One of the missing links which I personally find in SharePoint is the lack of a "partial" search, i.e. if I search for Tim, I found all those whose names starts with Tim i.e. Timothy, Timmy, etc instead of just Tim. This makes a lot of sense when working with employees of different nationalities who might or might find each others names difficult to remember.
Ramon Scott has the following sweet solution for defining your own Partial Search webpart. Although this is very close to hitting the spot, I would rather be able to modify /extend the actual people search webpart rather than creating a "new" one.
I'll be researching this and hopefully eventually posting a solution.
