A couple of weeks ago, I delivered a presentation at PASS 2007 entitled "Searching Business Intelligence Data in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007." The steps to configure the environment correctly are considerable and difficult to represent with enough detail in PowerPoint slides, so I promised the audience not to sweat the details in note-taking and await the step-by-step instructions to be posted on this site. At last, I've finalized the notes. Microsoft has a white paper, Extending Enterprise Search Capabilities to Your BI Applications (http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/a/72ae11fe-564d-4756-a878-eccb2e0692d7/BI%20Search%20Technical%20White%20Paper.doc),  and samples for download (http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/a/72ae11fe-564d-4756-a878-eccb2e0692d7/BI%20Search%20Technical%20White%20Paper%20Support%20Contents.zip), but I found that these instructions assume you know a lot about MOSS already and I found a couple of errors. I've provided more detailed (and hopefully, error-free) instructions and some additional sample content here: MOSS BI Search Step by Step.

Because most people that I've talked to are not implementing Kerberos yet (although I highly recommend you reconsider it as it makes security implementation easier!), I've written these instructions under the assumption that NTLM authentication is being used and hard-coded credentials in Excel and/or SSRS are being used to authenticate the user for the reports' data sources.

This particular example I've developed assumes one Analysis Services source - for Excel reporting - and one SQL Server source - for SSRS, but you shouldn't assume this means that you can't use SQL Server as a source for Excel reports or SSAS as a source for SSRS. You just need to create the Business Data Catalog (BDC) as appropriate for your source and associate it with Web part pages as an action. The key difference between the two sources for the BDC is how you pass parameter values to the Web part page.

Here are thumbnails linked to the full images...

First, the results of a search with the two links that I show later highlighted here in red:

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Here is the link to an Excel Web part page:

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And finally the link to an SSRS Web part page:

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