Microsoft has announced a new indexing connector for business intelligence (BI), specifically BI reports created using Excel and/or SQL Reporting Services, including the new tool for analysing massive amounts of data – PowerPivot. The connector creates a dedicated Report tab to query just reports, includes specific refiners filtering search reports, and thumbnails and previews to view reports within the search results page.
The pre-requisite for using the indexing connector (according to the download page for the backend components) is that you must be running FAST for SharePoint 2010.
If you are only planning on using SharePoint 2010, i.e. its built-in indexing and search capabilities, you can still index and search for Excel-based reports. You could also create a dedicated tab for them in the Search Center, but would require a manual process to tag reports in order to make them discoverable as a separate scope of results versus embedded along with all other documents that match a given search query. You won’t get the thumbnails or built-in preview, but for Excel you can still ‘view in browser’ thanks to Office Web Applications. The feature you cannot create outside of FAST are the custom refiners. FAST also does some more advanced funky indexing stuff around querying the data sources within the reports.
If you want to give the BI connector a go and are running FAST with SharePoint 2010, here’s the links to download: