This week there has been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Since SharePoint 2007 has been the quickest growing server product in the history of Microsoft, the expectations on SharePoint 2010 is tremendous.

Apart from a great deal of possibilities when it comes to content creation, collaboration and networking, easy business intelligence etc.  the launch also holds another promise: that of even better search capabilities (with the integration of FAST).

Since Microsoft acquired FAST in 2008, there have been a lot of speculations about what the future SharePoint versions may include in terms of search. And since Microsoft announced that they will drop their Linux and UNIX versions in order to focus on higher innovation speed, Microsoft customer are expecting something more than the regular. In an early phase it was also clear that Microsoft is eager to take market shares from the growing market in internet business.

So, simply put, the solutions that Microsoft now provide in terms of search is solutions for Business productivity (where the truly sophisticated search capabilities are available if you have Enterprise CAL-licenses, i.e. you pay for the number of users you have) and Internet Sites (where the pricing is based on the number of servers). These can then be used in a number of scenarios, all dependent on the business and end-user needs.
Microsoft has chosen to describe it like this:

• “Foundation” is, briefly put, basic SharePoint search (Site Search).

• “Standard” adds collaboration features to the “Foundation” edition and allows it to tie into repositories outside of SharePoint.

• “Enterprise ” adds a number of capabilities, previously only available through FAST licenses, such as contextual search (recognition of departments, names, geographies etc), ability to tag meta data to unstructured content, more scalability etc.

I’m not going to go into detail, rather just conclude that the more Microsoft technology the company or organization already use, the more benefits it will gain from investing in SharePoint search capabilities.

And just to be clear:  non-SharePoint versions (stand-alone) of FAST are still available, even though they are not promoted as intense as the SharePoint ones.

Apart from Microsoft’s overview above, Microsoft Technet provides a more deepdrawing description of the features and functionality from both an end-user and administrator point of view.

We look forward describing the features and functions in more detail in our upcoming customer cases. If you have any questions to our SharePoint or FAST search specialist, don’t hesitate to post them here on the blog. We’ll make sure you get all the answers.

‘Innovation is at the heart of our enterprise search strategy, and a commitment to innovation is what brought FAST and Microsoft together’ says Bjørn Olstad, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, in his blog post published this Thursday. And further more ‘As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX’.

The decision to do so is hardly a surprise to those who have been following FASTs development since the acquisition in 2008. Microsoft was last year ranked as no 1 in Gartner’s ‘Magic Quadrant’ for Information Access, an expression for the company’s single-mindedness struggle to remain the customers’ first choice when it comes to information retrieval. A strong focus and fast innovation is essential to keep this position.

Bjørn Olstad blog post holds a promise for non-Windows customers saying “We will always interoperate with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end. Our search solutions will crawl and index content stored on Windows, Linux, and UNIX systems, and our UI controls will work with UI frameworks running on any operating system”

Even so, the decision states a new era and it will be interesting to follow the development. A lot of the larger companies worldwide already have a Microsoft strategy, and this might even be an opportunity to switch towards FAST. For others Björn Olstads blog post is also giving a hint about cloud-support, where a hosted solution might solve headaches.

However, the most interesting statement is the accalerated speed of innovation. Even though the last Magic Quadrant stated Microsoft as a clear leader, others are following right behind and established vendors such as Autonomy as well as new players such as Lucid Imagination are responding to Microsofts offerings with new and innovative solutions. We will continue to report about this and Microsofts roadmap, so visit us from time to time to stay updated.

Today the focus of my sessions have been content indexing and content processing in both SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint. Bur first I started of with a session covering the new meta data focus in SharePoint 2010.

Meta data is information about the content and is of key importance for making a good search experience. In SharePoint 2010 the focus and this has increased drastically. New features is Term store which a service that can contain taxonomies, folksonomies, social tagging and keywords. Through this feature they make meta data to accessible through out the whole system on all levels of item creation. Having a structured way of working with meta data will drastically increase the quality of the search result.

Now back to the fun technical geek side of these sessions. In SharePoint 2010 Microsoft have introduced a lot of improvements to the indexing side search. First of they have aliened the two versions of search into using the same connectors. Both FAST Search and SharePoint use a common set of connectors and a common way of building new ones. With this you can use systems as BDC to create connectors even from the application SharePoint Designer which is an extremely simple to use application. BDC, which was found in 2007 as well, has though been enveloped  with new features like full security support and support for creating connectors in .NET. This making it easy and streamlined to create new connectors for indexing all kinds of systems.

One of the strengths in FAST Search for SharePoint has always been the document processing. This is a feature that SharePoint search is lacking and is probably an important thing why Microsoft bought FAST. In FAST Search for SharePoint they have taken this in to SharePoint to be easily managed and streamlined. Processing as for example entity extraction, lemmatisation and advanced language detection is now done automatically and can be configured through adding for example inclusion/exclusion words for entity extraction straight in UI (can be manged through PowerShell as well).

