Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

SharePoint Governance Workshop

Blogger: Craig Roth

Our Catalyst conference in San Diego is just over two weeks away now and I'm looking forward to this annual gathering of my co-workers at Burton Group, clients, vendors, industry luminaries, and users of technology.  Guy Creese and I will be giving our one day, advanced SharePoint workshop there (Tuesday, July 28, 2009) and there are still some slots open (it sold out when we gave this workshop in Scottsdale last year).  This is the first time it's been offered at Catalyst North America and is separate material (only about 10 minutes of overlap) from the "Understanding Microsoft SharePoint v3/2007 in Context" workshop that we still offer as a private onsite workshop. 

Governance is the largest section of the workshop, but I also want to point out the "SharePoint as an enterprise solution" section which applies an ITIL v3 model to SharePoint to structure our advice on offering SharePoint as a service rather than just dumping raw infrastructure on your users and divisional IT departments.

See the Catalyst website for more details.

SharePoint 2007: The Current Governance Nightmare—and Will It Get Better?

Craig Roth, and Guy Creese

SharePoint 2007 has been a runaway success, offering Office-centricity and ease-of-use to workers interested in storing and sharing information. However, its ease-of-use is also a snare and a delusion, in many cases fostering uncontrolled proliferation of thousands of SharePoint sites that have different navigation, taxonomy, and security models.

This workshop addresses SharePoint infrastructure planning and governance issues as well as the future of SharePoint with these modules:

• SharePoint as an enterprise solution
• SharePoint governance
• SharePoint security
• Deployment pre-work
• Adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise
• The future of SharePoint and a glimpse at Office 14

This just in: All attendees to the workshop will receive a free poster on "Creating a SharePoint Statement of Governance" that provides a handy reference to the section-by-section walkthrough I'll be doing on how to create a SharePoint SOG.  This handsome poster is about 2.5 by 3.5 feet, full color, on thick paper:

Oracle WebCenter and Fusion Middleware 11g

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle's analyst summit in mid-June provided a good look at their plans for Fusion Middleware 11g and WebCenter (released July 1st for download; see summary of features here).  Now that we're out of non-disclosure mode (and into "please disclose!" mode) I'd like to share my high-level impressions.  They covered a ton of stuff, but my view is biased towards my coverage area of portals with connections to search, productivity, and collaboration. Other Burton Group analysts were also in attendance from our Identity and Privacy Strategies team and our Application Platform Strategies team (see Anne Thomas Manes' thoughts here).

First, although Oracle owns 4 portal products, all the portal-related time was spent on WebCenter. Sure, other portals were mentioned in bullets as examples of how they can plug in (or consume WebCenter's social software), but it was clear WebCenter is the leading actor here (and supporting actor in the stories of the SOA, identity, and enterprise application teams). This confirms what I (and Oracle) has been saying: that WebCenter is the primary portal and that the other 3 (Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction née Plumtree) will be supported and have their die-hard fans but will not be best for new portal projects.

It was helpful to hear Oracle frame its collaboration/portal/search/productivity/social software ambitions in relation to Microsoft SharePoint.  For all its plusses and minuses, SharePoint provides a common point of reference against which to measure.  They described how they line up with SharePoint as an alternative, can coexist with it, and where they surpass it.  This is what IBM should have done with Quickr+Connections at Lotusphere.

As with SharePoint, WebCenter provides an impressive set of functions in one box. There is often better integration between WebCenter and other Oracle assets (like their applications and development tools) than Microsoft where other groups can sometimes get away with ignoring what the SharePoint and Office group does.

There are numerous SharePoint analogies in WebCenter.  From conversations with the execs there I found that some are intentional and in other cases they say SharePoint copied them (well, copied AquaLogic User Interaction)!

• Business Dictionary as a role based catalog of information assets. Seems like SharePoint's Business Data Catalog.  This should be an interesting battle since SharePoint's BDC is clearly a version 1.0 work-in-progress and Oracle has a lot of expertise to bring here being a database company at heart.
• Federated search. 'Nuff said.
• Office integration. Clients I speak with expect Microsoft will always have the best Office integration, but there are cases where Microsoft's internal silos or some good ideas can expose openings.  Oracle showed a nice Word sidebar for document management that had people, versions, etc.
• Slide sorter. This was a neat feature that SharePoint offered, but Oracle's version seems to leapfrog it. They demoed picking all the slides for a sales deck. Oracle calls this a "folio" or compound document. Oracle acquired a neat little company called "Outside In" that has sophisticated filters for productivity files.  Blending this into Web Center can provide for some good Office integration.

