One on One with Jared Spataro of Microsoft

January 27, 2010 | By Ron Miller

Jared Spataro is the director of enterprise search at Microsoft Corp. His professional career has focused on software, and before joining Microsoft he worked for a leading enterprise content management vendor. We asked Spataro about what it was like incorporating FAST into the Microsoft family of products and how he walks the line between catering to Microsoft products while still functioning as an enterprise tool.

FCM: How will you use FAST Search in SharePoint 2010?

JS: SharePoint 2010 will ship with a fantastic search experience featuring lots great enhancements. But FAST Search for SharePoint will allow customers to take search to a new level, delivering the power and flexibility of a best-in-class search platform. FAST Search for SharePoint customers will get a great general productivity search experience that is integrated with SharePoint out-of-the-box, but they'll also be able to use the advanced capabilities of the platform to build and deploy sophisticated search-enabled applications.

FCM: How has FAST Search changed now that it's part of Microsoft as opposed to a stand-alone vendor?

JS: Our top-tier search solutions are all built on the FAST Search core, and over time FAST will become a common foundation for all of our products. But FAST not only adds to our stable of technologies--it also benefits from it. Tighter connections between FAST and other key Microsoft products and technologies enable new scenarios and applications--making it easier than ever before for customers to take advantage of the power of the best enterprise search platform on the market.

FCM: How do you balance in-house compatibility with working across a variety competing content management products?

JS: A great enterprise search system needs to connect to everything and be accessible from everywhere. Out-of-the-box integration with SharePoint provides immediate value for many customers, but we've designed our products so that they can be embedded in any user experience and can index content living in any location. In the next wave of products, I'm particularly proud of the work we've done to improve our connector framework-making it easier than ever before to index information wherever it resides.

FCM: How is search changing with the advent of tagging, trusted networks, social networking and so forth that provide alternative ways to search from a traditional search process?

JS: At its core, search is a matching technology--it matches people to information. Tagging, social networks and other innovations often provide new "cues and clues" about what people want and what information is available. We think that the best search experiences will take advantage of these new technologies and use them to improve the way people navigate and process huge amounts of data.