Management pies…

I’m feeling pretty chuffed at the moment as the Configuration Manager implementation at work has gone really well. This is without doubt due to (warning: shameless self-promotion imminent) my technical leadership of a really good team of colleagues, and to be honest it wouldn’t have gone anywhere near as well as it did without them.

Okay, so we now have a system that can provide more data than you could ever need, and on the off-chance that there isn’t a report already present that you may need, you just knock one up, or maybe get your geek on with SQL Management Studio. Anyway, as expected there is a requirement to make some information available to members of senior management to aid with ‘planning & strategy’. As such, you need to make these sort of reports as FP as possible, ie: pictures (graphs). Now we have built our Config Manager infrastructure on Windows Server 2008 x64 (yes, I know that Config Manager is 32-bit only…) and everything works fine except after installing the Office Web Components on the server running as the Reporting Point I still wasn’t getting any graphs displayed on any reports, just the useful message:

This report has a chart, but the Microsoft Office Web Components required to view charts are not installed on the Reporting Point. Please contact your administrator.

Bit of digging and the solution was found here. You need to configure IIS to run 32-bit apps on x64. Ran the script, restarted IIS and I can now make easily digestible pie-charts available for consumption.

Update:

Would appear that since making the above change despite being able to view graphs through the SCCM Report Viewer, there are now errors being generated (one an hour) against the server acting as the reporting point, although on the face of it everything else seems to be working fine. Reverting the setting stops the errors so some further investigation is required, or I could get some wax crayons and draw the graphs by hand for them....

 

Update #2:

Sorted!  Found a box running 32-bit server 2003, added it as a new site system with just the Reporting Point role, installed Office Web components and as a certain potty-mouthed chef might say..‘Done!’.

It also now means that I am now free to revel in whatever adrenaline-fuelled activity that HE IT may throw at me this week….