Displaying Reports on SharePoint

Question

First of all, I must say that I'm new to this. I'm a 3rd year ICT & Business student and an intern in a international company. My assignment is to create a reporting service on the company's intranet (SharePoint).

The company wants to have a section on the intranet where only managers can access. To give you an idea, lets say one of the managers wants a report like this:

"Show the names of the male interns who worked between 2012 – 2013".

And lets say the interface on the intranet is going to be like the image below.

Once the manager fills in the required fields and presses the button;

1. SharePoint is going to create the query,
2. SharePoint is going to ask for the data which is stored in the SQL Server,
3. SQL Server is going to send the data to SharePoint,
4. SharePoint is going to create an Excel File.

In order to achieve such a reporting system, where and how do you suggest me to start? Any links, guides etc. would be much appretiated. Even a general response would help me to understand the basics.

NOTE: Our IT department will handle the connections between the SharePoint and SQL server. I don't have to worry about that. All I need is to find out how you create a query on Sharepoint which will connect to SQL server and ask for data and display it on SharePoint (or Excel in this case).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Reporting Services would probably be your best option given that the data is already in SQL Server. You can define parameters on the report so users filter what they see in the results and you can choose to output to Excel.