BIRT and SharePoint

DispatchMG

hey birters,

so, i've been tasked with implementing reporting for a project in our company. i've done this before for our ecommerce system, for which we use konakart; the konakart installation comes with an instance of birt for reporting. i successfully developed numerous complex reports with all sorts of parameters and such and eventually found that i kind of liked birt for reports.

so, that scenario being painted, here's the current situation: we've kinda recently started developing much more heavily using sharepoint (sp) as the framework. all development is done in-house and we only use sp for intrAnet type things. we want to continue to use sp as the entry point for internal management of various things, generally database tables and such.

we use sp to internally manage a sales system that relies heavily on web services hosted elsewhere, but this sales system has no reporting as of yet. this is where i come in (yay!). i do like birt, and i would like to use it for generating the report templates and such, but there are other considerations. for example, i do not want to set up yet another server just for birt and reporting; indeed, we have sp for these types of things, and we want that to be the house for all things internal. sp (especially 2010) is meant for this kinda stuff anyway - business connectivity services, business data connectivity, and external content types...these things are all aimed at external data being able to be handled and interacted with within sp. i want to follow that paradigm.

so, is it possible to set up a birt server on an sp box, or better yet, is there a birt plugin/webpart fro sp? is there any documentation on this type of integration? or, does birt not make sense in this situation? perhaps there is some functionality within sp that can handle reporting as elegantly and powerfully as birt? any help, documentation, insights, etc. would be appreciated!