Sticky Glue

So I’m planning away at my Teched presentation on Architechture of Search, which really focuses on FAST ESP, and then after much research it really highlights to me how little is really known about FAST ESP especially in the Microsoft community. So what I thought I’d do it write a series of Blogs to try demystify FAST ESP and perhaps highlight when one would choose FAST vs. Enterprise Search.
Alot of this will be point I’ll cover during my session at TECHED Africa – so join me there if you have questions..

Before I climb into the “finer details” of FAST, what I thought I’d do is just state a high level overview of what are the current offerings of Microsoft Search, What is FAST, and where does it look like Microsoft is taking search….

1.Microsoft Search ?

So in the Microsoft world, there is really three levels of Search. Entry Level, Infrastructure and “EEEEEEIIIISSSSHHHH” really Big

(A) Entry Level = Search Server 2008 Express. This is a free downloadable search engine that can be installed and setup on a single server. It really is not bad and caters for the basic requirement when it comes to search. So for SME’s this could be great starting point.

(B) Infrastructure = Search Server 2008 & SharePoint Enterprise Search. These are both paid for solutions. Search Server 2008 is really the same as the express release only that it can be scaled out across multiple servers. SharePoint Enterprise search comes with an Enterprise CAL in SharePoint and really can cater for most search requirments across file shares, data content (using BDC) as well as federated searches

(C) High End = We’re looking at FAST ESP, which to understate it, really costs a fortune but is truly scalable, which in my opinion is really one of the strengths of FAST ESP. Over this series of BLOGS, I’ll uncover more around this.

2. What is FAST?

FAST was a company that Microsoft aquired just over a year ago and in my opinion was really to begin taking the battle to Google. FAST ESP is not the only tool in the stack and I’ll try uncover this in the next couple of blogs. FAST originally comes from Norway and was purchased last year by Microsoft for around $1.2 Billion.

So I believe that is a basic intro for me. As I work through my TechEd presentation, I’ll compile the rest of these blogs. Leave some comments and lets see were this goes…