Friday, August 8, 2008

Anonymous access Report Manager


The problem is that when using Anonymous access, every person hitting that page will be under the Anonymous user context, and no one will have rights to administer Reporting Services through Report Manager. This is why we don't support using Anonymous access in Reporting Services.
In order to differentiate between users, we need to either disable Anonymous access or use a custom security extension. We have a sample using Forms Authentication:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/ufairs.asp

If the customer persists in wanting to use Anonymous access, this is a starting list:
1) Add the anonymous user to the System User role
2) Create an Item-level role with all of the tasks you want this user to be able to use, then assign the anonymous user to that role at the root level.
3) Check permissions for the anonymous user on folders that SRS uses:
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services (and subfolders)
- C:\\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files
- the temp folder for the anonymous user
There may be others as well.

Note that 1 & 2 can be accomplished through Report Manager only if Anonymous access is disabled and the logged-on user is a member of the System Administrator role.

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