I ran into a problem recently having set up a user with the “Browser” role in Reporting Services Report Manager. The user wanted to set up a subscription to have reports email out on a schedule but when she tried to create a subscription the “To” field was greyed out:

This would be fine if the user was the only person wanting to receive the report however the user would like to add her colleagues as recipients.

The predefined roles are documented in MSDN (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157363.aspx) and you can see that the Browser role has “Manage Individual Subscriptions” task.

When I log in (as a Content Manager) and attempt to create a subscription the “To” box is not greyed out so my initial conclusion was that the standard Browser role does not have permissions to send a subscription to anyone else. The Content Manager role has the “Manage all subscriptions” task included.

I don’t really want to give access to my user to manage all subscriptions. There needs to be a better alternative. So, how can I enable the “To” field without having to provide access to manage all subscriptions to my users?

The answer can be found at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159155.aspx and lies in the rsreportserver.config file. In there you’ll find <SendEmailToUserAlias>True</ SendEmailToUserAlias>.

[FYI The default location of the rsreportserver.config file is C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSRS11.MSSQLSERVERReporting ServicesReportServer]

By setting this to “False” the user will be able to edit the field. The intention of this setting is to allow the user to add their email address when the SMTP server uses email accounts that are different from the domain user accounts. By allowing users to edit the field we can add as many recipients as we like, delimited by a semicolon.

Below you can see the effect. Unfortunately you’ll notice we still lose the cc, bcc and reply-to fields but that was okay for my user. It seems that cc, bcc and reply-to are only available if you have the “Manage all subscriptions” task in you role.

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