Running WebDAV on your WFEs

So I’m going to start this blog post with a rant about SSRS, make reports outputtable to Excel 2007 format!

So with that said, we encountered a question poised to us from some of our users, “we have a report that is generated from SSRS that’s send to a file share. This has some KPI information we use in Sharepoint. It’s a manual process to get it converted and uploaded. Is there anything you can do to simplify this?”

If the SSRS was configured in Sharepoint Integration Mode, our lives would have been much simpler, but it wasn’t, so this is what we did.

AutoIT to the rescue. We created a script that will map 2 network drives, one to the network share where the files is sent from SSRS and the other to the Sharepoint document library where the file is to reside. Oh snap, can’t do a WebDAV connection to your Document Library in a SSL environment from the server! What to do?

We scratched our heads for a while and this is what we did, configured an AAM to point from localhost to our Sharepoint address. In IIS we added an additional entry in the advanced web site identification screen for the Sharepoint website that uses SSL. Then if we opened a command prompt and did a net use Z: \\localhost\sites\site\doclib, a successful mapped drive is created. Score!

After the drives are mapped with the AutoIT script, we excute a CMD file that copies the file from the file server to a temp directory, executes a VB script to convert the file to Excel 2007, copies the file to Sharepoint, then unmaps the drives and deletes the local files.

If you’d like to see examples of the script, let me know. What a pain in the…

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