FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard & SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise editions offer quality built-in search capabilities. But since acquiring the Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer, Microsoft has bulked up the native SharePoint search features with the dynamic addition of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

FAST Search: Enterprise Search Functionality

The FAST Search Server product enables enterprise-scale indexing and new functionality beyond other versions of Microsoft SharePoint. And once you have it, you can add to it. Some of the unique features and functions in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint include:

Content Indexing Features

• With FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint, all of the following types of content can be crawled and indexed:
  • Local SharePoint sites in the same farm
  • External SharePoint sites (hosted in other SharePoint farms)
  • Windows file shares
  • Microsoft Exchange public folders
  • Websites (including non-SharePoint sites)
  • People Profiles/ Personnel Data
  • External line-of-business (LOB) applications
  • Structured database contents
  • Content returned from external web services
  • Third-party products and solutions (such as Lotus Notes/Documentum)

Business Intelligence Features

Crawl BI assets (such as Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports) faster and with robust sorting and filtering features in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. BI information is now accessed more quickly by navigating data directly- without even opening the document.

Index Scalability

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint offers extreme index scaling potential beyond the index scale limitations of other versions of Microsoft SharePoint. For example, a fully scaled-out farm of SharePoint Server 2010 infrastructure can support up to a maxium of 100 million items in its index. With FAST Search Server 2010, however, the SharePoint farm can be scaled to accomodate and index more than one billion content items.

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