Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog : FAST

The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 - Query Interfaces

enterprisesearch — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:39:00 GMT

SharePoint 2010 includes a number of features that make the platform easier to use for developers. An improved Visual Studio integration, the addition of LINQ to the SharePoint platform, sandboxing for deployment, and the new developer dashboard are just a few examples of how developing and deploying SharePoint solutions have become much easier.

As a member of the enterprise search development team that has worked to bring FAST Search into SharePoint 2010, I can tell you that a lot has also been done to benefit developers of search-based solutions. SharePoint 2010 Search and the new FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 have been designed to share a common platform so that search developers can integrate with both SharePoint Search and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 using the same query side interfaces. This means developers don’t have to learn new APIs or programming models, but can leverage the same object models, services and a common query language for both products.

SharePoint developers and architects implementing search-driven applications should understand the available integration options. Depending on requirements, tools, and preferences, one can choose from among several integration points, including a brand new object model in SharePoint 2010. Here’s a list of the different integration points with a brief description of each:

The Federation Object Model (OM)

This is a new search object model in SharePoint 2010. It provides a unified interface for querying against different locations (search providers), giving developers of search-driven Web Parts a way to implement end-user experiences that are independent of the underlying search engine. The object model also allows for combining and merging results from different search providers. Out-of-box Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 are based on this OM, and SharePoint 2010 ships with 3 different types of locations; SharePoint Search, FAST Search and OpenSearch. The Federation OM is also extensible, should you want or need to implement a custom search location outside of the supported types.

The Query Web Service

This is the integration point for applications outside of your SharePoint environment, such as standalone, non-web based applications, or Silverlight applications running in a browser. The Query Web Service is a SOAP based ASMX web service, and supports a number of operations, including:

Querying and getting search results

Getting query suggestions

Getting meta data, e.g. a list managed properties

The same schema is shared for SharePoint Search and FAST Search, and both products support the same operations. For querying, clients can easily switch the search provider by setting a ResultsProvider element in the request XML. A number of extensions are available for FAST Search, e.g. refinement results, advanced sorting using a formula, issuing queries using the FAST Query Language.

The Query RSS Feed

Certain scenarios, like simple mashups, may need only a simple search result list. The RSS feed is an alternative, lightweight integration point for supplying applications outside of SharePoint with a simple RSS result list. The Search Center - the default search front-end in SharePoint 2010 - includes a link to a query-based RSS feed. Switching the engine to the RSS format is done by simply setting a URL provider. Because of its intended simplicity, there are some limitations to what can be returned and customized in the query RSS feed. The object models or the web service integration scenarios are recommended for more advanced applications.

The Query Object Model

This is the lowest level object model, used by the Federation object model, the Query Web Service and the Query RSS feed. Both SharePoint Search and FAST Search support the KeywordQuery object in this object model. While the Federation OM returns XML (to Web Parts), the Query OM returns data types.

The Search Web Parts

Search Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 are common in SharePoint Search and FAST Search, and are now based on the common Federation OM. The Web Parts on a page communicate through a shared Query Manager, a central component of the Federation OM. This makes adding new Web Parts that interact with existing Web Parts simpler than before. For example, a new Tag Cloud Web Part for visualizing the query results can utilize the shared Query Manager for getting results. Developers will also be able to extend out-of-box Web Parts as they now are public in SharePoint 2010 (no longer sealed).

The Common Query Language

Both SharePoint Search and FAST Search support the Keyword Query Language syntax. This is the default query language for both products, and the end-user language supported from the Web Parts in the search centers (including the advanced search page).

FAST Search Extensions

FAST Search has a number of extensions beyond the standard SharePoint Search that are available on both the Federation and Query object models, and as well as on the query web service. Some examples are:

The FAST Query Language, which supports advanced query operators like XRANK for dynamic (query time) term weighting and ranking.
Deep refiners over the whole results set, and the possibility of adding refiners over any managed property
Advanced sorting using managed properties or a query-time sort formula.
Advanced duplicate trimming, with the ability to specify a custom property on which to base duplicate comparisons.
“Similar documents” matching.
FAST Search Admin Object Model for promoting documents or assigning visual best bets to query keywords/phrases.

