FAST is the Enterprise Search solution from Microsoft and it is quickly taking a very important role in the offering of enterprise servers for businesses. With its integration in the SharePoint 2010 family, FAST bids a scalable, flexible and powerful search server that not only contents with other similar commercial software but that can pick up the gauntlet and surmount easily any other product.
This book is oriented to technical audiences that need to design, install, configure and customize a FAST Search implementation. More general themes are handled in the first chapters: wide-ranging information about search, the past-and-future of search, a short history of FAST and explanations about the very specific definitions and concept used by search engines; because search is intimately related to human linguistics and how people organize information, special attention has been given to how the internal algorithms can be interpreted from an information technology perspective, not from a pure technical point of view.
Installation and configuration are managed in the following chapters. Although the installation procedure trails the traditional friendly installation routines of all Microsoft products, there are some important aspects that must be taken in consideration especially for an enterprise FAST farm. The different configuration options (SharePoint Central Administration, SharePoint Site Collection Administration, FAST Object Model and FAST PowerShell console) are reviewed to explain the several available ways to adapt the system to the enterprise requirements.
Finally, the default Search User Interface is assessed. Albeit the SharePoint Search WebParts can be used by both, the SharePoint Enterprise Search and FAST, the different WebParts are analyzed and the configuration and customization possibilities are described because they form the main components that the day-to-day users will experience.
Customization of the core search engine is one of the points that make FAST different from the SharePoint Enterprise Search engine. In the current FAST version, great part of customizations take place modifying XML files but some programming is allowed, and sometimes indispensable, to ensure FAST is behaving as required. The last book chapter deals with programming and customizing the engine and it is mainly oriented to developers.
All-by-all the book offers a 360 degrees view of FAST and it is intended to be a reference work for those people that are curious about FAST and the ones that must deal with the server for the first time.
Gustavo Vélez
Sharepoint MOSS MVP
Gustavo Vélez is a SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) and Group Manager for the Solutions Development department of Avanade Corporation (http://www.avanade.com), a global Microsoft Partner specialized in integration of Microsoft software.
He has many years of experience developing Windows and Office applications, and more than ten years of daily design, programming and management experience with SharePoint. The author's articles can be found in many of the leading trade magazines in English, Dutch and Spanish. He is also pleased to be Webmaster of http://www.gavd.net/servers, the first Spanish-language reference site dedicated to SharePoint.