I am regularly asked by partners and clients if we are worried about the release of FAST for SharePoint 2010, and how Ontolica will survive in a market with a Microsoft built search enhancement. For the past year or so, at every conference from the SPC to the WPC, from walkthroughs to partner training, I have learned to expect that this question will arise. To the surprise of all those initially investigating either Ontolica or FAST, my response is that we have no intention of competing with FAST. While both Ontolica and FAST enhance the search experience in SharePoint, they were designed to do so in very different ways, and appeal to distinctly different clients. The goal of this post is to clarify when each solution is appropriate.
All of the Ontolica solutions, whether your needs call for Search, Preview, Intelligence, or Express, have a reoccurring theme. They all use the existing SharePoint infrastructure and index to expand the functionality of SharePoint. Alternatively, FAST for SharePoint has its own index which requires additional infrastructure and works in parallel to SharePoint. This major difference is the keystone from which the two solutions diverge to meet distinctly different needs.
If you can use SharePoint’s index to crawl content, then Ontolica can enhance how you interact with search results. By avoiding an additional index, companies can decrease infrastructure, maintenance, and deployment costs. To use the SharePoint index, a company needs to have less than 100 million documents in SharePoint 2010, or 50 million documents in MOSS 2007 according to Microsoft. The SharePoint index (Search Server, MOSS, or SP 2010) must be able to crawl the content either directly or via the BDC / BCS. In addition, any languages a company wishes to execute queries in must be supported by the current version of the index. As long as these two restrictions are met, Ontolica can provide a significantly less expensive and less complex solution to enhancing search.
In addition to the index, there are a few other very important factors which should indicate that Ontolica is the most appropriate solution. Ontolica’s graphical preview capabilities do not require any client side plug-ins, and work on file formats other than office documents and PDF. This means that for firms using any file types outside of office, such as Auto-CAD, Ontolica Preview can effortlessly return previews that FAST is unable to achieve. In addition, FAST’s preview capabilities require office installed on the users’ machine, so executing document previews on public sites, mobile devices, or any machine without office is not currently possible with FAST. Alternatively, Ontolica does all of its rendering on the server side, so it will generate previews in all of these scenarios.
The other major factor which should indicate Ontolica is potentially the right fit is if there is the need for analytics. Ontolica includes an easy to utilize search and BI analytics catalog to provide a wide range of information about how and what users are doing with SharePoint content and search. Designed to pull data quickly and easily, the Ontolica Search Intelligence (OSI) reports can be created and manipulated through Excel 2007 or 2010.
As mentioned previously, a very large document repository with over 100 million files should be an immediate indication that FAST is the more appropriate solution. There are however a few other factors which should stimulate an investigation into FAST for SharePoint. If there is the need to build a highly customizable search based application, with increased control over the relevancy algorithm or index pipeline, then FAST may be the more appropriate solution. As mentioned earlier, due to FAST’s proprietary index, there is far greater control over how it calculates relevancy and crawls data. In addition to being highly scalable, it can also search line-of-business systems which cannot be indexed into SharePoint via the BDC/BCS. This becomes more important for large enterprises which have business segments relying on non-Microsoft systems.
In addition to the technical aspects of the solutions, there is one other major facet which highly influences which solution is the correct option for an organization, cost. There is a drastic difference between the types of deployments which can even consider deploying FAST. Due to the enterprise nature of FAST, Microsoft has restricted its use to those clients with Enterprise agreements (eCAL). Even then FAST is still an additional license costs. Although in a clever change of marketing it has been stated CALs are free, as opposed to initial plans, per server licensing costs between $20K and $25K USD at the time of this article. Considering that most Enterprise agreements require more than 4 servers, licensing alone costs over $100K USD. Total implementation costs increase significantly past that once the price of additional infrastructure, deployment, and administration is taken into account. Alternatively, Ontolica does not use additional infrastructure, deployment time is minimal, and license costs are significantly less expensive, it is not restricted to use with Enterprise clients.
In summary, the appropriate scenarios for deploying Ontolica or FAST are significantly polar. FAST is the best solution for Enterprise clients with the need complete control over a highly scalable index. Alternatively, Ontolica is the best solution for any SharePoint client that want to improve an existing SharePoint search interface and help their users find relevant search results in significantly less time.
For an up-to-date comparison of features offered in SharePoint, Ontolica, and FAST, please see the current feature matrix found on www.surfray.com. For a full explanation of SharePoint 2010 and FAST licensing cost, you may find UK SharePoint Expert Ari Baker’s blog on the subject informative.
http://www.sharepointconfig.com/2010/05/indicative-sharepoint-2010-licencing-costs/