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As mobile devices are becoming more common as primary consumption devices for BI assets, we have more requests to deploy our BI Assets out to tablet devices like the iPad. In this lesson we're going to look at how we can use Reporting Services and SharePoint to deploy solutions like this to the iPad device.

The first thing we'll use in this solution is SharePoint 2010. We'll also need network connectivity to the iPad. We'll talk about the various ways we can accomplish that. And we're going to use Reporting Services installed in SharePoint Integrated mode in this solution. This isn't the only possible way you could deliver this SharePoint content, but this is what we're going to use in this example.

And then we'll have some reports we published into SSRS Integrated mode of course.

Then we'll develop a web part page to host those reports and format it just the way we want with the iPad. Finally we'll use a custom master page to present "finger friendly" navigation that will work better on the iPad than an out of the box V4 master page.

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A critical piece of getting the iPad connected to SharePoint is really thinking about how that iPad is actually going to connect to SharePoint. If you're only going to deploy this solution within your building...within your Intranet, where the iPad is connected to the WiFi network that's behind the firewall and has a clear shot at SharePoint, there's really nothing you need to configure. The iPad just needs to connect to the network; the network has SharePoint, and this all works pretty easily.

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However iPads are not always connected to the internal network, so we need to decide what we're going to do when the iPad is traveling. We might do none of these; we might decide we'll only support iPads that are within the building. Most iPad users, however, take these things home. They take them on trips; they take them to the airport.

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If we want to provide access to the public Internet, we need to think about how to do that. One way is extending SharePoint directly to the web, which is completely supported in SharePoint. We can connect SharePoint to the web if we want to. If we don't want it directly on the web, we could put it behind a VPN. The iPad supports various clients. There's PPTP built into the iPad that can be used. Some of the major VPN concentrator vendors are providing iPad clients, such as Cisco and Juniper. Normally you'll have to pay up for this as an additional cost, however they're becoming more available.

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A third option--and the one we'll actually use in this solution--is a hybrid. We're going to publish the SharePoint solution to the web through a reverse proxy server. In this case Microsoft ForeFront TMG.

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One thing to note is that in any of these solutions, the iPad is going to run the Safari web browser, which does not support Windows integrated authentication. Your iPad user will be prompted for username and password.

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Let's look at the architecture for the solution, and then in the next lesson we'll walk through and take a look at it.

The first part of our solution is our data, and our data in this solution is in SQL Server relational databases as well as Analysis Services cubes. Our repots will leverage both of these.

That data will be built into reports using SSRS in SharePoint Integration Mode. That's hosted within SharePoint 2010. We do have a custom master page that is developed with SharePoint designer.

In this solution we're supporting iPad devices not only on the internal WiFi network, but also as they're traveling on the Internet, and we're supporting this through ForeFront TMG's reverse proxy services.

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The iPad actually talks to ForeFront TMG using SSL, and TMG is reverse proxying those connections back to the SharePoint Server.

That's the overall architecture and the pieces we need to make this solution work. In the next lesson we'll look at how the pieces fit together on the back-end and how the solution looks for the iPad user on the front-end.