Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story. (more…)

After the Microsoft takeover of FAST almost three years ago, it’s been silent and no new updates of ESP. We all know that MS discontinued Linux support, and that the major focus with the FAST technology has been to power the high-end search for Sharepoint 2010. ESP was forked and heavily modified to integrate smoothly with Windows, SQL server, AD, PowerShell and more, and it made the leap to 64 bit – finally!

But what about non Sharepoint users? MS has an offering to them as well, called FAST Search for Internet Sites. Read Comperio’s excellent blog article about it. A bit disappointing that the core is still the more than three year old ESP5.3 wrapped in new MS APIs, but cool that you can still hack the ESP internals.. (more…)

A considerable part of Cominvent’s projects the last years have been migrations from FAST ESP to Solr. Some customers have a cost saving focus while others need a search engine on Linux. Anyhow, with more than 10 years of FAST experience, Cominvent is an authority in this field, securing a smooth transition.

As an example, we recently migrated the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv and several other online newspapers from FAST to Solr, including Norwegian linguistics and Escenic integration.

Our friends in Lucid Imagination will host a free webinar on this topic on November 18th, don’t miss it if you want to hear more success stories.

Also see our migration slides.

Jan Høydahl will be speaking at Lucene EuroCon in Prague May 20-21st 2010. EuroCon is a new annual conference hosted by Lucid Imagination. In this event the majority of the Lucene/Solr community will come together discussing how search can improve findability & revenue for various types of businesses.

Jan will be speaking about “Key topics when migrating from FAST to Solr”, pitched towards a Solr audience. There will be a short overview of FAST ESP, and a walkthrough of the migration process including what pain-points you could expect and how to handle them.

You have a search solution already. Are you satisfied? Have your needs changed? How long since you evaluated alternatives?

Perhaps it’s time for a faster, bigger, more feature rich, more extensible or more affordable search engine? A migration requires good and structured planning and deep knowledge of the existing solution as well as the target technology.

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