Fast News & Articles

First week of the New Year and already there are updates for SharePoint 2010. This time they comes from KnowledgeLake (news, site) who have announced that they have added FAST search technology support to their Imaging for SharePoint software.

Last February Microsoft (news, site) announced that it was discontinuing mainstream and extended UNIX and Linux support for its FAST search technology. There was some speculation that in doing so it hoped that it could drag Linux and UNIX users into its Windows stable. However, Autonomy (news, site) has been quick to see and seize the opportunity this decision provided.

 A little funding news for your Monday afternoon. BA-Insight, provider of enterprise search solutions built on Microsoft technologies, have secured a tidy sum of US$ 6 million in funding.

In my last article we looked at a 'real world' scenario where SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) had been deployed for enterprise search in a pragmatic fashion using a phased approach. This time we will build on the theme of search and look at the new features that have been added to SharePoint 2010.

Information infrastructure giant EMC (news, site) has just announced the release of the first phase of its FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology that will automate information storage across its information storage platforms.

Reefs by nature are a nutrient-sharing organism; relying on other habitats for an exchange of nitrogen and vegetation. Perhaps coral reefs were the inspiration for Digital Reef's new Partner Program.

The Digital Reef Partner Program makes unstructured data management more accessible to companies that can complement their services with Digital Reef technology solutions. This might seem like a win-win situation for Digital Reef (news, site), who after all, secure the customer base of companies while demonstrating their expertise with managing unstructured data.

But it can also benefit those in the enterprise who desperately seek the technology and scalability of a single platform. As well, they benefit from search, analytics, automatic data classification and data management functionalities, which can only make their workflows and document management processes run that much more efficiently.

It’s now official, Microsoft has finalized it’s tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They’re pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP — the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it’s own FAST sales, service and support teams, they’ll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.”

Now Microsoft can renew it’s full focus on Yahoo! — if it isn’t already too late.

Microsoft is on the hunt for FAST search! They have offered $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), one of the more well known enterprise search vendors on the market!