Enterprise Search and BI

I notice from various sources (for example, Don Dodge) that Microsoft have released a free version of their Enterprise Search product, Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. The thing that caught my eye was the list of federated connectors:

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/connectors/federated.aspx

…which includes Business Objects, Cognos, SAS, but there’s no mention of Reporting Services or Analysis Services anywhere. As I think I’ve said here before, I’m not convinced that a search interface on top of a BI platform is going to be useful in the real world (though I bet you could do some cool demos with it): I suppose if you have hundreds of SSRS reports for example you might want to look for the ones that contain figures for a particular Product or Customer, but I would have thought that it’s just as likely that you’d do a search, find a report and then find you don’t have permission to view it. As for using a search interface as a way of querying a cube, all I have to say about that is two words: English Query.

But I think there’s a more interesting application for BI here: what if you could build a cube off the index this thing creates? You could have dimensions like Date Updated, Keyword, File Type and Path, and measures like Count of Files and File Size; you’d be able to do things like create reports which tracked the overall space taken by mp3 files on your network and where these files were, the number of emails with the phrase "new job" in; even just browsing ad hoc in Excel you’d have a new way of searching for files: for example, you could slice on File Type=Word doc, Keyword="CV" or "Resume" and then put the Path dimension on rows and drill down to find all the CVs on your network.