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SharePoint / FAST Information Integration

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Why Integrate FAST or SharePoint Search to ERP, CRM, ECM, and custom applications?
A recent study by Accenture revealed that 50% of middle managers at over 1000 companies within the U.K and the United States felt that the information returned by their search engines was of no value. An IDC study concluded that the reason for this was that the search engines typically do not index the majority of data contained in business systems. Simply stated, users that value this data will never obtain a relevant search result and the search initiative will be of no value to a large set of users in the company

The Challenge of Integration - Security, Scalability, Performance, and Deployment
Integrating FAST and SharePoint Search with enterprise systems presents numerouos difficulties, but security is by far the most challenging. SharePoint Search will not honor the security of systems that it indexes that are non Active Directory based. FAST has a more sophisticated security model, but leveraging it to integrate FAST with different systems is a significant coding effort, often requiring months of work. BA-Insight's integration framework provides the ability to map the security of SharePoint or FAST to a target system automatically.

Another challenge associated with integrating search with business systems is scalability and performance. Both SharePoint and FAST must crawl the entire system to detect updates to data. This put significant pressure on the indexed system often impacting performance. BA-Insight's integration framework caches the change log and references it during a crawl. By doing so, the search engine knows exactly what content to index. This results in significantly less stress on the indexed system.

Finally one must consider the cost, risk, and time it takes to integrate SharePoint or FAST to a business system. BA-Insight has created connectors between SharePoint or FAST with all of the major ERP, CRM, ECM systems in the market. Deploying a BA-Insight connector takes less than one day.