Building powerful search applications is easier than ever in SharePoint 2010. FAST Search is now integrated into the SharePoint platform and developers of search-driven solutions and applications can leverage a common platform and common APIs for both SharePoint Search and FAST Search. This means applications can be built to support both search engines and then extended if and when desired to take advantage of the more advanced features available with FAST Search, such as dynamic ranking, flexible sort formulae, or deep refiners for insight into your full result set.

Arnt Schøning, Senior Development Engineer | Microsoft Enterprise Search Group

(o on Twitter as @aschoning)

FAST meets SharePoint - What's Coming in Search for SharePoint 2010

ntreloar — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:22:00 GMT

Last week was the 2009 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. The sold-out attendance of 7400 doubled the number from the previous SharePoint conference 1 ½ years ago. This is not too surprising given the incredible momentum of SharePoint and the fact that much of the event was dedicated to disclosure of the highly anticipated SharePoint 2010 release. Surprising or not, it was gratifying for us search guys to see the level of interest in the new search capabilities being disclosed for 2010. Several of the search-specific break-out sessions had as many people in the audience (>1000) as the entire attendance of our FASTforward’09 search conference in February earlier this year.

At that FASTforward conference in February, Microsoft announced plans to deliver enterprise search targeting two general solution areas: 1) business productivity applications, where the emphasis is on search driving employee efficiency, and 2) Internet business applications, where search is used to drive customer service and revenue. The disclosure of the new search options in SharePoint 2010 at last weeks SharePoint Conference amounts to the first deliverable of this strategy.

SharePoint as a whole has evolved from the original content management and portal platform of earlier releases into a complete “business collaboration platform”, and there are *a lot* of enhancements and new capabilities in SharePoint 2010. I won’t even attempt to summarize them all here. Instead, check out Jeff Teper’s blog post from early last week, which provides a remarkably good summary of everything that’s coming in SharePoint 2010. As Jeff points out in his blog, search is just one of several major categories of capabilities in SharePoint 2010, but “enterprise search is a big investment area for Microsoft” and an area where “we’ve added depth at all levels in 2010”.

There are two main enterprise search options coming with the SharePoint 2010 release:

1) SharePoint Server 2010 Search – the out-of-the-box SharePoint search for enterprise deployments.

2) FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint – a brand new add-on product based on the FAST search technology that combines the best of FAST’s high-end search capabilities with the best of SharePoint.

SharePoint Server 2010 Search represents an important upgrade to the existing search for SharePoint, while FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is a completely new offering and the first new product based on the FAST technology since FAST was acquired by Microsoft in April 2008. Customers and partners familiar with search in previous versions of SharePoint will see many important improvements in 2010, regardless of which product they deploy. For example, there is a new People Search feature for expertise identification and search-driven collaboration, to name just one (see Jeff’s post for a good summary of these general improvements).

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 adds a whole new level of search capabilities that are a superset of what comes in the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 Search option. Since there are now two search options in 2010, it’s useful to understand what is unique in FAST Search for SharePoint and when you might consider using it over the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 search. With that in mind, here are my 10 reasons to consider FAST Search for SharePoint 2010:

1) Content Processing Pipeline

For people familiar with the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), the good news is that the most valued capabilities of ESP have been brought into FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 and made easier to access and deploy through tight integration with the SharePoint management and development tools. The open framework in FAST ESP for creating custom content processing pipelines is a good example. Since it was first introduced in version 3 way back in 2002, FAST customers and partners have leveraged advanced content processing and advanced linguistic features to create a wide variety of novel search applications. This highly valued aspect of the FAST ESP will be available in FAST Search for SharePoint and has been architected and enhanced to take advantage of the SharePoint management interfaces and development tools like PowerShell.

