Related links     Microsoft's FAST search to mate with social networking Beyond Business Intelligence: Delivering a Comprehensive Approach to Enterprise Information Management Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology Case Study: Consulting Firm Works Smarter with Integrated Search to Find Data, Expertise     Download     FAST ESP product overview, Portable Document Format, 874 KB     Products and technologies     Microsoft Enterprise Search Windows Vista Instant Search Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Windows Live Search     Get Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Not knowing which sources to search.
• Spending more time looking for—rather than finding—the right information.
• Not knowing when new or updated information is available.
• Being unsure as to the correct person in the organization to help with your information requests.
• Not having a common tool for both business productivity and e-discovery and compliance.

In addition, it can often be difficult to identify where sensitive data is being stored, to retrieve information based on location or time (using an intuitive map or timeline search), and to find concepts-based information.

The result, all too often, is frustration, wasted time, and inefficiency. What government organizations need is a complete set of integrated tools that help you efficiently find the data you seek—in any location or format—aggregate it, and present it on your desktop in an easily understood format.

Industry-leading and analyst top-rated enterprise search solutions from Microsoft can help you address these issues by providing a single interface to search across the many places where an agency stores its data. The high-end search capabilities provided by FAST ESP for SharePoint helps government agencies make better, faster decisions to support missions from Homeland Security to Stimulus, and offers the public unprecedented access to relevant information required by both individuals and communities.

The technology extends the capabilities of traditional search engines and expands the very definition of what is searchable. With this toolset of powerful search capabilities, users can:

• Search within databases and other “structured data,” in addition to “unstructured data,” such as Microsoft Office Word documents and Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets.
• Search enterprise data across multiple intranets, servers, and data repositories.
• Locate data external to the organization.
• Customize their Internet Explorer interface to automatically reach out to other selected search engines, such as CNN and USA Today.
• Use new social-networking technology to quickly identify the individuals with the expertise, authority, or organizational knowledge to assist you.
• Recognize emerging trends and patterns in social networks.
• Find and identify personally identifiable information (PII), such as Social Security numbers (SSNs), throughout your enterprise.
• Find data based on geospatial or temporal information, which is automatically extracted from documents in your enterprise.
• Extract information automatically from your enterprise documents or based on your enterprise taxonomy or folksonomy.

If it’s vital to government, it’s mission critical to Microsoft.