Tuesday, February 7, 2012

How to eliminate secondary authentication request in performancepoint reports

You may have already noticed that there is two authentication requests while connecting to a performancepoint report through sharepoint integrated mode under NTLM authentication.

  1. Preliminary authentication request for the sharepoint site.
  2. Secondary authentication request for the report server(RS) web service. 

But it's not a good way to use in deployment environment, since it prompts twice for credentials, in case of client's active directory is not supported for kerberos authentication.

This problem can be eliminated using a simple methodology. The solution is very simple and straightforward.

Use the same port that you are used to create the web application (or application pool) to configure the RS web service URL. But make sure that your virtual directory name is not conflict with existing directories in your sites.
 


Default virtual directories are "ReportServer" and "Reports". Therefore if you have following directories, change the default virtual directory names.

http://Server Name:Port/ReportServer
http://Server Name:Port/Reports

Limitations:
Both sherepoint site collections (The sharepoint site collection used to publish reports and share point site collection used to integrate performancepoint reports) should use same web application.

Sharepoint server and report server should be in one physical server (Otherwise it will lead to double-hop problem).

If you need more detailed steps, the following figures will guide you through complete setup.

If you allocate different ports, for your web application and RS web service URL, the following authentication requests will prompt. In this illustration I have used 44000 to create my web application and RS web service URL is configured to 42000.


To eliminate the problem, first open reporting service configuration manager and change the RS web service URL port to 44000(same port used in the web application). In my demonstration I have added two URLs.

Then integrate the newly added RS web service URL using report server integration wizard and change the report server in performancepoint reports.



Hope this article would help you to eliminate secondary authentication prompt while connecting to a performancepoint report through sharepoint.