Welcome - FASTforward Kick-Off

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The "Inter" Personal Enterprise

Ray Lane, venture capitalist and former President of Oracle, will assess the current state of the software industry. Lane will share his perspectives about how the new "winning" applications must include ease of adoption, instantaneous value, minimum IT footprint and deliver value to users, rather than to corporate buyers. These applications will spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict - delivering the highest value to both end users and their enterprise.

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Welcome - Day 2 Kick-Off

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Search 2.0: The Future of Search

Search as we know it has gone way beyond the "search box." The real value of search will be expressed through a variety of perspectives, revealing the wide spectrum of impact search is having on the enterprise.

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Web 2.0: Powered by Search

Web 2.0 is more than just a collection of new tools - it is about the ability to create new business models through lightweight application development and data integration that harness network effects. In this session John Battelle, the renowned search and Web 2.0 guru, will update us on the latest developments in the Web 2.0 world and how search has come to be at the core of everything.

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Enterprise 2.0 - The Next Disrupter

Many experts have predicted that Web 2.0 for the Enterprise is where the action is. Enterprise 2.0 technologies allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. They dispose of the preconceived notions of structure and instead deliver freeform, intuitive, social, and flexible services that help enterprises gain true value from the collision of its employees' ideas, sometimes in unintended uses. In this session Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAfee, who coined Enterprise 2.0, will take us through the latest developments and how it will drive the next wave of value creation within and across your enterprise.

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Business Intelligence: Transformation 2.0

In today's world, companies' success hinges on timely access to accurate information for effective decision-making. Business managers need the ability to interact dynamically without a technical or "power user" intermediary. They need bi-directional information flow, both receiving important alerts including analytics as well as being able to demand answers to ad-hoc queries. These expectations are transforming BI as we know it. This panel session will explore what the future of BI may be.

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Web 2.0 Survey: The Economist Intelligence Unit

Everyone knows that scrappy startups from Silicon Valley are knee-deep in Web 2.0 trends, but what about big business? The Economist Intelligence Unit (the EIU), sponsored by FAST, recently launched a research project answer that question. Jeanette Borzo will discuss the EIU's findings, previewing material that will be presented in a white paper the EIU will publish in March.

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Putting It All Together: The Vision is Reality

In this roundtable discussion, trend spotter Tim O'Reilly will lead a conversation with leading innovators and early adopters who have made this Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 vision a reality. You will hear about what it takes to make it all work and what impact it will have on your organization.

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Search Technology: The New Frontier

Senior Forrester Analyst Matt Brown and FAST CTO Bjorn Olstad will explore the future directions of search and how it will transform and disrupt existing categories and technologies - including business intelligence, knowledge management, portals, and collaboration.

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Innovate, Accelerate, Dominate!

Search is changing business in three ways. First, search is the key enabler for introducing new business models and for monetizing existing assets. Second, search is improving business decisions by connecting users to answers, experts, analytics, and services. Third, search is disrupting the back office by exponentially improving data quality and warehouse performance and agility. With the help of three key customers who have innovated, accelerated, and now dominate, Zia Zaman SVP, Strategic Market Development of FAST, will explore these use cases and rovide his views about the next big disruptive application in the enterprise.

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Welcome - Day 3 Kick-Off

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The Long Tail

In his book “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson maintains that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve toward a huge number of niches in “the tail”. Wired editor-in-chief and author Anderson reviews the business potential of delivering products and services to customers in the long tail, and the effect of technologies that have made it easier for customers to find and buy niche products in the tail, leading to entirely new economic business models for businesses.

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Reach The Long Tail

Search is driving new patterns for connecting users to the long tail, both in terms of products, people, and services. CTO Bjørn Olstad will present how new search paradigms can be used to extract business value (i.e., the journey from zero results to zero-term search).

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The "Very Long Tail" of the Enterprise: What Role for Search

Chris Weitz of BearingPoint will describe how the Enterprise has the longest tail of all—the proprietary and private information in enterprise repositories not currently searchable or easily available to customers, employees, or managers. Tapping this vast pool of information is the key to both productivity and profit, but there are barriers and risks. How does the consumer software model apply to enterprises, and what really is the role for search in the enterprise? Current research, vendor positions, and customer perspectives will be examined.

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Back Office 2.0

A revolution is taking place in back-office information access. The ability to make informed decisions quickly is a key competitive advantage in today's global markets. Companies need an information orchestration framework that provides timely access to clean data including from a large number of diverse data sources, both structured and unstructured. This session explores how companies are transforming their businesses with new approaches to information access.

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Extreme Data Quality

Clean, integrated data presenting a "single version of the truth" is becoming increasingly critical in today's competitive economy. Extreme data quality is crucial for companies transacting in the currency of information. For such enterprises providing information-based products to the market, having accurate, rich data is a key competitive advantage. We discuss how one company has effectively used data cleansing to transform their business and increase their revenues.

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Is The Database Dead?

In this age of explosive information growth, it is increasingly challenging to provide effective information access for both customers and knowledge workers, even as providing such unified, real-time access to both structured and unstructured information is becoming more crucial. We examine how one company revolutionized its information management framework to deliver superior information retrieval performance and put its customers and business users in the driver’s seat while lowering its total cost of ownership.

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Search Powered Enterprise 2.0

As big as Web 2.0 is becoming, it is dwarfed by the same concepts applied to the enterprise. Tens of billions of dollars will be spent creating Enterprise 2.0. All the consumerist concepts of collaboration, expert location, community, social networking, user-driven content, and collaboration will infiltrate the IT groups in organizations by 2010. We discuss how top companies will embark on major initiatives to improve business decisions and manage mission-critical business information. Learn about the cavalcade of technology providers that will emerge claiming to play a key part in Enterprise 2.0—and search.

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Information Discovery: Lifting the Fog in Your Organization

Improving the quality of business decisions is paramount to improving a firm’s business results. Yet, most business decisions are made in a fog. Learn how search eliminates that fog and helps companies make fully-informed decisions that take into account many information sources and insights from within and outside the company.

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Business Transformation Through Search

Customers occasionally push the limits of how they want search to contribute to their business. It goes well beyond IT and starts to become a critical business enabler in the company’s overall transformation. As search becomes more deeply embedded in the company’s business processes, the more measurable business value is created from it. But this places extreme demands not just on the technology but also on the professional services and business consulting advisors who are being asked not just to implement ESP but to radically change a client’s business. We discuss how one client worked with FAST on an ambitious business transformation program and developed a blueprint for an information access layer to fundamentally alter the business.

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Surveillance, Data Fusion, and Information Exchange for Intelligence Applications

Search is becoming an integral part of a new generation of mission critical intelligence applications. FAST capabilities, including Enterprise Search (ESP), Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), and our Personal Search Platform (PSP), are being configured in innovative and highly effective ways to meet the needs for intelligence, data fusion, and information exchange application architectures. This session provides details about our latest success in these areas, helps you establish important contacts for staying informed about future initiatives, and provides an opportunity to discuss the challenges, new ideas, and lessons learned with your fellow FAST user community and partners.

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User Experience: Innovation at Marriott

When Marriott International wanted to use search to deliver on their mission to bring the right information to the right people as quickly as possible, they turned to FAST to guide them through User Centered Search development for their intranet. The process to uncover the user’s cognitive information model for searching and scanning results led to a new interface, improved internal business processes, and a search engine tuned for usability. In this session, we review the development process undertaken to enhance search and its successful outcome that is now changing the way tens of thousands of Marriott users access corporate information worldwide.

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Convergence of Search and BI

Ventana research findings on business intelligence and search are presented to help companies understand what role search technology will play in accessing BI data and delivering new functionality that expands the business value of BI. The findings will enable organizations to determine how to align the two technologies with their people and processes to achieve corporate goals and objectives.

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Gaining Powerful Insights from Your Data

The fast pace of today's economy requires companies to pay constant and close attention to their customers and to their business operations. Companies need a dynamic business intelligence and analytic tool with extreme visualization capabilities in order to gain powerful, actionable insights from their data quickly and easily. We examine how companies have used extreme, user-driven visualization tools to greatly enhance transparency in business operations and gain the insight needed for effective decision-making.

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New Business Models in Video Distribution

With the emergence of ubiquitous multi-platform broadband access and popular new multimedia content aggregators, as well as the rabid demand and popularity of user-created and shared content, video content producers, packagers, and distributors face a new world of opportunities and challenges. Join Dr. Jacques Bughin, Partner at McKinsey & Company, as he presents a strategic view of “The New Business Models in Video Distribution.” Dr. Bughin discusses emerging trends in the video marketplace, highlighting McKinsey’s new market research on the impact of user-generated content on traditional aggregators. He also provides examples of best practices detailing how traditional and new video aggregators can leverage search, personalization, and recommendation to compete and thrive in this rapidly-changing market.

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Building Stronger Communities

In a world where competition is only a click away, consumers have abundant choices on where and how they can access content. Media companies know now that stronger brand loyalty means giving audiences access not only to their content but also to the most relevant related content including voices from the community. How will you enable users to engage in meaningful conversations with others? How do you create value from such conversations? We investigate how leading media companies are building sustainable communities and transforming their interactions into strategic assets.

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Engaging with Your Multi-Platform Audience

Successful media brands have strong relationships with their audiences, who identify with the values and sensibilities embedded in the brands. These brands are now deepening the relationship by providing anywhere/anytime access to their content across multiple platforms, including the Web, mobile devices, broadband video, and TV. Success in this multi-platform world requires understanding what audiences want and when and how their needs change based on the platforms being used. We discuss how leading companies are satisfying users across multiple platforms and exploiting diverse revenue models to serve users while maximizing profitability.

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Innovation in Monetization: Search as a Profit Center

Successful media companies are taking a holistic approach to monetizing their content and their audiences by embracing targeted, contextual advertising and using content spotlighting and promotion to drive premium content sales and subscriptions. We explore how companies are integrating new monetization tools and platforms to drive maximum value from their content and audience.

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Changing the Game: Using Search to Build New Business Models

Everything around us seems to be in a perpetual disruptive mode: The new search generation is here with its unique behavior and expectations; The lines between media creation and consumption have blurred; New monetization models are born and destroyed every day. How can you understand the shifting user behavior patterns and respond to those opportunities in real-time? How do you integrate it all? This session brings it all together with three companies describing how they are partnering with FAST to create game-changing business models and agile customer centric content infrastructure that adapts at the speed of thought.

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Winning Strategies in Vertical Search

Media companies, including B2Bs and newspaper publishers, have large and profitable businesses creating and aggregating in-depth collections of content targeting specific user groups such as vertical or geographic markets. However, Web search engine companies are beginning to target these markets. We discuss how targeted local and vertical market publishers can use search to showcase content and deliver time-sensitive audiences the most relevant in-depth local and industry information. You also learn how to build a strong vertical portal, combining your proprietary text and multimedia content with “best of the Web” local and industry content.

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Domination Through Local Search

Search in many fashions will increasingly become even more central in the navigation and exploration of the crowded Web. The key question is not to build the most powerful and worldknown brand, but to win and lead the users in your environment. Learn how search and discovery will play major roles in our traditional business arenas, and will fight for and guard these positions against all global players (with knowledge, intelligence, innovation, and market power).

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Mining the Web For Gold: Structure the Unstructured

The Internet is the most complete and dynamic source of information accessible to the public today. Community based sites are prospering and Web 2.0 is the current hype. Look even further, and imagine how you can take advantage of the entire web as a community. Make every Website a contributor in your community. Learn how to extract and synthesize previously unstructured and scattered information into structured information.

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Mitigating Risk with eDiscovery Solutions: A Panel Discussion

Litigation, regulation, audit, and plain old internal investigation are forcing companies to locate and produce all relevant “electronically stored information” as part of what is becoming a critical and increasingly broad electronic discovery process. E-mails, instant messages, and other electronic documents scattered across an organization are all fair game. In the past, failure to produce this information has led to millions of dollars in fines, and a set of new rules promise to be even more punitive. During this discussion, you’ll learn how leveraging innovative storage, archiving, and corporate discovery solutions with robust embedded search capabilities can help mitigate the substantial risks that face today’s enterprise.

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Embedded Search Value

Engineers spend 25% of their time searching for product-related data. Reducing the time engineers spend searching can result in immediate productivity gains. By embedding search within PTC’s Windchill, PTC customers have realized values such as reduction in new product development cycles, design times, and time to market. This presentation will provide an overview of search within Windchill and describe the value it is now bringing to PTC customers.

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FAST Technology - Solutions for the Connected World

Search in many fashions will increasingly become even more central in the navigation and exploration of the crowded Web. The key question is not to build the most powerful and worldknown brand, but to win and lead the users in your environment. Learn how search and discovery will play major roles in our traditional business arenas, and will fight for and guard these positions against all global players (with knowledge, intelligence, innovation, and market power).

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The Future of Search and Information Access

Technical, commercial, and social influences are shaping the future of businesses on the Web. Enabling technologies like affordable broadband, search, self-provisioned collaboration, and commerce tools—combined with widespread individual and global community participation—disrupt everything from entrenched business models to public opinion and how we think about protecting and monetizing our intellectual property. Search and information access technologies represent both a significant opportunity and a threat to those organizations looking to not just survive, but thrive in this chaotic environment. We examine how enterprise search platforms have evolved to meet these new demands and present what it means to organizations that are ready to adapt.

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FAST Beyond 2007: Technology Direction

The FAST ESP technology platform is the foundation for all FAST solutions. Learn more about the ongoing development for strengthening and expanding the core capabilities of this platform, pushing toward a more user centric IT architecture. We present a high-level overview of our roadmap and an introduction to the deep dive presentations appearing later in the agenda.

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Search is the Portal

Discover how search has become the primary business interaction tool, providing both external and internal users with a single seamless, flexible, and dynamic interface to all the information tools users need. Network has become the computer, and search has become the interface. The traditional portals were basic information gateways; the new portals based on search are interactive, collaboration-oriented multimedia information discovery, delivery, and analysis tools.

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Search as the Service Delivery Platform

Powerful, intelligent search is at the heart of a major strategic battle to win users in the new digital landscape. As emerging Web 2.0 services are changing user expectations, simply providing views into databases of content and services is no longer sufficient. To differentiate, companies must present the right content to each user, provide mechanisms to discover relevant new content, deliver services in the right channels, and enable users to extend their online presence into broader social networks. Search integrated with content delivery, communities, and monetization is the key technology powering the new Web 2.0 services.

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Consumption Oriented Architecture

The basic IT infrastructure problem of the past decade is largely solved. Companies are now struggling with the information access puzzle, and it is this information sophistication that has become the main new differentiator. In face of growing data volumes and complexity, we explore how FAST provides the most scalable and flexible tools and partnership. Companies need to act fast: In this positioning in the different digital market spaces, the stakes are high, and the timing is crucial.

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FAST Technology Overview

Learn about FAST’s modular architecture and how features map to that architecture. Discover how FAST fits into corporate environments and what some of the functionality versus sizing and architecture trade-offs are for. This discussion is aimed toward both technical or business professionals who may be interested in understanding FAST’s technology on a deeper level.

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Search Usability and Result Navigators

Many have asked us, “What is the best way to present search result navigators?” In the past year, FAST has completed the usability studies. Our findings are presenting in this session, including examples of what works—and what doesn’t.

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The Complete Search Deployment Life-Cycle

Learn about the unique FAST deployment methodology from project inception to vision realization. We take you through the complete life cycle of a search deployment and review the tools and processes FAST uses to gather and align business and technical requirements, execute on those requirements, develop a long-term search vision, and fulfill that vision.

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ESP: New Innovation and Developments

Get an update on the planned additions to the ESP5 platform during 2007. We walk you through the different product areas and help you understand how these updates can help you to improve your business. Topics include: improvements to efficiency, scalability, and performance; how ESP will become easier to deploy and manage; and how to optimize the search experience.

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Secure Search - The Very Idea

Even defining what security means in the context of a search capability turns out to be a tricky question. We would want to implement confidentiality, integrity, and availability policies of some sort. But what might those policies proscribe? As we demonstrate, the issues go far beyond the familiar ones from operating system and database system security. Both security requirements and various implementation options and consequences are discussed.

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Integration and Document Processing

The quality of information access solutions is often determined by the breadth and depth of content and data that can be made available for intelligent decision making. FAST R&D is now previewing our next generation Content Capture and Refinement (CCR) framework, aimed at streaming computing for massive repositories and data streams across the enterprise. The design goals for CCR are discussed in detail with attention given to the fusion of relational data, rich media, and unstructured content.

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Implementing Enterprise Search: METRO Group Networking

METRO Group is one of the most important international retailing companies offering private and commercial customers a comprehensive service in retailing and selfservice wholesale. Approximately 250,000 employees work at more than 2,200 locations in 30 countries, creating a huge mass of information and communication. We examine how METRO Group Networking, which includes a search engine able to manage this fast-growing mass of data, represents the “workplace of the future” for this company.

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Integrated Search Approach at Siemens

We present the story of the integration of different data repositories with FAST ESP to realize the vision of a real integrated enterprise search in a heterogeneous environment at one of the world's largest electrical engineering and electronics companies with over 450,000 employees. Learn about the vision, the architecture, and the solution.

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Web 2.0 Consumer Health Search

TauMed is a Web 2.0 search engine and a virtual health community site where anyone can search for personalized health and medical information, get breaking news, ask/answer questions, share information, and do much more. Discover how the site offers the highest quality health-related Web 2.0 search tools available on the Web, and provides an open platform for everyday people, health professionals, and caregivers to exchange valuable information.

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Business Intelligence Based on Search

Imagine how wonderful it would be if you – or the CEO, finance director, or whoever – could find out how sales in a particular region in the first quarter had been, by typing in a simple query into a Google-like interface:

'Sales and "first quarter, 2007" and Chicago.'

Also imagine being able to get the results instantly and being able to view the information in a variety of forms – the raw figures, charts and graphs of different kinds, and being able to drill-down further for more information.

For many, such simplicity would be a dream come true. Traditional BI software vendors have struggled to make their historically complex products easy to use. After all, they were responsible for ‘multi-dimensional cubing’ and other complex concepts, which they claimed would make BI easy, but which still required lengthy training sessions to use.

Companies are realizing they need a fundamentally different approach to BI, one that is based on comprehensive, clean data exposed on a platform which allows for intuitive, ad-hoc access. The next generation framework for BI requires search at the core, as the underlying information access foundation upon which BI applications are based.

Join us in this workshop to examine the next-generation BI framework, transforming BI as we know it. We will explore key features such as dynamic profiling, data enrichment through object associations and advanced data cleansing techniques, and extreme ad-hoc query performance. We will illustrate how these capabilities have been used within mission-critical applications to power innovative new business models.

Speakers Include:

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Workshop: The Future of Media

The media, entertainment, and communications industries are experiencing seismic ecosystem changes that challenge fundamental assumptions about the viability of existing business models and processes. These major disruptive trends include:

Every participant in the media value chain, including content creators (studios, music labels, game developers, publishers), content aggregators and distributors (broadcast and cable networks, online portals, B2B information service providers), “quad-play” service providers (cable, satellite, broadband and wire line/wireless voice and data providers), advertisers, agencies and technology providers, must contend with this convergence of disruptive forces. How will business models evolve? Will video, voice, and data communications services become free – subsidized by advertisers or hardware manufacturers or content creators seeking to attract an audience? How will the process of creating, packaging, and distributing content change?

What are the biggest threats – existing or potential – to companies in the existing value chain? How will each respond? Which companies will thrive, survive, or perish along this path? What is your company’s future?

Moderators:

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Partner Training

Hosted by FAST University, this half-day training offered for FAST Partners focuses on teaching how to build a search application. Attendees learn how to get a FAST application up and running quickly. An overview of important FAST components and how they can be re-used across application domains is also provided.

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Search Enabling your desktop application with PSP

Most desktop applications today deal with some kind of information. You may store database records, have a custom file type, or simply need to integrate access to an online help system. FAST PSP can make your application data searchable. We discuss how FAST PSP can help achieve the goal of having searchable data applications.

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Beyond Relevance: Leveraging XML Scope Search

Everyone has experienced “You have 13,000 hits,” but what can you actually do with all those hits? We believe users must be able to leverage the entire result set as opposed to “and’ing” the query into uselessness. We present proven strategies that refine queries without excluding critical results and discuss how to leverage entity extraction and XML scope search to enhance not only search but visualization of result sets.

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Metrics: Enabling the Agile Enterprise

The use of real-time operational metrics to enable faster, more informed decisions that improve financial results is explored. We review how proper "driver metrics" lead to improved execution, resulting in superior performance in processes ranging from sales to product development to order fulfillment for both service and manufacturing businesses. Learn how to use these metrics to leverage critical resources and investments to run a nimble, more responsive enterprise.

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Mobile Web 2.0

Mobile Web 2.0 provides a detailed strategic analysis of the changing relationships in media and communications and the changing role of revenue platforms including advertising, attention, location, relevance, voting, payment, verification, indexing, and tags. We focus on the advent of user-generated content and how this will affect the established economic models and force change from supply:demand to create:consume.

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Search Meets Blogs and Wikis

The Internet, organized loosely by pages and links coupled with search technology, is easily the most successful content and knowledge management experiment to date. However, enterprises have been slow to replicate the Internet's success on their intranet. Enterprise IT is confronted with a need for easy page publishing, coordinated taxonomy, permission filtering, and infrastructure management issues. The marriage of enterprise blogs, enterprise wikis, RSS, and integrated FAST search will meet this challenge. We discuss how content and links in the blogs and wikis can serve as human-authored indices to content stored in other repositories, making that information more useful and actionable.

