Over the last five or ten years it seems like everywhere I turn innovations in technology and a desire by corporations to manage the bottom line have conspired to “empower” me to serve myself. In most cases, I’m okay with this and view it as a step forward. On the professional front, as a 20-year veteran of decision support, data warehousing, data marts, and reporting and analysis solutions, I’ve been trying to enable business users so that they could serve themselves (versus total dependency on their corporate IT brethren) when it comes to getting the information they need to monitor and analyze the performance of their business. At the risk of oversimplification, I would say there are two key elements that must be in place to enable self-service for business users. . . .

In my last post, PowerPivot: A Cool Way to Prototype, I talked about the importance to prototyping a BI solution as well as consideration for using PowerPivot as a tool for developing a prototype solution. In this post, I’d like to discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of using PowerPivot as a prototyping tool for PerformancePoint dashboards and other Analytic Reporting solutions.

SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search has great wildcard search support built in now. However, it requires the use to add an asterisk to their query every time they want a wildcard search. This is a great step compared to what we had in MOSS 2007, but now it results in a training issue. In 2007, many people wrote custom code or relied on the Wildcard Search Web Part that I built. So I thought why not use the QueryManager object to override the query and add an asterisk to the query for the user.

Enterprise Search is one of my favorite SharePoint topics to speak about. Often in my talks, I use various keyword queries to display results that people often end up asking me about. Today, I thought it would be useful to show you some of the most useful built-in keywords that you can use to troubleshoot search results or even build custom scopes with.