The MR users were in several locations as well and not just at corporate.
We have several other customers asking similar questions.
We scoured the internet trying to find out who has done this before and what solutions were out there. The only one we could find was publishing the URL to Sharepoint. Although Sharepoint is a great solution, the clients we were talking to did not have any Sharepoint deployed.
The solution that we came up with is publishing the URL externally so it can be accessed from any location. This is not as easy as you would think because MR is not using IIS (Internet Information Services). IIS is how web sites are created and publish for most applications.
The benefits of publishing to an external URL are 3 fold:
Cost Savings:
You have 25 people who need to view the reports but only 5 of those really need to log into GP. Web Viewer helps eliminate the need for the GP licenses, but you will still need Citrix or RDP (Terminal Services). Even though these costs are only around $10 - $35 plus per user, say it is $20.00. $20 x 20 users is still an extra $400 per month. With an external URL, you will only need an Active Directory (AD) Login. There should be no additional for an AD account. No additional products need to be purchased to make this solution work.
Time Savings
You are at a GPUP summit or some other conference. The Hotel Internet is notoriously very slow. Someone publishes a report you want to see right away. Logging into the Citrix server or RDP server, will add an additional 5 minutes to getting into the report. If you go straight to the URL, you only need your AD login once.
Note: the security for the report link is derived from the corresponding Reports Library location. So users accessing the report link still must have their AD logins setup in Management Reporter as users with the appropriate security to open the link.
- No longer a need to export to other formats and emailing to team members for viewing
- No need to spend time exporting each report in different format for different people. URLs can be sent out to all who need to view a report.
Applying permissions are no different than when you do it from your MR permissions.
