If a person is a System Administrator in SSRS 2008 R2 why do you have to add them to all folders and reports?

Hi MontyPython, In SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS), there are two different security roles, System Role and Item role. System Role contains a system-level task. A system-level task is a collection of permissions that relate to operations that apply to the report server site as a whole. An item-level task is a collection of permissions that relate to a report, folder, report model, resource, or shared data source. According to the description above, when a person is a System Administrator, he/she still need permissions to access individual item in the report server. Item permissions can be inherited. If reports or subfolders inherit permissions from parent folder, we don't need to set permissions for the reports or subfolders again. For more information, please see: System-Level Tasks: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157353.aspx Item-Level Tasks: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms160344.aspx If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks, Jin ChenJin Chen - MSFT