FAST ESP or FAST Search Server for SharePoint

Question

I am learning Microsoft FAST search for solving our search problem. I am getting resources for FAST Search for Sharepoint(FS4SP) instead of FAST Enterprise search Platform(FASTESP/FSIS/FSIA). I am more interested in FAST ESP as I don’t want any sharepoint dependency, but all the documentation I observed seems to be related to the Sharepoint integrated version. Is FS4SP provide same features as FASTESP/FSIS/FSIA?

The main problems that I want to solve using this search solutions are:

1.Search public and private(needs user authentication) data. For private data search, user should authenticate and see only autorized contents.

2.Search Web and non-web data. We have some desktop(client-server) applications and we want to make app/user data searchable.

3.Solution should be integarted all web, desktop and mobile applications. So that user should be able to perform search from web, desktop and mobile applications.

Can FS4SP solve all of above problems?

Answer 1

Both FAST ESP and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 can solve your requirements. If you are starting a new project FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is the only option you can purchase. I would suggest going for SharePoint 2013 which includes the FAST Search components by default.

FAST ESP had most of its documentation as PDF documents that shipped with the product. With the SharePoint versions, most of it is found online.