Configure Email Subscriptions in SSRS

In this blog we are going to look at how to configure Email subscriptions in SSRS. Subscriptions like its names suggests is a way for the user to be able to get alerts or subscribe to a particular report , somewhat similar to the way they can subscribe to and RSS Feed. The idea being that a report generally falls into one of two categories. These are reports that are published in regular intervals such as monthly sales report or a report that is more ad hoc in nature and will be published when data is available.

Subscriptions allow the user two options to be able to work with report in either of these categories, the first being a scheduled subscriptions and the second being data driven subscription.

Let us now look at how to configure a scheduled subscription.

Navigate to the report that you will subscribe to and click on the arrow next to the report name

You will see an option to subscribe to the report, select it to move on to the next screen.

If you see the above error message it means that the report credentials are not stored on the report server itself and therefore it will not be possible for SSRS to execute the report on its own.

I am going to change my authentication type to SQL and save the credentials on the server itself now.

Navigate back to the report and again click on the arrow except this time select the Manage option. Select data sources from the left hand side menu and select the radio button for credentials stored securely in the report server as shown below, do not forget to press apply

Navigate back to subscriptions tab after the above step and you should see a screen like below

At this point you are now ready to create the subscription. The subscription sends out an email to the sender list and includes the report itself with additional metadata about the report. Towards the lower half of the screen you will see the option to schedule the report

    For example the above report is configured to run every Monday at 8:00 AM.

And this is all there is to configure a subscription.

Some Common Errorsand their solutions :-

Got the error “Failure sending mail: The server rejected the sender address. The server response was: 530 5.7.0” when setting up SSRS email subscriptions using a Gmail account

Make sure the Port and the options for and are configured to 465, 1and, 2 respectively. Refer the below link for more details on how to work with the reporting services config file

Note:- If your configuring subscriptions to use an email account that is not managed by you e.g. Gmail etc. then you need to enabled SMTP relay in order for SSRS to be able to send out the reports , else you will get and error message that invalid recipient lists even though the list of recipients is valid.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157273.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159155.aspx#bkmk_configure_for_local_or_remote_SMTP

Please Consider Subscribing

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