for your clients. Don’t forget we’ve built this with a responsive web design, so you can load and manage reports from any device. Find out more on what’s new here.

Report Scheduling

Yes, it’s true; you can now schedule reports to run automatically. You can even add an unlimited number of recipients to each scheduled task, and they’ll receive the report right in their mailbox.

Setting a scheduled task is very easy, and once set you have a few options to track it. You can create a task while in the reports view for a selected report, or go to the scheduling module and start from there.

For a new task, you need to specify:

• The report that will run
• The format it’ll be saved in: PDF, Excel, Word, TIFF, RTF, CSV, PowerPoint, Web Archive, XPS
• The date the task will run
• The recurrence, defined by setting the repeat period to daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or once (and when the task recurrence should end)

You can monitor a task you’ve created in its activity panel. There you’ll see when the task runs, along with the documents created as a result and when they were created. The generated report documents are saved in the Report Server storage that you choose when you configure it.

If you want the generated report to be automatically distributed to stakeholders, colleagues or clients, you can add as many recipients as you want to the scheduled task subscribers list. They can be both Report Server registered users and external one-time entries.

For the automatic emails to be sent to the report recipients, you need to make a one-time configuration in the Report Server settings to specify your mail server properties. You can find more information in the documentation.

AD FS Support

We know that most companies prefer their employees to use their domain credentials to log into any application used internally by the company. It’s more secure, easier to manage by IT and simpler for the end user as they won’t need to create and remember separate accounts for each app. With this release, Telerik Report Server provides that option. In addition to the local (WebForms) account support, we provide authentication option through the Web Services Federation (WS-Federation) specification. Now you can easily configure the Report Server to use a Federation provider to log in. Currently we support:

• Active Directory for Windows Domain
• Azure AD

Find out more on how to set it up here.

What’s Next?

More and more exciting staff is coming. First, we will enhance the scheduling functionality by adding the ability to set report parameters for the scheduled task through a nice UI that’s easy to use. This will allow you to best leverage the report parameters functionality and reuse the same report definition multiple times. We will also add the ability to customize the email template that’s sent to the scheduled task subscribers with the generated report. When we’re ready with these features, we will release them immediately.

A full roadmap will be available on the Report Server page by the end of the month, so stay tuned. To have a say on it, share your feedback and thoughts in our feedback portal or in the comments below.

P.S. Join Telerik developer advocates on October 14th to see technical demos of the DevCraft Q3 2015 release highlights. You’ll have a chance to win awesome prizes and get your questions answered live. Hope to see you there.