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 3rd 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.
