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. . . .

One of the coolest features unique to SharePoint Online is the ability to share sites with external users. I’ve noticed the functionality was there throughout the beta but I believe I hadn’t actually been able to get it to work until GA. Even then, it took checking a number of settings before I could actually get it to work.

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, we just need to start over. A lot of times, I see cases in the forums where it is just easier to reinstall the Search Service Application. This especially applies to new environments or when someone ran the dreaded “wizard” to set up their service applications. This serves as a quick reference guide on how to re-create your Search Service Application.