There was a lot of discussion in the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference posts by Bill Ives, Jevon MacDonald, and Jon Husband around issues in the deployment and management of the technology platforms for emergent 2.0 practices. As you know, we have always held that Search (the S in Andy McAfee’s SLATES model for E20) is the core “glue” in these platforms, pulling together concepts and people across the silos of project wikis, individual blogs, TownSquare-type enterprise Facebook projects, etc. Search becomes a core facility for knowing what you know as a firm and as an individual, and for keeping found things found and learned lessons learned.

As part of Microsoft, FAST is now working with the SharePoint team to help enable the growing base of 85 million Microsoft Office SharePoint Server licensees to integrate advanced search and discovery capabilities into their collaborative environments, including, of course, the SharePoint E20 applications.

It’s been around 45 days since Microsoft completed the acquisition of FAST, and now we are publishing tools to deliver interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server in an open process. Today we posted a set of open downloadable FAST search Web Parts on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site for the developer community. See more about the details at the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog or check out the SharePoint Team Blog.

These Web Parts are available as a free download and provide discrete pluggable services for such functions as including an advanced FAST ESP search box in any SharePoint project and for creating conversational results displays that allow SharePoint users to refine searches through navigating dynamic clusters of content. SharePoint administrators will be able to build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Look for the features, functionality and range of FAST ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.