Microsoft beefs up SharePoint with Fast muscle

At the annual Fastforward event in Las Vegas in February, Microsoft finally gave its customers some idea of how it will use the technology it acquired from Fast Search and Transfer, the enterprise search supplier it bought for over a billion dollars last year.

Fast’s technology will be integrated into Microsoft’s browser-based collaboration and document management product SharePoint. It will also be used in a separate search offering for externally facing corporate websites. However, commentators are divided about how successful Microsoft is likely to be in realising its vision.

In his keynote speech at the event, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft general manager for its Office software suite, announced Fast Search for Internet Business. The product will fine-tune Fast’s ESP technology for website search and includes features such as interaction management – “helping businesses manage campaigns and merchandising in a way that reduces the burden on IT” – and a content integration studio, designed to “help you manage diverse types of content”.

But the product announcement that had commentators falling over themselves to speculate was Fast Search for SharePoint, a new search server which will add the high-end search capabilities of the Fast enterprise search platform to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as a part of the next release of Microsoft Office, scheduled for 2010.

Koenigsbauer said that Fast Search for SharePoint would help boost productivity and create richer experiences. He described it as “the full functionality of Fast, with all the scale and the connectors and the high-end capabilities you’ve grown to see, but tuned to integrate deeply for SharePoint”.

Ovum analyst Mike Davis said the move signalled Microsoft’s intention to bring high-end search to the masses, just as it has done with business intelligence and content management, and that it would “shake up the market”.

Others, though, were more cautious about prospects for SharePoint users.

Tony Byrne, of independent analyst firm CMS Watch, praised Microsoft for its clear statement of intent – the company has been criticised in the past for not revealing its long-term strategy. However, he questioned whether many SharePoint users would actually want or need the new product.

“SharePoint search is currently somewhere between mediocre and pretty good,” he said. “The reality is that Fast is a fairly complex technology, built from a completely different code base to SharePoint. It’s another option for people and options are good, but I’d caution customers to look at the underlying architecture of Fast before jumping in.”

Byrne pointed out that many SharePoint users might be loathe to rip out their current search tools, which they are likely to have tailored, in order to replace them with a new search product that may even have integration issues with SharePoint.

Ben Richmond, founder of content management consultancy Content Group, also speculated that Fast might not yet be integrated with SharePoint, and that the product could take one or two more iterations before it enjoyed mass adoption, a process that he said would “involve some kind of code rewrite”. He added that Koenigsbauer’s announcement was more a case of Microsoft trying to get some quick wins around the Fast technology base with SharePoint customers.

Richmond said that Microsoft would have to do more work on usability to make Fast Search for SharePoint appeal to typical SharePoint users. “Fast has powerful search algorithms, 3D views and other high-end capabilities, but they are normally used by the sophisticated power user,” he said. “But then, that is what Microsoft usually excels at: user intuitiveness.”

Microsoft is trying to encourage adoption by offering the product at a compelling price. Koenigsbauer promised that Fast Search for SharePoint could save customers up to 50% in costs on licences because it was tied to MOSS’s user-based client access licensing scheme. Customers who already have MOSS will need only buy the additional search server licences. The current figure for Fast Search for SharePoint server licences is estimated at about $25,000.

Davis declared that the announcement would make Autonomy, Endeca, Recommind and others think “very hard” about how they currently priced and packaged their products. But Byrne argued that, if anything, Fast’s traditional rivals in the high-end search market might be relieved that Microsoft was trying to broaden the appeal of the technology.

“Potentially there are quiet smiles in Autonomy right now, because Microsoft appears to be emphasising Fast for SharePoint rather than Fast as an enterprise tool,” Byrne said. “From a marketing perspective it’s almost as if they’re taking it downmarket.”

Koenigsbauer was at pains to reassure existing Fast customers that Microsoft would continue to support Fast products. However, if Microsoft is intent on widening Fast ESP’s appeal, and even making Fast ESP the de facto search tool for SharePoint as many commentators suggest, then some traditional Fast customers may be beginning to feel nervous.

“Fast users of old have made big investments in the technology and use it on an enterprise scale. Many of them aren’t going to be SharePoint houses, so where does this move leave them?” argued Richmond.

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