Oracle did a fine job of acknowledging the need to work with SharePoint and others.  But the meat boils down to their WSRP producer running on .NET, selective metadata consumption, and Ensemble (a reverse proxy solution).  Hopefully this gets beefed up with more programmatic integration, discovery tools, and guidance so it requires less reliance on WSRP.

Of all the competitors, WebCenter is the newest architecture from the ground up.  Being the youngest has its advantages.  Since WebCenter is newly architected it feels like it more seamlessly integrates new concepts like tagging, linking, social connections, and REST services than IBM and MSFT where it's more bolted on. So they're better at utilizing these features across the suite that Microsoft and a little bit better than IBM.

But will Oracle - the whole company - give WebCenter the resources it needs to win the marketplace(not just the resources required to be a good and useful product)?  In the Q&A session, Oracle President Charles Phillips said there are "No plans to have middleware broken out in reporting. We have lots of product lines, we're getting more with Sun... " This hits at the perennial knock on Oracle's efforts around knowledge infrastructure - lack of push and commitment.  Oracle did talk about how much revenue Fusion pulled in, the growth rate, penetration, etc.  That would indicate the company would have to care.  But still, Microsoft manages to report on four breakouts (Client, Server and Tools, Online Services Business, Microsoft Business Division, Entertainment and Devices Division).  Oracle sticks to two (Applications, Database and Middleware).  Sun will add at least one more (servers and hardware).  If Oracle is dedicated to the enormous space between enterprise apps and the database, breaking out middleware from the database would be a great way to track and prove this commitment.

Oracle Enters Beehive in Collaboration Tournament

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle announced its release of Beehive 1.5 today.  They are hoping that a technology refresh of the Beehive collaboration assets (along with additional assets acquired along with BEA) can give Oracle another shot at the collaboration market after the moribund Oracle Collaboration Server has fizzled. 

The announcement comes at a good quiet spot between IBM's collaboration announcements at Lotusphere in January and Microsoft's announcements on SharePoint 2010 that will probably come to a peak at their conference in October. Likewise, its most attractive feature is that its platform and standards offer an alternative to a Microsoft stack (Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint) and an IBM stack (Notes/Domino and/or Quickr+Connections with WebSphere).  Beehive offers more standards than you can shake a stick at (although I don't recommend shaking sticks at beehives generally): WebDAV, IMAP/SMTP, JSR 170 for content repository access, XMPP for IM and presence, LDAP or AD for directory, and JMX for management.  You can use Solaris, Windows Server, or Linux for the serve and any development tool desired.  From a technology point of view its appeal is likely to be based on architectural decisions about what standards and stack an organization wants to embrace (or stay away from).

But technology aside, the key for Oracle (as always) is whether they can utilize their channel to sell this stuff and whether organizations can be persuaded to pay real money for it after previous false starts.  In the past, Oracle hasn't had much voice left to talk about collaboration and portal after yelling about database and ERP.  But since the Stellent acquisition, content management has been a bright spot for them and I think it has changed some minds. 

Personally, I want to see the collaboration market stay competitive.  End users win when vendors compete hard on features, quality, and pricing.  Lately it seems like Microsoft SharePoint has gotten a lion's share of attention from organizations.  Microsoft has been the main attraction at this tournament  and I'm glad to see Oracle showing up to play.  IBM Lotus still feels to me like they haven't shown up to the tournament and are setting up a parallel exhibition match for the same sport in another part of town.  They didn't mention SharePoint by name in the Lotusphere main tent (although it was clear who they were talking about and Jive got a mention). But as an analyst I'm like an unaligned spectator at a sporting event - you just want to see a diverse set of skillful challengers compete really well and bring up the level of play.

Do Chargebacks Work for SharePoint, Portals, and Collaboration?

Blogger: Craig Roth

Larry Cannell recently mentioned a case study of a corporation that had created a chargeback system for SharePoint.  It fostered some good internal debate that I have captured in this posting. This large corporation used a chargeback system for SharePoint in which fees are assessed per SharePoint site and rolled up by department.  This was considered a big improvement since it forced measurement and understanding of usage.  But IT wound up granting a lot of exceptions (the article doesn't say why) so they are thinking of charging by storage volume instead.

