Data Source Deployment Best Practises Supporting Development, Test, And Production Environments

We are setting up a new Reporting Services 2005 enterprise reporting tier that will support multiple developers, applications, and end users. We will have mirrored environments including development, test, and production each with their own database cluster, and reporting server.

We have multiple report developers who share a single Visual Studio solution which is saved in SourceSafe and is setup to have separate report projects for each business unit in the orgainzation. Each report project is mapped to a specific deployment folder matching the business unit. Using the Visual Studio Configuration Manager, we can simply flip to the envirnoment we want to deploy to and the reports are published to the correct environment and folder structure.

My problem lies with the common data sources. We are using a single master Common Data Sources folder to hold all of the data sources. The trick is that each and every reporting folder seems to have to have it's own copy of the data source in visual studio. There does not seem to be an easy way to change the data sources for the reports when you publish to various environment, i.e. development, test, production etc.

Ideally, we would have a single project for the common data sources that all reporting projects and associated folders would map to, and we would have a way to associate the appropriate data source for each environment when we deploy.

I'm looling for best practices on how to setup data sources for development and deployment in an enterprise environment that uses Visual Studio to develop and publish reports. We have 3 environments, and 6 data sources per environment and about 20 reporting folder / project in Visual Studio. That's 360 changes that have to be manged when deploying reports. Is there a best practices way to do this?

There has got to be a better way? Can anyone give me some insite into how to set this up?

Thanks!