For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

February 8, 2010

SharePoint 2010: Search Improved, But Think Twice About FAST Search Upgrade
by leslie owens with Matthew Brown and Sara Burnes

ExECUT I v E S U M MA Ry
Microsoft recently unveiled the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010 and the public beta of FAST Search for SharePoint. Information professionals will welcome the new ability to centrally manage metadata, as well as improved search for people functionality in SharePoint. In fact, Microsoft has improved SharePoints integrated search capabilities to the point where the upgrade to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint may prove unnecessary. Of course, Microsoft-centric enterprises will shortlist FAST when they want to invest in an advanced enterprise search tool; the pricing and packaging are compelling relative to the alternatives. But if centralized search administration and a common developer experience is not your top priority, then FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint should be just another new, unproven product to stack up against alternative enterprise search platforms SHarepoint 2010 includeS new featureS tHat booSt content findability Microsoft plans to launch SharePoint Server 2010 (SPS 2010) in the first half of 2010. Forrester believes this is an evolutionary, not revolutionary upgrade overall.1 That said, Microsoft has improved SharePoints metadata management and search capabilities pressing pain points with the current Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).2 Information professionals who struggle to organize site content and to define and control taxonomies in MOSS 2007 can address these problems in SPS 2010 with enhanced out-of-the-box capabilities and options from partners like MetaVis and Smart Logic. Forrester expects that SharePoint 2010 will improve information accessibility as it:

Syndicates content types across sites and server farms. Content types manage the metadata

and behaviors of content such as documents, list items, and folders in a centralized, reusable way. With the new content type hub, administrators can define a content type, such as a contract, and disseminate it throughout the SharePoint environment, no longer restricted by site collection boundaries. Also, users can create a virtual three-ring binder (bundling documents together that share certain characteristics), and treat those documents as a single object with shared metadata and a common workflow.

Manages metadata as a shared service application. Taxonomists can manage metadata in

hierarchical vocabularies in a term store and propagate the vocabularies to SharePoint sites (as lookup columns), as well as to Office applications. For example, information professionals can maintain an authoritative list of the names of internal business units in SharePoint and dispatch that

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SharePoint 2010: Search Improved, But Think Twice About FAST Search Upgrade
For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

list to Microsoft Word, where it will show up in a drop-down menu on the toolbar. In addition, SharePoint 2010 keeps free text keywords in check; as a user starts typing a keyword, the system auto-completes, disambiguates, and suggests a preferred term. (People can tag content with open, uncontrolled tags too.)

Upgrades SharePoints search architecture. A new query architecture and crawling

architecture underpin the search engine in SPS 2010. These enhancements enable greater redundancy and help customers dictate what content is crawled and how it is crawled.3 Microsoft claims the integrated search in SPS 2010 can scale up to 100 million documents.

Factors peoples behavior into search relevance calculations. SharePoint 2010 tracks the clickthrough rate on search results to detect popular results and adjusts the relevance algorithm accordingly. Also, a top-rated document will rank higher than a poorly rated document in search results. Finally, searching for colleagues is easier with support for wildcards, faceted search, and phonetic name search.

Enterprises should commit to a multi-prong findability strategy to leverage these enhancements. The more structure people add to their SharePoint content by using content types and tags, ratings, and descriptive metadata the better the out-of-the-box search experience. It takes discipline to follow information classification best practices, but knowledge workers who prudently organize their information will make the most of the improved integrated search functionality.4 dont Jump into an enterpriSe SearcH purcHaSe witHout due diligence Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, a high-end enterprise search vendor, in 2008. Microsoft still sells FAST technology as a standalone solution for enterprise search (FAST Search for Internal Applications) and as a solution for on-site search (FAST Search for External Applications). But Microsofts R&D priority for the past 18 months has been integrating FAST ESP with SharePoint. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePointa new offering for Microsoft enterprise license customers built on the FAST ESP coreis the first step in that direction.5 Given the improvements in the complimentary out-of-the-box SharePoint Server 2010 Search mentioned above, why would an enterprise spend money on FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint?6 Here are the top reasons:

Relevance profiles. With FAST, search administrators can create custom relevance models

tuned to differences in content sources, application needs, and user contexts. In practice, this means when an engineer and a marketer search for product specifications, FAST search will rank the results differently for each role.

February 8, 2010

2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

SharePoint 2010: Search Improved, But Think Twice About FAST Search Upgrade
For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Content processing. Search administrators can define tasks to enrich the content as it moves
through the FAST search pipeline. For example, the search engine can identify and extract names of people or events from text. Taxonomists can map these extracted properties to managed properties and exploit them as refiners and sorters in the search results page.7

Miscellaneous niceties for the end user. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint augments

the standard search experience with document thumbnails, deeper sorting and refining options, and visual best bets.

Such information access capabilities are not unique to FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. In fact, there are many high-end products that let administrators create role-based relevance and navigation options, process multilingual content, extract entities, and let users view a document without opening it. Also some enterprises have requirements like auto-classification, alerting, and the ability to use tags as refiners out-of-the-box that FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint wont meet without services or partners. The licensing for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint does not include FAST Enterprise Search Platforms (ESP) connector library to content, collaboration, and portal repositories.8 Instead, administrators will use Business Data Connectivity Services (BCS) to ingest data and information from external line of business applications.9 Forrester clients make it clear that a crucial component of a true enterprise search program accessing information stored in diverse systems and legacy content sources is an expensive, political, and technical headache that no vendor has truly solved. confirm timeline and investment priorities According to a recent Forrester survey, about half of the Enterprise IT decision-makers interested in implementing or planning to implement information access (search) software are in a different stage of adoption regarding content or collaboration tools.10 Information and knowledge management professionals must be mindful of the tradeoffs of mixing their search requirements with their broader information management choices. Companies must be clear about whether they seek a search engine to enhance general productivity (i.e., help a salesperson retrieve a presentation) or to accomplish more advanced information management tasks (i.e., help a salesperson mine competitive intelligence). General productivity search engines of varying sophistication are embedded in information management systems (like SharePoint) and are also available as standalone investments (like the Google Search appliance). IKM professionals who are dissatisfied with their ability to find information and considering FAST Search for SharePoint should first:

February 8, 2010

2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

SharePoint 2010: Search Improved, But Think Twice About FAST Search Upgrade
For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Find the root causes of your current dissatisfaction with search. Common findability issues include: poor content quality, incomplete search scope, lack of information retrieval expertise, and lack of governance. As you check off these issues, consider whether or not you need to buy more technology or make the most of what you have. Characterize your search scenario(s). Common search scenarios include: intranet search, people search, and Web site search. More complex search scenarios revolve around specific business activities like market research, customer service, business intelligence, and compliance. Define the breadth and depth of your search goals to know what features and functions you need and to calculate the expected ROI. Place enterprise search in the context of your enterprise architecture. Enterprise search finds and associates information across system boundaries. As a key part of the information network, search should be on the EA road map both from a technology perspective and an organizational perspective. Enterprises with an urgent timeline for their search initiative or a mandate to only deploy production versions of software will rule out FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint for now. On the other hand, enterprises that have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft will find FAST Search for SharePoint much cheaper to acquire, build, and maintain than an alternative third-party search platform.

W H AT I T M E A N S

i&Km proS SHould clarify tHeir SearcH obJectiveS

With its lower pricing and tight integration with SharePoint management and development tools, Microsoft has changed the competitive dynamics of the enterprise search market with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. Unlike independent enterprise search vendors, Microsoft salespeople can discount, shuffle, and bundle licenses across its broad portfolio and fold FAST Search for SharePoint into great big enterprise agreements signed by CIOs. This flexibility introduces downward pricing pressure for the entire enterprise search market. If your enterprise has decided SharePoint will be the hub of your unstructured information ecosystem, then FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint has a great value proposition. It shares a common base platform with SharePoint and confers sophisticated search capabilities to your environment. If your enterprise is more heterogeneous, where SharePoint may be in the mix but does not dominate your Information Workplace, then your enterprise search strategy will take a different angle and emphasis. Regardless of the information access vendor(s) you select or the scope of your enterprise search program, information professionals should leverage the evolved managed metadata capability in SPS 2010. Enriching content with descriptive metadata makes it easier to find. Better metadata is one of many ways out of the information findability problem, including formalizing the content creation process, personalizing the user experience, and upgrading your search technology.
February 8, 2010 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

SharePoint 2010: Search Improved, But Think Twice About FAST Search Upgrade
For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

endnoteS
1

The new release of SharePoint is discussed in more detail in the January 25, 2010, SharePoint Server 2010: An Evolutionary Step Toward Content-Centric Middleware report. For more on information architecture and MOSS 2007, see the February 24, 2009, The Critical Role Of A SharePoint Information Architecture report. Search administrators will now be able to partition an index and spread it across multiple query servers. SharePoint Server 2010 is optimized for 64-bit processors (Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or 2008). Its vital to enrich the content that flows through information management systems with more meaningful and structured metadata. Enriched content is simply easier to isolate, promote, find, and control. But its challenging to incorporate taxonomy projects in the whirlwind of tools and processes to create, manage, and access content in the enterprise. See the November 17, 2008, How To Build A High-Octane Taxonomy For ECM And Enterprise Search Systems report. Enterprises can run FAST Search for SharePoint as a standalone search solution that doesnt index SharePoint at all, but Forrester expects that most buyers will use SharePoint as a hub and will crawl or federate to other content sources. FAST Search capabilities will be available via the FAST Search for SharePoint add-on server for customers with the Enterprise CAL. The ESP for SharePoint SKU, available since early 2009, is priced at $25K per server and provides an anchor for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint pricing. In addition, the FAST content pipeline can detect and normalize multilingual content, covert formats, and filter out offensive content. These actions help to clean, parse, and normalize content, as well as add structure to unstructured information. FAST Search for SharePoint ships with connectors for file systems, Web sites, SharePoint, Exchange, Documentum, and Lotus Notes. Buyers can also license some of FAST ESPs existing connectors or build new connectors to access content in various sources. FAST application developers can use the FAST Query Language (FQL) to create formula-based query operations, to weight terms with the xxrank operator, and to let users search for numbers, dates, and other encoded and structured information. Source: Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009

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Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 20 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 26 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email clientsupport@forrester.com. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com. 48332