Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/37773
Thompson Coburn’s FAST Search Engine Experience T hrough the years, Thompson Coburn, a mid-sized Midwestern law firm, has evaluated some of the popular high-end search engines, including FAST ESP. At the time, the firm did not believe there was sufficient ROI to make a purchase. The Microsoft FAST Search & Transfer acquisition took place while Thompson Coburn was working on their SharePoint 2007 implementation project. Thompson Coburn was looking for an enterprise search solution that would not only index SharePoint content, but also the iManage document management system content, FileSurf records management content, and legacy intranet content during the migration to SharePoint 2007. The search engine also needed to support the security requirements in all three of the systems and scale to over 10 million items. The SharePoint Server 2007 search engine did not meet the requirements. When Microsoft announced it was offering the FAST ESP search engine to Enterprise Agreement customers for a fraction of the cost that it previously sold for, Thompson Coburn decided to take a closer look at the product and agreed to do a proof of concept (POC) with FAST Support Services. A FAST consultant, along with a Thompson Coburn software architect, developed the iManage connector as part of the POC. Since the POC was successful and the price was reasonable, Thompson Coburn became one of the first law firms to purchase the FAST ESP product. A Thompson Coburn software architect developed the FileSurf Records Management system connector and the search result page design, and then started indexing the content. The enterprise search implementation that was released by Thompson Coburn in its SharePoint 2007 intranet provided sub-second results against millions of documents, security- trimmed interactive results, and automatically extracted metadata 56 Portal Platforms ILTA White Paper and metadata refiners. After the new intranet was deployed, the Enterprise search solution was recognized by attorneys as one of the most valuable intranet components. One benefit of the FAST architecture is the ability to easily build search applications. Thompson Coburn took advantage of this by building an advanced search capability that gives users a search experience similar to what it had in the native document and records management systems. The application is a Silverlight search form that allows users to search a combination of profile fields and the full text in both systems, simultaneously or separately. It is accessible from a link next to the intranet’s primary search box. Again, the search results are usually returned in under a second. Now, when full-text searching, users do not have to open the native applications and use separate search engines, which are generally slow and sometimes time out. Thompson Coburn is currently in the middle of its SharePoint 2010 implementation project using the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint search engine. The choice to use FS4SP was an easy one since the firm already owned the FAST ESP licenses. It would have been a much harder choice had it not owned the licenses, since the functionality gap is narrower between SharePoint Search 2010 and FS4SP. This version of the FAST search engine compared to FAST ESP has proven to be much easier to install, configure and administer. A good example of a reduction in complexity is the time it took to rewrite the iManage and FileSurf content connectors. It took weeks to develop the connectors with FAST ESP, but took an internal team member less than 20 hours to rewrite the same connectors using FS4SP. Thompson Coburn intends to leverage as many of the new search capabilities as possible in its upcoming deployment. ILTA