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By Tom Groenfeldt
Microsoft is launching versions of its Fast search technology that will work with SharePoint and Internet and intranet searches, allowing search results, including PowerPoint presentations, to be displayed in a browser without clicking through to the site where they are located.
Search developers are seeking to create a rich user experience on the fly, rather than through indexing, said Bjorn Olstad, CTO of Fast and a Microsoft distinguished engineer.
Microsoft started a three-city promotional tour for Fast, an enterprise search company it acquired in April 2008, in Chicago on Wednesday. It will be in New York Thursday and San Francisco on March 16. Although the presentations in Chicago were sometimes repetitive and often seemed to present the dots without clearly connecting them, the enterprise users on site included Dell, the Financial Times, Bank of America, U.K. real estate brokerage firm Globrix and Best Buy.
General Mills, the sixth-largest food manufacturing company in the world, is launching a pilot project using Fast in its research and development group beginning Monday. The company is a big SharePoint user and it wanted a search tool that could look through internal data sites such as SharePoint, SQL and SAP, plus external Internet sites, and return relevant results by understanding something about the users.
Jenny Hon, a project manager for enterprise collaboration at General Mills, said the company selected Microsoft SharePoint in 2001 for document management and now has thousands of SharePoint sites. To find information, it has relied on the relatively basic search functions of SharePoint. She expects Fast will improve searches by understanding the different requirements of particular users -- a marketing person will have different requirements than a scientist, for example. Fast will also help the company connect information located in silos, such as SharePoint and SAP, and display the results on one place.
Hon said that users at the company have specific demands – how do I find the sales presentation which showed 2009 revenues -- and more general needs, such as “What is the buzz around sugar these days?” She expects that Fast will help meet those needs for scientists, researchers and librarians in the R&D group.
The company chose Fast, said Hon, because it is an established industry leader, on the upper tier of the search products available, extremely extensible and it fits easily and economically into the Microsoft Office environment.
“Our users don’t need to relearn screen, so it is a pretty easy segue into a Fast world.”
Her group anticipates that Fast will save the company’s 600 R&D staff 14,400 hours per year, although she admitted that number is pretty soft.
Federated search refers to delivering content from multiple types of sources, including existing documents inside a company, Internet sites and user files. Fast can mix the content together in a single ranked display or leave it in separate displays.
“This allows you to access content you don’t own and don’t manage,” said Leslie Kues, director of product marketing for Fast. For an online retailing site, that means a store can present reviews and comments from multiple sources including text, images and video, delivering information a buyer wants without sending him to other sites. Retaining him on the store’s sales site increases the opportunity to sell, she added.
With sophisticated search, a firm can use business rules and templates to define hundreds or thousands of topic pages and then use search to fill the pages with the latest information available.
“You can be a source on a particular topic and present the user with all the information on one page,” said Kues. Because the topic pages draw on a variety of Web resources and repeat key words, they rank high with search engines, she added. A page about a singer could have an area for news, information about her latest recordings, another area which displays her current touring schedule, and her ranking on social networks -- all on a single page that gets updated every time someone loads it.
Searching with Fast can also detect a user’s location and deliver information most relevant to the country or city they are searching from.
Connect, adapt and guide are the watchwords for the Fast team as it develops new versions for internal and Internet search to be delivered later this year. The tools will allow business users to adapt search without making programming demands on IT.
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