2) Meta-data Extraction

Meta-data is used in search for faceted refinement, relevancy tuning, targeted queries (e.g. search only the authors field), and other general techniques designed to improve findability. The problem is that unstructured documents are often devoid of useful meta-data. The ability to automatically extract meta-data to create useful structure on otherwise unstructured documents is a feature of FAST ESP that will also available in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. Importantly, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of simple administrative tools and the concept of “managed properties” in SharePoint to support adding custom meta-data extractors very quickly.

3) Structured Data Search

Structured data search is possible with both search options in SharePoint 2010, but FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 adds an extra level of sophistication for searching data that contains numbers, dates, and other encoded and structured information. To start, the full FAST Query Language (FQL) is available to application developers who want the richness and expressiveness that FQL provides. This includes support for numeric and date data types, formula-based query operations, term weighting with the XRANK operator, and much more. Also, integration with the new Microsoft Business Data Connectivity services in 2010 means that ingesting structured data from external Line of Business applications is much easier in FAST Search for SharePoint.

4) “Deep” Refinement (Faceted Search)

Previously only available in SharePoint search through 3^rd party add-ons, faceted search, called “refiners” in the default search interface (SharePoint Search Center), is now native in the out-of-box SharePoint 2010 search. FAST Search for SharePoint adds to this the ability to deliver faceted search across results sets of any size while retaining precise counts on the refinement facets. This is critical for research and analysis applications where precise counts on facets are important decision making criteria. (You can see examples of deep refiners on FAST ESP powered sites like scirus.com and dell.com.)

5) Visual Search (Document Thumbnails and Previews)

Visual document thumbnails and previewer Web Parts will be out-of-the-box with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 to help users more quickly judge what is relevant in a search result list. This includes a graphical previewer for PowerPoint presentations based on Microsoft Silverlight that allows users to quickly find the “one slide” of interest without having to open up the entire presentation.

6) Advanced linguistics

The quality of search against text data is highly dependent on the ability to apply the right language-specific processing techniques. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 builds on the FAST ESP heritage and Microsoft tools to include advanced language processing (linguistics) for dozens of languages, including optimized processing for Chinese/Japanese/Korean.

7) Visual best bets

SharePoint already supports the concept of search Best Bets – managed results delivered with the search for specific queries. FAST Search for SharePoint adds to this the ability to render visual best bests in the form of images and even videos. Management of search best bets, both standard and visual, is through the standard SharePoint administrative console.

8) Best-in-class development platform

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 builds on the comprehensive development framework of SharePoint 2010. The customization options range from configuring out-of-the-box search behavior (best bets) and user interface controls (Web Parts), to extending existing functionality using public Web Part code and SharePoint Designer, to creating brand new components and functionality with the available APIs. For FAST ESP aficionados, no compromises have been made in the area of extensibility with FAST Search for SharePoint, but many of the customizations in ESP are now much easier to do.

9) Custom search experiences (per user/profile)

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 includes the same level of relevancy tuning available to FAST ESP. It will be possible, as it is in ESP, to create custom relevancy models tuned to differences in content sources, application needs, and user contexts. User context simply means that different users can have different search “contexts” that enable experiences optimized for their specific business needs. User context can be used to set the search sources, relevance rank profile, linguistic processing features, and other search features by user or user group. In an enterprise search setting, this means that a Sales Director does not have to see the exact same results as a Product Designer for a given query, even if they are searching the same sources.

10) Extreme Scale and Performance

Scale and performance of the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 Search has been dramatically improved – with proven scalability to 100 million documents and more. For FAST Search for SharePoint 2010, the exact same scale-out model that exists in FAST ESP has been preserved to enable extremes of content (e.g. number of documents to search), queries (e.g. the number of queries or query rate), or both. This means search solutions that can support billions of documents and thousands of queries per second.

There is much to like about what is coming with search in SharePoint 2010 and more information than I’m able to share in one blog post. You can add to the list above the general benefits of search enhanced by all the other tools and services of the SharePoint platform - including content management, communication and collaboration, business intelligence, system administration and monitoring, application development, and so on. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, search doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the ability to integrate and interoperate with other business productivity functions is critical to actually acting on a search result. From this point of view, SharePoint and it’s compendium of integrated services, simply makes search better.

