As you deploy the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 4.5 environment, you will make many business decisions about what types of plans and levels of support to offer to your customers. This section provides a detailed list of the standard reports included in Reporting services. Review this list to determine whether the reporting needs of your business are met. If not, or if you later discover you have additional reporting needs, you can create custom reports.

Reporting services uses SQL Server Reporting Services with the addition of a few key components that collect and store the data gathered by the monitoring system for long-term analysis. Standard reports, included as part of this component, help service providers:

• Evaluate system performance and make decisions about when to add servers to increase system capacity.
  
• Review what service plans have been sold and track the success of promotions by combining data from applicable databases, including from the Provisioning component.
  

This component enables the creation, management, and delivery of both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports.

Reporting services in Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5 uses standardized tools to support the full reporting life cycle. SQL Server Reporting Services support both on-demand (pull) and event-based (push) delivery of reports. Users can view reports in a Web-based format or in e-mail.

To learn about enabling automatic delivery of reports in e-mail, see Subscription Overview in Reporting Services - Managing and Working With Published Reports.

Report developers can create reports to be published to the Report Server using Microsoft or third-party design tools that use Report Definition Language (RDL), an XML-based industry standard used to define reports.More information about RDL can be found at Report Definition Language Specification.

This version of Hosted Messaging and Collaboration uses SQL Server Reporting Services. Together with System Center Operations Manager 2007 and solution components, it provides a framework to meet your solution reporting needs. Adding SQL Server Reporting Services to the solution allows you to access standard solution reports through a Web interface.

New and updated reporting components include:

• Updated data collection services, including Active Directory collection Service, and System Center Operations Manager collection service
  
• Exchange and Windows SharePoint Services service availability APIs
  
• Updated Microsoft Provisioning System Management Pack monitoring the Active Directory and System Center Operations Manager collection service
  
• The Data Usage Report API
  

SQL Server Reporting Services and these reporting components provide you with several standard solution reports. Microsoft Operations Manager Reports provides an overview of the reports available to you once you have deployed Reporting services for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration.