I just got back from the FASTforward event held in New York City, in which more than 400 attendees were treated to a range of applications and new thinking around the way organizations collaborate.  Bjorn Olstad, distinguished engineer for Microsoft and CTO of FAST, kicked off the proceedings with an overview of the latest FAST search functionality, available as part of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone solution. He discussed the growing interconnectness between search — offered via internal networks as well as through customer-facing portals — and collaboration and real-time customer experiences.

Major organizations are leveraging collaborative tools to improve the experiences for customers and constituents, and this was explained by representatives of two major global organizations. G. “Gurvais” Clayton Grigg, chief knowledge officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explained how his agency is managing an enormous flow of data into an already massive amount of content and documents. He said it was estimated that the FBI maintains enough paper to create a tower 178 miles high.

The challenge is transfer the nuggets of important information on some of this paper to a digitized and accessible form, Grigg says. Paper artifacts will be around for a long time to come, he points out. “The bad guys aren’t going to be organizing their evidence as metadata,” he says. “They’re not going to hand you everything on a CD.”

He said the agency’s strategy is to better leverage three sources of information — data, paper, and people.

Questions that need to be asked about information include “What do we know?” “Who knows it?” “How is it being used?” and “How is it being shared?” Grigg says. The ability to connect people and help them collaborate is paramount, he adds. “While it’s really good to help people find data, it’s even better to help them find the people with the data,” he says.

Technology needs to take a back seat to people and business considerations, he adds. “When people come to me requesting a technology, I first ask them to describe the problem without technology. If they can do that, they understand the problem better.”

Michael Rossotti, application services sr. analyst at Merck, explained how the pharmaceutical giant was leveraging the FAST Enterprise Search Platform and complementary solutions to deliver the latest information to physicians and consumers around the world.

The company maintains two primary portals, Merck Medicus, for doctors, and MerckSource for consumers. Both now have search capabilities built in.

The goals of the implementation, begun in March 2007, were to “have the user experience be central,” Rossotti says. “We wanted to build trust with the customer. Sometimes our only interactions with customers is through our portals.” The company conducted a phased rollout of capabilities, starting with an advanced search feature for Medicus. The first phase was linking to 50 companies across the enterprise that were crawled on a daily basis. The portals were later enhanced with a federated search capability to other search results, but still contained within the portal page. In 2009, the company integrated its portal search capabilities with SharePoint, he says. Currently, the system sees about five queries a second, he says.

Rossotti says some of the lessons learned from the experience include the need to “be wary of feature creep,” as departments seek to activate more tools and enhancements at the sites. “If you start to do too much, the experience for the client can become too complex.” The priorities, Rossotti, are to “step forward on governance, and meet increased demand.”