A long time ago (it seems) I blogged about reporting directly from the SharePoint workspace sites using SQL Reporting Services to get around the limitations with the reporting database refresh. Using XML provided a neat method for pulling data directly from all the out-of-the-box lists such as Risks and Issues, as well as other custom lists.
Unfortunately setup and maintenance was difficult requiring a little knowledge of web services as well as some XML syntax, but fortunately now with SQL Server 2008 R2 things have improved drastically!
What’s New: Now you can directly create ‘Microsoft SharePoint List’ data sources!
See the screenshot:
Better yet when you create a Data Set using the above data source the Query Designer is completely new:
Finally no more messing around with column names using XML and having to have specific views configured in your SharePoint sites.
That should make things much easier!
BTW. Lastly it’s definitely worth mentioning that the above also works with Report Builder 3.0!