When discussing mobile reporting, there are multiple factors involved in providing a robust reporting solution. This section focuses on discussing issues with building a mobile reporting solution for the latest smart phone platforms. Most of these platforms have some capability around viewing rich document formats such as PDF, Excel, and HTML. Also, most of these platforms have the ability to create basic navigation HTML web pages or install a custom application that allows navigation.
The first step in building a mobile reporting solution is developing a report server that can support mobile clients. Due to the differences in smart phone technologies, it's important that the reporting server has the ability to detect the phone technology that is making the request, and proxy to the correct service for providing a mobile user interface. For instance, if your reporting server was using a rich HTML Javascript client, you may not want to attempt to render...