Larry Cannell commented previously in this blog about how a chargeback system drives (distorts) user behavior.  For example, charging per site discourages creation of subsites, but charging per GB of storage encourages moving files to other storage systems.  The ultimate impact is that people expend energy consolidating sites or moving files around to save money and the total cost of ownership for the SharePoint installation is hobbled.  Also, subsites are very easy to create and may not take many resources at all, so a fixed fee per subsite could be way out of sync with actual costs incurred.

Bill Pray commented that the exception granting process is very important.  Organizations should define an exception process because rigid application of chargeback rules in every case can be detrimental to the growth of the system.

My advice has always been that, especially during the critical early phase of rolling out a tool that thrives on network effect (portals, collaborative workspaces, social software, IM, etc.), you don’t want to disincent usage.  In the case of a portal, that means you don’t want to charge per site set up or by the amount of content being stored.  If you do that it causes squirreling behavior – carefully watching your usage, using free siloed systems where possible, or having a shadow presence that links to off-site content that won’t be shared.

The correct approach in my opinion is to charge a fixed fee based on number of potential users or something like that, regardless of usage.  It’s accordingly been called a “tax”, but the result is to encourage usage since you’re paying for it whether you use it or not and may as well get your money’s worth.  And the more an organization uses it, the more value they get for their tax, hence encouraging usage rather than discouraging it.

Once the system is well established and network effect (aka snowball effect) keeps it rolling on its own momentum, an organization could potentially change the chargeback mechanism to go from tax to usage, although I would probably set thresholds that indicate abuse (like dumping multi-gigibyte multimedia files into the Sharepoint repository).

I should add that we recently completed a set of interviews with clients about how the recession is impacting their approach to communication, collaboration, and content systems.  One discovery was that the companies we spoke with that were very successful with their chargeback systems also had barriers (generally legal and regulatory) that prevented business units from going around IT or forcing them to compete against outside providers.  In cases where business units can write a check to an outside collaboration provider as easily as they can to IT, chargeback systems have to be approached with much more care (e.g., subsidized, regulatory conformance policy for external alternatives, rates that change over time due to externalities).

Internal markets for services follow many of the same rules of economics that an open (external) market does which should be addressed when designing chargeback systems:

1. Increasing price (or adding a price for something that was formerly free) decreases demand for your product and could increase demand for substitute goods.  All too often, e-mail is considered a free substitute for blasting out information, exchanging documents, and having discussions.
2. With a product that gains benefit from network effect (e.g., online gaming, a dating service, trading cards, collaborative workspaces), decreasing sales decreases demand since each customer will have fewer peers with which to utilize it.
3. Just like in a real market, when the central authority (e.g., federal government or central IT) tries to shape behavior by adding rules and regulations, this often distorts behavior as participants shift usage patterns to exploit inefficiencies in the regulations (e.g., edge cases, loopholes, misalignment of incentives).

The Perils of Chargeback Systems

Blogger: Larry Cannell

One approach we’ve seen enterprises take to recover the costs for providing a communication, collaboration, or content management service is to use an internal chargeback mechanism. IT plays the role of an internally-sourced service provider. This approach works well for simple services like, for example, audio conferencing. Simply charge a per minute fee for each participant (Number of callers * Number of minutes * Per minute cost = Total cost of the audio conference). It’s a simple formula that everyone understands and it does a decent job of relating usage to the resources required to deliver the service.

But, applying this same approach for recovering costs to other collaborative applications gets much more difficult. Case in point, a recent post on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog points to a Gartner case study which describes the deployment of SharePoint at Pfizer. What I found most interesting was this paragraph about chargebacks:

“Pfizer initially implemented a chargeback approach. The business departments are charged a flat fee for each SharePoint site they created. Costs were assigned to the primary owner of the department of the site and a detailed use report was provided to each department head listing every site that was assigned to them. This approach has worked well as the businesses wanted greater transparency in service costs than they had received in previous content management solutions. However, the IT department found that they have had to grant a lot of exceptions in the per site fee and it is no longer practical. In 2009, they are considering moving to a model based on storage volume (x$ per gigabyte of storage per year) rather than the per-site fee.”

