Professional Microsoft® Search: FAST Search, SharePoint® Search, and Search Server

Chapter 11. Search and Business Intelligence

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Exploring the merging of Search and BI

• Exploring ways to use Search and BI together

• Overviewing Microsoft BI and SharePoint

• Understanding the Microsoft BI Indexing Connector

• Looking at the Future of Search and BI

What is the difference between business intelligence (BI) and enterprise search? Both are technologies dedicated to the discovery and analysis of data. However, each tends to look at different types of information, and they have radically different approaches to finding that information.

Business intelligence and data warehousing were designed to process, manage, and explore structured data, often data from essential production systems all over the enterprise. Search tools have, for the most part, been designed to index and query unstructured data, such as websites and document repositories.

A typical search engine is something that even a novice can use to find information quickly. BI tools, on the other hand, are based on complex and refined queries that result in exact and complete data results and reports. BI applications, thus, tend to have a high level of complexity, which has meant that only business analysts or those specifically trained on BI systems could effectively use them.

Despite their differences, both BI and search are ultimately in the business of discovering information, and when effectively combined, they can provide a broad and insightful information discovery system. For example, a search ...