Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint
Enabling a new level of search precision and experience
FAST provides organizations with a scalable, high-performance enterprise search and information access platform designed to give instant access to information that is secure, relevant, accurate, and timely. With FAST and its Contextual Insight capability, it is possible to detect the context and intent of the query, search for terms and phrases, and return requested entities that appear in the context of the matching text. You will get both the contextual results with extreme precision and the contextual, dynamic navigation for further investiga¬tion of related information. Advanced linguistics and relevancy management features further improve and simplify your users’ search experience, enabling truly user-centric search.
Delivering end-to-end security
FAST is built to provide easy access to available information and deliver this information in a secure way. It can be integrated into the security fabric of your organization, and it provides an end-to-end secure enterprise search platform that addresses security at all critical levels: content, server environment, and search application.
Holistic search management and analysis for maximum usability
FAST provides rich search management and analysis functionality and tuning capabilities to minimize the total cost of ownership and enable truly user-centric search. The business-level management of the search experience includes a wide variety of tuning, monitoring, administration, analysis, and reporting operations, helping improve the search experience and cater to the search needs of various audiences.
Accessing a wide variety of data sources
FAST provides access to a wide variety of data sources and formats: rich media data, formally structured data held in databases, semi-structured data, and unstructured information held in Web pages, e-mail, blogs, documents, presentations, and the like.
FAST natively supports 81 languages and over 400 document formats, and can be easily adapted to processing custom file formats. It provides a comprehensive set of content connectors to simplify integration with databases, e-mail systems, and content management systems. In addition, it can connect information from a variety of other sources, such as Web servers and file servers. This helps you harness the power of your existing information assets through seamless enterprise integration.
Built-in scalability and high performance
The FAST core architecture scales linearly, independently, and simultaneously in three dimensions: data volume, queries per second, and freshness of data. In this way, the desired performance targets can be achieved along each of the three dimensions with the most cost-efficient server hardware architecture – on a wide variety of common operating systems. Your search-driven services and application systems are able to support millions of users and search terabytes of data from any point in time, while still providing sub-second response times.
The bottom line
FAST delivers the most battle-proven enterprise search platform on the market today with 4,000 mission-critical installations worldwide. It delivers exponential business value, connecting your users to the right information, the right products and services, and the right people.