The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Enterprise Search: SharePoint Searches FASTer
Last year Microsoft shelled out $1.2 billion to buy Norway’s Fast Search and Transfer (FAST). It’s a year later now and Microsoft just announced upcoming plans for the FAST technology.
The plans include the bundling of FAST technology with SharePoint. This will be a big boost to SharePoint which has been significantly weak in search. With FAST, SharePoint search should become significantly faster and produce more targeted results. FAST brings with it the ability to extract concepts and draw relationships from data.
One barrier to adoption of FAST has been a steep price. Microsoft plans to lower FAST fees. Microsoft says the enterprise SharePoint customers will save over 50% when FAST search and SharePoint are combined.
But don’t hold your breath. The beta version of FAST search for SharePoint is due out in the second half of this year, so a final version won’t be out until sometime at least until 2010, probably to coincide with the next version of SharePoint expected in 2010. This will be a SharePoint add-on that would replace the lower-cost not-very-efficient standard SharePoint search.