But what about all those custom pipeline stages that was used to be a large part of en ESP configuration before? This is a function that is not done as before. No python coded pipeline stage can be added however what you now can do is that you add a “extensibility pipeline stage”. This stage can then be configured to call an .NET application with a set of input properties and then a list of returning properties. In this way you can basically do what ever you want with the text content and then do it with the full power of .NET. Some nice side effects of this for us developers is that creating pipeline stages in the past has always been a hussel. Both since it has bin done in python and that testing it had either demanded an hard to setup instance of Eclipse and ESP or to try it out live in ESP. In the new system since it actually are small console applications that is running this can easily be tested stand alone with good debugging through Visual Studio.

Tomorrow is actually the last day of this conference. That they will for me focused on partner events that covers more the sales perspective on all the new things in SharePoint and FAST.

But now its time for some relaxing and then its time for Enterprise Search evening by the pool event.

After a great evening with Microsoft Sweden touring around Las Vegas, having dinner at the Stratosphere and a good night sleep today’s session started of. Today’s focus has been deep dives in to the different areas. For me it has been deep dives in Sharepoint Search and FAST Search for Sharepoint.

First of was sessions about Sharepoint Search functions and depolyment. This was more or less going through the different functionality that I wrote about yesterday. A thew new things did thou come up, things like crawler policy’s, avoiding that your index is empties just because the web site that you crawl is on service during crawl time, connector framework that now supports developing connectors in .NET and configuration of the whole search service through PowerShell.

But now to the more exiting thing, FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. This something that it has been really quite about. It has gone 18 months since the acquisition of FAST and during that time not much information about the upcoming version has leaked out. But from yesterday everything is made public. There is even gona come a public beta of FAST Search for SharePoint in November for everyone to test it out.

The most exiting thing about this new version of FAST is that it’s almost completely integrated within SharePoint. With almost is that the installation of FAST is still done on separated servers and has it’s own installation program, though simplified. But after completion of installation and node setup (done in a deployment.xml config file) everything is done in the SharePoint central administration interface or through PowerShell. There is not even the possibility any longer to make configurations through config files in the installation of FAST. Some more advanced configurations and extensions can be made through .NET libraries and PowerShell, for example document processing steps. I will know more about this after tomorrows sessions.

Connectors in new FAST are no longer used as before. They are integrated into SharePoint instead. It’s even the same connector for SharePoint search and FAST Search for SharePoint. Setup is done in the same way to ease the transition from SharePoint Search to FAST.

People search in SharePoint 2010 will, even though you use FAST Search For SharePoint, be handled by SharePoint search. And as Jeff Fried sad “why try to set this up in FAST Search for SharePoint when the people search in SharePoint already is amazing”.

Now it’s time for one of the biggest beach parties that Las Vegas ever has hosted here at Mandal Bay Hotel. Over 7000 crazy SharePoint geeks are going to rock there pants of to the sound of the 80′s.

Today the initial key notes and session on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has begun here in Las Vegas. The conference is fully booked with over 7400 registered attendees and is hosted at the Mandala Bay Hotel. There are over 240 different sessions covering everything within the new version of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 is schedules to be released during the first half of next year however a public beta will be available now in November.

I will try to cover the Enterprise Search perspective of this conference and summarize new features and functions in this blog.

The conference was started up through two key notes held by among others Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) and Jeff Teper (VP). They introduces new features in SharePoint 2010 on all levels from both really deep technical to end user perspective. Showing a lot of new cool features, where one feature was especially sticking out and that was Search. They all pointed out over and over again the importance of search as the core functionality of everything.

My first sessions during this conference was on Enterprise Search and the overview of this. A lot of new concepts and functions are introduced. I will try here to summarize some of the new functions in a list.

Sharepoint 2010 and Search Server 2010 (Not all is supported in Search Server):

-Wildcard search support
-Phonetic Spelling on person name searches
-Partitioned index/query (for scaling purposes)
-Support for up to 100 Million documents
-Zero query search – Used for using search as navigation
-Query Suggestion
-Refinement from meta data (Shallow navigators)
-Related Searches
-Federate Searches with Desktop
-Rating/Language used for relevance tuning
-View related content in people search
-Multiple crawler

FAST Search for SharePoint:

-All above from SharePoint searches (some times they are even supposed to work together like people search is still done through SharePoint search)
-Visual preview and thumbnails
-Same APIs as SharePoint
-All administration is done through SharePoint administration
-Similar results
-Deep refinement navigators
-Entity extraction
-Visual Best bet
-Contextual Search
-No index profile any more. Everything is set through SharePoint administration even Navigators and meta data mappings.
-Can use BCS for connecting to other systems
-User context searching. Promote/denote documents and changing relevance after users context
-New search interface

That was a summary of the new features that is to come. I will come back every day to post updates and more detailed information about these features.

To finish of I want to quote Microsoft: This is a quantum leap in Enterprise Search

Findwise has now through Ludvig, become Microsoft Small Business Specialist.

To carry on as Microsoft Partner in Search, Ludvig has successfully completed the exam for becoming a MCP in Sharepoint.

Findwise has earned the status of being a Microsoft Certified Partner through our experience in search. This helps us in our aim to give our customers the best services available.