This is a good example of how a chargeback system can drive user behavior. Charging per SharePoint site sounds counterproductive to me. Anyone can create a new sub-site and it hardly takes up any resources at all. Sub-sites are a valid way to organize information in SharePoint, so why discourage it? I expect this model might have been better aligned with some of the products they are replacing with SharePoint.

In any case, there is a good chance a per-GB chargeback model won't work much better. By pricing per site they were discouraging use of a powerful feature in SharePoint (sub-sites) but by pricing per GB they are discouraging other use cases as well. As a result, at a time when money is tight and management starts soliciting ideas for saving money from their departmental budget, we could see the business units consolidating SharePoint sites, or moving files to other systems which charge less for storage, all to avoid internal chargebacks. In the end, there will likely be little or no change in the TCO for all of these systems and (worse) it creates a lot of extra work for people moving files around (lots of activity, but no impact on the bottom line).

While I think an internal SaaS model can work it has to be done at a level that doesn't encourage the wrong behavior or causes internal systems to compete with each other.

What Microsoft Office 14 Needs: A New, Separate SKU

Blogger: Craig Roth

Recently I posted some guesses as to what features Microsoft will put into Office 14's content creation tools (the productivity suite consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote).  But those were guesses about what Microsoft would do, not what they could do or should do. 

There's a lot of interest in O14 since professional pundits (and swivel-chair pundits in fuzzy cubicles everywhere) want to speculate about whether the 800 pound gorilla known as Microsoft Office can be brought down by plucky upstarts like Google or Zoho, or free options like OpenOffice or IBM Symphony. But this speculation is misplaced.  I start the NextGen authoring section of my content creation seminar with a prediction:

If Microsoft is ever dethroned in the content creation market, it will not be because they were beat on features or marketing … it will be because of a fundamental shift in the content creation market for which they failed to adapt.

In other words, it is not Vendor X that will beat them by being cheaper or more feature rich.  It's Suite X that will beat them with a different set of technologies that addresses a unique but growing subset of content creators.  There is a fundamental shift in how content is being created.  It has bubbled up from old concepts such as collaborative editing and been picked up by web 2.0 and its Gen Y adherents who think in rapidly produced, hyperlinked, searchable content chunks instead of ponderous, static, e-mailed documents. I introduced the NextGen content creation trends here (with further description here).  This is how I see the content creation environment today:

Note that I chose to visualize this as a central core being expanded by these new needs rather than a versioning depiction such as 1.0 ---> 2.0.  That's because the core needs will always exist in enterprises, but we need to acknowledge a new set of needs that is not well met by the core authoring tools and that will account for an increasing percentage of content creation as Gen Y'ers enter the workforce and information workers get used to authoring in new ways via blogs and wikis.

We are at an inflection point in the way content is being created.  Microsoft would be unwise to pass up this opportunity to segment the market.  Microsoft may be able to get through one more major version of Office by stretching traditional document-related technology to fit.  But this anchors their attempts to address new content creation needs to a 1990's document-centric mindset.  By carving out a new target market, they build incremental revenue (most buyers of this suite would still have needs for core Office as well), plant the seeds for a new franchise that would be small but grow more rapidly than Office, and compete better with innovative vendors that are unencumbered by entrenched bureaucracy and sunk costs.  And all while helping to mitigate the bloat and complexity of Office by separating out features that will be unused or confusing for many core Office users. There's a chance that this would cannibalize Office 14 upgrades, but my instinct is that it would make no or a minor short term loss (since the new target market is small) and pay for itself within the next two versions of Office. It could be rolled out on half-cycles with Office to help avoid cannibalization and steady the famously spiky revenue stream and attention that Office releases garner.

Accordingly, I argue that Microsoft should create a new product (a SKU in industry parlance) for the NextGen content tools rather than continually trying to bolt onto Office Pro.  It could be called Office Extended, although some more thinking would elicit a more clever term.  Here's how I would start:

• OneNote would shift over to anchor the new suite.  With new branding and development, it can finally stand up as a new type of content platform that allows for content components, real-time collaborative authoring, and improved linking rather than just being a productivity add-on aimed at students and meeting notes.  OneNote will only be truly understood to represent a different paradigm when it breaks the chain it has to the Office Home and Student suite
• The Live Writer blogging tool would finally get a real home here
• Microsoft would have a place to create a real wiki rather than the SharePoint template that stands in as the official "Microsoft wiki" for lack of anything better.  No one - not even SharePoint folks - asserts that SharePoint's wikis are in the league of any best of breed tools, and I can't think why Microsoft would not want to compete for a best of breed wiki any less than they want to have a best of breed browser.  And remember the pain that being too slow to recognize a "good enough" 80/20 browser wasn't enough caused them.
• Microsoft would take an 80/20 swipe at the XML content creation market with a new Xmetal-like tool, much as they grabbed a new low end of the records management market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

