Microsoft Announces FAST Search Roadmap

by Andy on February 18th, 2009

I found a great article today on officesharepointpro.com about Microsoft Announcing the FAST Search Roadmap. The following is an extract from http://tinyurl.com/cf6zl4

Last April, Microsoft completed its acquisition of the Norwegian search developer, FAST Search and Transfer. Since then, teams from both companies have been working to further integrate the two products. Last week, at the FASTforward’09 event, Microsoft revealed some of the vision for FAST technologies moving forward. First, two products were announced: FAST Search for SharePoint and FAST Search for Internet Business. The first product will bring the high-end search capabilities of FAST to SharePoint Server’s collaboration, portal, and content management workloads. The second will be focused on providing search for sophisticated web applications. Both products will be released in beta later this year, which means their final form will be part of the 2010 wave of SharePoint products and technologies. In the meantime, Enterprise CAL customers can take advantage of the third announcement made last week: ESP for SharePoint. This offering is not a new product, per se, but rather a licensing path that enables customers to take advantage of FAST ESP with existing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) implementations, with a defined licensing path to FAST Search for SharePoint when it is released.

It’s interesting to me that this roadmap suggests that Microsoft is keeping FAST as a completely separate, though complementary, set of product offerings, rather than integrating them into out-of-box offerings or “premium” versions of SharePoint Server. I expect this has much to do with the timing of the acquisition and integration activities, which occurred well into the SharePoint 14 development cycle. It will be interesting to see if any of the FAST capabilities manage to sneak into the core search functionality of SharePoint. Without a doubt, FAST brings powerful enhancements to SharePoint, and further moves SharePoint into the “no brainer” category for enterprise search.

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