The first public beta for SharePoint 2010 will be available in a few weeks. This will include beta bits for the standard search in SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. I hope you’ll be able to try out these new search products and features. In the mean time, you can learn more about what’s coming in search for SharePoint 2010 by going to the SharePoint 2010 preview site at http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/.

Nate

A Focus on Search User Experience

ntreloar — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:17:00 GMT

It’s happening… slowly … but it’s happening.

Attention in search is finally shifting from a focus on low-level features and relevancy models to looking at the whole user experience for information access. I, for one, am very glad to see this trend. Of all the enterprise technologies out there, few are planted so squarely at the interface of humans and machine as search. And yet, for many users, the search input box and a list of blue links is still the pinnacle of a search user experience – a user interface model that hasn’t changed appreciably in over 10 years. There is room for improvement.

So what exactly is happening? I’ll point out three things:

1) New Books on Search User Interfaces and User Experiences

Three recently published books have put some focus on human-computer interaction (HCI) and search. The first book by Ryen White, from Microsoft Research, and Resa Roth, published earlier this year, covers the topic of exploratory search. From the abstract:

Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from the information retrieval, information science, and human-computer interaction communities in moving beyond the traditional turn-taking interaction model supported by major Web search engines, and toward support for human intelligence amplification and information use.

The second book, Daniel Tunkelang’s on faceted search, looks at a particular interaction pattern that is now a mainstay of most commercial search platforms. Daniel, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Endeca, can speak with some authority on the topic of faceted search since his company was essentially built on the idea.

The third book, and perhaps the most ambitious, is from Marti Hearst, a respected researcher in information retrieval and text mining at UC Berkeley, who has recently released for online reading (print version coming in September) a comprehensive review of search user interface research.

A general theme, with the first two books especially, is on user models for search that are interactive and iterative. They address, in part, the fact that users are not very precise in communicating their information needs in an ad hoc query. While there is some evidence that keyword queries are getting longer, the oft-referenced 2.3 term average query length still demands user experiences that don’t just try to deliver the best possible results on the first attempt, but that can help the user ask a better question through contextual navigation, iterative feedback and refinement options.

2) New and Evolving Examples Online

Beyond the three more academic works above, there is also evidence that commercial search applications are focusing more on search-based user experience. In a post last month, I referenced a couple Microsoft/FAST customers, Oodle and Globrix, who have put a particular emphasis on user experiences built completely around search. Other sites, like Getty Images’ Catalyst search take advantage of the uniqueness of the domain (image search) to create rich and engaging experiences built on search.

On the wider Web, Microsoft launched the Bing “decision engine” in May with query disambiguation features built in. Even Google has relaxed its keep-it-simple position by adding search options to enrich the user experience. Compared to domain-specific enterprise search applications, the Web search engines are just beginning to dip their toes in the water, but otherwise the same theme exists: search user experiences that are more interactive, iterative, and conversational.

3) Search UI Design Patterns

Finally, the past couple years have seen efforts to formalize UI design patterns for search. Peter Morville has championed this idea and posted a nice compendium of discrete search patterns with example screen shots on Flickr (also see his wiki). The idea of cataloging UI patterns for search is so that the good patterns - those that have been proven to work well and to result in a positive user experience - can be promoted and reused. There is also the concept of “anti-patterns” or patterns that have been shown to have a neutral or negative impact on user experience. (As an aside, Peter’s catalog of patterns focuses on GUI patterns – many of which will be familiar even to non-practitioners. In my post on search and Natural User Interfaces , or NUIs, I mentioned that these new “touch and gesture” UIs do not have established patterns yet for search. It is truly a greenfield and it will be interesting to see what patterns emerge.)

As said, I’m a fan of this focus on user experience in search and also of the formalization of best practice design patterns. I’d like to see it all go a little further, though. Having a set of discrete and generic patterns is helpful, but even better will be having best practice patterns that are oriented toward specific business processes where search is used. Understanding these meta patterns in enterprise search is especially important in order to understand user experience differences between search for Research, search for eCommerce, search for Customer Service, search for eDiscovery, etc... Some of these differences are in the search features themselves, others are in how search interfaces with other non-search features and workflow (e.g. shopping carts in eCommerce or communication tools for collaborative research). For example, the “product comparison” view is something common in eCommerce applications and, while not obviously a search UI element, its rendering is dependent on search results.