And that's just a start.  Part of the idea is to give this new market segment a new matching suite to grow with.  This idea fits Microsoft's software+services direction since a few of these products (wikis and blogs) are not purely client-based, so services are needed.  I guarantee the evolution of content creation is not over, so the new SKU provides a place with plenty of room to stretch and grow new creation mechanisms the market demands without having to add a 14th pound of flour to the 10 pound bag of Office.

Some Un-educated Guesses about Office 14

Blogger: Craig Roth

This seems like a perfect time to post up some un-educated guesses about what will be in Office 14.  It's the perfect time because Burton Group hasn't been briefed on it yet.  Normally we would have been by now, but after numerous scheduling conflicts our briefing has now been rescheduled several times since the end of 2008.    Usually we are briefed by the vendors we cover well in advance of major announcements which helps us prime our content pipeline, but it also puts a freezing effect on guessing due to the non-disclosure agreements.  This leaves me an opportunity to make some lemonade from those lemons.  Since I haven't been officially educated on O14, I can feel free to publish guesses without fear that I'm giving away secrets!

That's a round-about way of saying these are all purely guesses on my part.  My teammate Larry Cannell already posted some gleanings about SharePoint 14 after the FAST conference.  Here are my guesses on the productivity side of Office 14:

• Breaking down some barriers in moving content to/from the web: Copy/pasting from websites to Office and back shouldn't be so messy and linkages should remain.  Again, OneNote has foreshadowed some of this and Microsoft has already acknowledged this will be addressed
• Better leveraging / integration of OneNote: The more you dig into OneNote, the more you see that it is not just a note-taking tool for students and home use, but a quantum leap in content creation from Word.  Microsoft hasn't pushed its value because they have trouble explaining it.  I'm going to place a bet that O14 will lift OneNote's profile, although still not to the level it should be
• Tighter SharePoint integration with the productivity side of Office: I expect the web editors to be leveraged to allow editing of workspace documents in place, much like IBM Lotus Notes does by leveraging Symphony.  I also expect better (think "wiki-like") versioning capabilities when modifying documents stored in SharePoint
• Better use of XML schemas: The OOXML spec allows for some very nice schema usage (tagging document sections, being able to split a document into different pieces) that Microsoft didn’t take advantage of in Office 2007. Making those capabilities more visible will make it easier for enterprises and third-parties to programmatically create and reuse document parts
• Better tagging across the suite: Uses of tagging in web 2.0 tools (blogging, tag clouds, social tagging) has far outpaced the underutilized, weak, free-form "keywords" and "category" fields in the Document Properties pane (quiz: do you know how to get to it in Office 2007?).  SharePoint enabled policies to be linked to the Document Properties panel, but capabilities for shared namespaces, tag clouds, and controlled vocabularies were absent from Office 2007.  I will place my last bet that O14 includes at least some of these tagging capabilities that are commonplace in other domains
• Web editors: Stripped down, Silverlight enabled versions of all your Office favorites.  Includes a mobile experience as well.  Some of this has already been announced or leaked, but the Silverlight part is just a guess
• Real-time collaborative editing: There are plenty of non-Microsoft products that do this now (like SubEthaEdit) and OneNote can already do this (to a lesser extent than the true RCE tools).  I expect more of it in the rest of the Office suite

One final caveat: While I think all of these are good, this is not my list of what could and should be done with Office.  What I've guessed above are more incremental improvements except for the web editors.  I'll leave some more radical ideas on how to revitalize the Office productivity franchise for another posting.

This is a Microsoft Conference?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Today is the final day for the FASTforward 2009 Conference. This is the fourth year it has been held but the first one planned, developed and run under Microsoft management. Now, I have been to many Microsoft enterprise IT conferences, but this one is different from any other I’ve attended.

