Stand-alone FAST Products Ship

Two stand-alone FAST search products have been released to provide high-end search in organizations that don’t have SharePoint 2010. The products are not available in Microsoft’s normal volume licensing channel, and Microsoft’s future FAST search development will probably focus on integration with SharePoint.

Search-Driven Sites and Applications Without SharePoint

The two stand-alone FAST products released in Aug. 2010 include the following:

• FAST Search for Internet Sites, a search platform for e-commerce sites and other large external-facing Web sites
• FAST Search for Internal Applications, for enterprise search and specialized search applications.

Both products descend from FAST ESP and provide a direct migration path. FAST ESP is a high-end enterprise search product that Microsoft gained in its 2008 acquisition of Norway-based Fast Search and Transfer. Technology from FAST ESP also powers FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (FAST for SharePoint), an add-on for SharePoint 2010. However, neither FAST Search for Internet Sites nor FAST Search for Internal Applications requires SharePoint, although they can index and search SharePoint content. The two stand-alone products also have development tools not found in FAST for SharePoint for customizing search user interfaces and content integration (the process by which documents and other content are brought into FAST).