In time, I expect these meta patterns to evolve into user experience and UI templates (customizable) that will help organizations quickly stand up search front-ends that take into consideration not just how people search (functional patterns), but why people search (process patterns).

Nate

One Year with Microsoft – a FAST Perspective

ntreloar — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:49:00 GMT

After years of writing customer proposals, internal memoranda, and various stuffily formal documents, it feels like a luxury to be able to just write what I think about enterprise search. It’s actually part of my job these days and I’m looking forward to sharing a perspective from 13 years in the industry – the past 6 years with FAST and, most recently, with Microsoft.

As a reminder, it’s been a more than a year since the original offer came down from Microsoft to acquire FAST. To be precise, the bid was announced on January 8^th, 2008 and the deal closed on April 25^th, 2008. The FAST team now makes up a large part of the new Enterprise Search Group (ESG) within the Microsoft Business Division (MBD) – the division that makes SharePoint, the Office line of products, Exchange, etc… .

When I get asked about my reaction to the FAST acquisition by Microsoft, I tend to point out that, while those of us in the business have always understood the value of search, nothing says “Ata boy!” like having the largest software company in the world take notice. Maybe we could ask why it took so long, but even if you didn’t happen to work at FAST, you can’t help but feel that Microsoft’s move is validation of our growing corner of the IT industry.

I admit that the answer above, while maybe heartwarming, doesn’t get to the core of what people really want to know. Not surprisingly, folks are more interested in Microsoft’s vision for enterprise search and plans for the FAST people, products, partners, and customers than they are in my emotions. Now, with a year under the belt at Microsoft, I have a few more insights to offer than just the initial “nice validation” response.

In his keynote presentation at FASTforward’09 in February, Kirk Koenigsbauer addressed three key topics related to Microsoft’s interest in enterprise search (a transcript of Kirk’s keynote can be found here). These were:

· Commitment (to enterprise search)

· Vision

· Product Plans

These topics provide a useful framework for sharing my own observations.

Commitment

There are a number of anecdotal facts that point to Microsoft’s commitment to being a leader in enterprise search. Kirk shared a few of these in his keynote – things like the percentage of Microsoft Research investment going to search (appx 15%), the size of the Enterprise Search Group R&D organization (several hundred engineers and growing), and of course the investment itself to acquire FAST (US$1.2B). There are other supporting data points, like the announcement of Oslo (FAST’s headquarters) as a key R&D center for business search.

Any one of these facts is a strong indication of Microsoft’s ambitions in this space, but my take is that the evidence of Microsoft’s commitment to search comes from more than these metrics or executive statements. It comes from a growing grass roots interest in search across all of Microsoft. For example, I often get a question like this from customers and partners:

“Have you guys talked with the folks over in Microsoft’s <product name> team?”

…and then…

“ Man, you should because FAST technology added to what they’re doing would be powerful combination.”

The usual answer is, yes, we’ve talked to the <product name> team and, yes, there are some very interesting ideas and even some specific activity that we mostly can’t talk about yet. In fact, what’s been most interesting and fun for us former FAST folks is the breadth of technologies that we can now include in our conversations with customers and partners. SharePoint is the “hero SKU”, as we say here, and the combination of FAST search with the capabilities of SharePoint makes for an impressive offering for both intranet and Internet applications that are focused on helping people consume and use information. It’s not a leap to recognize that Microsoft has something to offer at almost every level of an IT solution “stack” complementing the capabilities of both SharePoint and search – from the operating system to application development tools and even cloud-based services. To put it in perspective, ask yourself how many companies offer both a world class enterprise search platform and a world class relational database.

To be honest, search is such a generally valued concept and the possibilities are so compelling when it’s combined with other Microsoft products and technology that it’s all we can do to stay focused on our main priorities. It’s a good problem.