Granted, there has been plenty of corporate speak, the occasional mind-numbing speaker (note to self: pacing, mumbling, and having no slides to help listeners follow you is not a good idea), and the obligatory sales pitches (from both Microsoft and FAST speakers). However, a number of things jumped out at me this week that may reflect changes coming to Microsoft or may just be anomalies which the corporate immune system will soon correct:

• FASTForward 2009 had the coolest Contoso and Litware demos I've ever seen at a Microsoft Conference. For those of you not familiar with these names, Contoso and Litware are pseudo-companies Microsoft often uses in mock-ups to show off their technology. For example, instead of the staid, boring default SharePoint themes showing how Litware manages their documents, this week we saw a cool website featuring David Bowie!
• It is strange to be at a Microsoft conference and hear words assuring customers that their investments in Linux and Unix-based solutions are safe.
• Although I’ve heard Microsoft people refer to “user experience” at previous conferences (usually in passing), this week’s speakers talk about user experience like they mean it.
• I haven’t seen any bloggers make note of this, but in Clay Shirky’s keynote Monday afternoon, products from Microsoft competitors (IBM’s Dogear and Apple’s iPod) played important roles in his examples. I am sure someone from Microsoft reviewed these slides but they were left in anyway. Maybe not a big deal but there are many companies that would not have allowed this, regardless if they were expressing interesting ideas.

Time will tell if these changes extend beyond this conference. Do they reflect a change at Microsoft? Are they a reflection of an aging company going through a mid-life crisis trying to find its new identify? What do you think?

FASTforward Offers Sneak Peak at SharePoint "14"

Blogger: Larry Cannell

I am attending the FASTforward 2009 Conference this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. An earlier post has details of what I have learned about Microsoft’s plans for integrating FAST search technologies in SharePoint. However, there are some things we can also infer about the SharePoint “14” release in general.

Here are some things about SharePoint “14” I’ve gleaned from demonstrations and announcements made at FASTforward:

• Browser-based document thumbnails and previews. I’ve seen a couple of screenshots showing document thumbnails and previews in a SharePoint site. This morning’s presentation showed a set of Powerpoint slide thumbnails within a browser on a SharePoint site.
• In a Q&A session at the analyst meeting yesterday, we learned the Business Data Catalog will benefit from the FAST search technologies, although it is not yet clear how. For those of you familiar with the BDC’s ability to aggregate business application data within SharePoint’s collaborative environment and FAST’s capabilities to work with structured data, this should get you thinking about some interesting possibilities.
• Tagging was mentioned in a SharePoint demo during this morning’s session.
• Expertise information (perhaps leftovers from the Knowledge Network beta pulled shortly before SharePoint 2007’s launch) also looks to be included in “14.”

Microsoft didn’t provide any hints on timing for the release of SharePoint or Office “14” but given the recent announcement of the SharePoint Conference 2009 to take place in late October I would expect to see a beta as early as November/December but more likely in 1Q 2010.

FAST Search for SharePoint

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A little over a year after Microsoft acquired FAST the company outlined plans today for incorporating the high-end search technology with SharePoint in a forthcoming feature called “FAST Search for SharePoint.” The official press release is available here.

The high points of the FAST/SharePoint roadmap include:

• SharePoint “14” provides the basis for this deep integration with FAST.
• FAST Search for SharePoint will be included with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition. However, customers will also need to purchase server-based licenses for all required FAST servers (this is the first SharePoint capability, which I can think of, that requires both client and server CALs).
• Customers who want to use FAST with their SharePoint environment now can purchase “ESP for SharePoint.”  This does not provide the same capabilities expected with FAST Search for SharePoint but is still more sophisticated than SharePoint’s search (and likely to be similar to the free FAST webparts announced last year).
• Beta testing for Fast Search for SharePoint will be aligned with SharePoint “14.”

In an analyst meeting at the FASTforward 2009 conference yesterday, Microsoft briefly showed a couple of sample screenshots of mock-ups illustrating how FAST will integrate with SharePoint “14.” The first one was a faceted navigation UI showing facets in a left side menu (with “exact counts” next to each facet) on a page also showing related search queries, and featured content.

The second example showed an integration with SharePoint people search, providing the capability for phonetic name lookup, organization-based browsing, recently authored content, expertise identification, and filters using focus expertise, and other attributes.

Also revealed was the company’s long-term plans for FAST to provide the foundation for all enterprise search technologies from Microsoft. However, for the “14” release SharePoint search technologies will still provide the basis for Search Server Express, search in the standard edition of SharePoint, and Search Server.