SSRS Email Subscription Change Service Account

Question

We have an instance of SSRS running on 'Local System' service account. I have added the SMTP settings to the Configuration Manager. I now want to change the service account to use an authenticated Windows AD account to I can access the Exchange server and utilise subscriptions.

I am using 2008, other than a need to restart IIS/RS I want to check about the symmetric keys that are used for accessing the report server database that have been encrypted with the local machine.

I want to check the steps and caveats of changing the service account in configuration manager from Local System to MyDomain\\My.User.

This page mentions about having to backup encryption keys first, then removing the reference to it after stopping IIS. Updating the service account and creating a new key before starting IIS.

So I need to do/worry about this or will the tool just handle this?

I suspect the tool 'should' manage all this for me but we know what assumptions are.

Answer 1

You need to use the Reporting Services Configuration tool to make changes to the service account being used. If you use this tool then it will automatically take care of permissions changes and modifying encryption keys. More details are available on MSDN .

The issue described on the website you linked to probably occurred because the service account was changed using the Services management tool in Windows, rather than the Reporting Services Configuration tool, and therefore the encryption key was not automatically updated.

Regardless of the above you should always back up the encryption keys for the report server and store them elsewhere.