Vision

At some point prior to the acquisition, the Microsoft enterprise search team came to a vision of search that matched what we had developed at FAST. Specifically, that search is more than just a search box and a list of blue document links, but represents a set of capabilities that are enabling new ways to engage users by creating personalized, conversational experiences that cater to the way people prefer to consume and interact with information. This vision was behind the principle theme for the FASTforward’09 conference this past February – “Engage Your Users”.

Whether the original Microsoft team came to this vision independently or after talking to FAST folks (ego would like to think the latter) is less important than the fact that it is now a shared vision throughout the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group and is shaping how we are investing in product development. It’s also a vision that is permeating into other areas within Microsoft. For example, I recently had a chance to apply this way of thinking about search to some other very interesting Microsoft technology, Microsoft Surface, but that’s a topic for another post.

Product Plans

At FASTforward’09 we announced our plans to target enterprise search in two areas:

· Business productivity – applications inside the firewall where, in particular, SharePoint provides the framework for content management and collaboration.

· Internet business – “outside the firewall” applications for attracting, retaining, and otherwise monetizing customers.

The intentions are to have a common search platform supporting both of these general markets and to include application specific capabilities and templates that are unique to each. FAST had already started down this path. For example, FAST AdMomentum is an ad platform that interoperates with search and is relevant to monetization strategies in Internet Businesses, but not so obvious of a fit for inside the firewall apps.

This relatively straightforward strategy and message was very important to get out to the FAST customers base, especially given that Internet Businesses have made up well more than half of FAST’s business to date. Also, most industry pundits will tell you that the requirements for search inside the corporate firewall are simply different than search in consumer facing applications. Even so, what’s so promising to me about this strategy is that there are opportunities to “bleed” capabilities between these two application spaces. We saw this “consumerization” of search features happen more than once at FAST. Features that we initially designed for consumer search found their way into intranet search deployments (one simple example is the “best bets” concept like the one found in SharePoint). The opposite has also happened. Now, consider the capabilities in SharePoint, which is already powering many consumer facing Web sites, and you can see where this can lead.

There you have it, my first post for the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog. Look for more posts from me in this general category of enterprise search vision and strategy. I welcome all comments on this and future entries.

Next up – Search plus Natural User Interfaces.

Nate

Microsoft positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2008 Information Access Magic Quadrant

enterprisesearch — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:33:00 GMT

We’ve got great news to share! Last month, Gartner published the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, and Microsoft was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant. Since the completion of the acquisition, we’ve worked incredibly hard to communicate and demonstrate a combined vision and strategy to our customers and partners. It’s good to know we’re heading in the right direction!

When I talk with customers about search, it’s clear that organizations have very different needs. In fact, many people tell me that even within an organization the one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work. So over the last year, we’ve announced some bold moves designed to create a compelling portfolio of search applications. With the addition of Search Server Express and the acquisition of FAST, we now have a product line-up designed to meet a broad range of business needs:

Some departments or small organizations need search that is quick and easy to set up; we offer Microsoft Search Server Express as a free download so that you can get it up and running in about 30 minutes. We’re excited to see customers like St. Jude Medical and Urbis having quick successes with Express. We’re also seeing partners, such as StartReady, build solutions around Search Server Express to create a search appliance.
Many organizations need search as an integral part of a business productivity infrastructure; Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is integrated with other key SharePoint productivity workloads such as portals, collaboration, ECM, business processes and BI. Customers like McCann Worldgroup and Jones Lang LaSalle are all deriving productivity increases with better search in SharePoint. In particular, both companies are promoting collaboration and leveraging in-house experts with people search enhanced by user profiles in MySites.
Some organizations face business problems that demand high-end search; FAST ESP offers best-in-class search with extreme scalability, query performance, and other advanced capabilities for sophisticated customer-facing or inside-the-firewall applications. For example, Aerotek and TEKsystems, two of the world’s largest staffing companies, deliver job searching to more than 1.3 million users. In more than 164 million queries, greater than 99.5% of query results came back in less than 2 seconds. For inside-the-firewall productivity, they index more than 10 million complex candidate records with low latency during high volume index updates. We’re also excited to see Pfizer pushing the envelope with an Enterprise Collaboration Framework driven by FAST ESP on top of SharePoint

While our “Leaders Quadrant” position in the Magic Quadrant is an important milestone, we still think of this as the very beginning of our journey. We’re continuing to combine our deep technical expertise with our broad reach to deliver exciting innovations to the market – so you can and should expect great things to come. Stay tuned!

Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager,
SharePoint Business Group

Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology (Gartner Research, Sept. 30, 2008) Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner, Inc.'s 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology. This report assesses vendors with capabilities that go beyond enterprise search to encompass a range of technologies. Their capabilities include search; federated search, content classification, categorization and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation and management; information presentation (for example, visualization) to support analysis and understanding; and desktop search to address user-controlled repositories in order to locate and "invoke" documents, data, e-mail and intelligence.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Announcing: SharePoint Web Parts for FAST ESP

enterprisesearch — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:06:00 GMT

It’s been around 45 days since the acquisition of FAST Search and Transfer closed and we’re moving quickly to provide interoperability for Microsoft customers between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server.

The first deliverables from this work are a set of FAST ESP Search Web Parts for quickly integrating results from FAST ESP into SharePoint Server 2007 and a FAST ESP Search site template.

Using these Web Parts and Site Template SharePoint administrators will be able to quickly and easily build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download (both compiled code and source code) from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Some of the FAST ESP search capabilities that can be exposed within SharePoint Server 2007 using these Web Parts include:

• Search Box Web Part -- Search box for query term submission and includes “did you mean” functionality for query correction

• Result List Web Part -- Displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering

• Navigator Web Part -- Displays dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks

• Breadcrumb Web Part -- Displays the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set

The FAST ESP Web parts are designed to be open and extensible, and we’re actively encouraging customers and partners to download them, customize them to align with their branding and extend them to fit their search and user experience requirements.

Expect the features, functionality and range of ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the FAST & Microsoft Search Team!

FAST & Microsoft Search Teams.

FAST Tender Offer Complete!

enterprisesearch — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Well, it has been a while since I last posted – but for good reason. Aside from our usual day-to-day efforts to deliver great enterprise search solutions for our customers, we’ve also been feverishly working on the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer that we originally announced on January 8. Today, I’m excited to share that the tender offer is complete!

As I mentioned in January, FAST has an incredibly talented team of folks who bring great customer focus and tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields. One of their true visionaries, John Markus Lervik, who has been FAST CEO, will transition to become Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. John’s leadership will have an immediate impact on the development across our comprehensive portfolio of enterprise search offerings – including Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express , search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP – and will result in the future delivery of a single enterprise search platform. I’m thrilled to welcome our new team members on board and am eager for them to get started!

By bringing together our two companies, customers will no longer have to compromise when evaluating the enterprise search solution that’s best for them. We can now meet all their needs no matter how basic or complex: Search Server Express available as a free download; SharePoint offers search integrated with other business productivity tools; and for those with highly sophisticated needs, FAST ESP provides best-in-class capabilities for the most demanding search applications in both internal and customer-facing scenarios. And, you can be assured that with our expanded team in place, we’ll be in an even better position to continue innovation across all three products, including FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX.

Speaking of Linux and UNIX, some people may be (mis)interpreting our continued support and investment in these platforms as a broader change for Microsoft – so here’s some color. We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.

Net, our approach doesn’t imply any kind of broader change for our company in its strategy (so conspiracy theorists can stand down :-)) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.

Getting to this point has been quite a journey, but the most exciting part about it for me is that we are only just getting started. Whether it’s ensuring customers continue to get great service from the people and support teams they know or building on the span of our product portfolio, I’m confident that the combination of Microsoft and FAST will serve customers’ needs more broadly and help make enterprise search become a truly ubiquitous tool that is central to how workers find and use information.

I look forward to sharing more with you as the journey continues.

Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager
SharePoint Business Group