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On Demand and eCommerce: How the SAAS Model Can Simplify Life for Online Retailers

Selling online is a complex and competitive business. More than ever, online retailers must remain on the leading edge of a rapidly evolving market. Success online requires the automation of many processes and a sound strategy for technology investment. Truition CEO Butch Langlois discusses how the SAAS model for eCommerce provides competitive advantage for modern e-tailers.

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GeoSpatial Mobile Telephony Search

eSr introduces their two-year SI partnership with FAST, and then demonstrates a working FAST prototype that allows a user to submit queries by voice to locate products and services. The queries will post the geo-spatial information of the mobile phone to allow a user to ask, “Where can I find a wireless coffee house that serves burgers in San Diego?” Sort results are then provided by distance, ultimately enabling the user to arrive at the desired destination.

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Retail Domination Through Search

With the advent of Web 2.0, we see many opportunities open up for online retailers. In this presentation, Conchango will address the impact that Web 2.0 and powerful site search can deliver to the Retail Industry in the face of increasingly fierce competition.

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FAST Search API for Applications

FAST Search API was specifically designed to make it easier for Web-based search applications to integrate with FAST ESP (both 4.x and 5.x), and is quickly becoming the preferred API for search applications throughout FAST. It is currently being used by ProPublish and Tracking and Monitoring Services, and the newly rewritten Search Front End will also be using this API. We introduce you to Search API and demonstrate its main concepts using examples from Web applications.

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Solution Development Tools

This presentation showcases all of the non-platform tools that can be used to speed up development time: ESPDeploy, Acuity, Clarity (in ESP5), SFERanquzlier, and DocProc analyzer.

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ESP Studio: Linguistic Management Made Easy

ESP Studio can be used for managing linguistic assets, both on the dictionary level and with regards to operations. We describe the value chain of linguistic processing available in FAST ESP, how the components can be tuned, and how this improves the search experience.

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Enterprise 2.0 Delivered

Our presentations showcase the strong standards-based integration support provided in ESP. We begin by showing how to rapidly build search front-ends using our new components-based SFE and industry standard graphical drag-and-drop GUI builders (Sun Java Studio Creator is used as an example). Next, we detail how FAST applications such as FAST Home can be extended and customized easily. Finally, we demonstrate how simple it is to integrate your business data and ESP using ESP Web Services and the industry standard Business Process Execution Language.

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Security in Action

We examine what security means for search in general by examining the assets that must be protected and who and what we are protecting them from. The present and future mechanisms inside ESP that deal with security issues are also addressed.

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Challenges and Techniques for Implementing a FAST Yellow Pages Site

A typical yellow page business sells advertising features and the ability to purchase ads within particular geographic regions. This combination makes for a challenging search implementation. This solution-oriented workshop reviews many of the challenges and suggests various solutions that FAST offers. A production, full scale YP site is used as a case study to exemplify how the implementation was done and various operational complexities that needed to be addressed.

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Query Federation with Unity

The explosion of consumer choice and changing media consumption habits (reinforced by new technologies such as DVRs, broadband, search, video-enabled iPods, networked game consoles, etc.) is examined.

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Solution Building with ESPDeploy

Learn about the features and functions of ESPDeploy, which is designed to be a tool that can both install FDS/ESP and configure it for a custom solution in a repeatable and automated manner.

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Entity Extraction Based on Very Small Dictionaries

A fully-automated shopping comparison engine with a typically 98% accuracy rate is presented that extracts product names, prices, and images from public e-shopping sites using a dictionary of < 50 entries and only a few very simple extraction patterns. In the first phase, a small set of products is identified on each Website, and new extraction rules are learned based on an automated layout analysis of the successful extractions. The new rules are put to use in the second phase to extract product information from the remaining documents in each Website.

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Application Development with ESP and FAST Multimedia Miner

Examining several application-level use cases for multimedia search based on a foundation of FAST MM (Multimedia Miner) and ESP, we identify the technical interfaces that are specific to FAST MM and describe a conceptual model applicable to working with that interface. The session is broken out into strategies for multimedia content capture (RSS, Simple Crawl, Complex Crawl), indexing multimedia metadata, and supplementing multimedia metadata. We then offer presentation techniques underlying different strategies for delivery of multimedia specific user experience.

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Web Advertising Solutions

FAST gives publishers the advertising and search marketing tools that help maintain their business independence and grow their online revenue. FAST solutions also help customers to grow user and advertiser bases by controlling and exploiting their media assets. We provide an overview of the FAST advertising solution and review examples of how it is meeting customer business needs today.

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Connecting PSP to Your Corporate Knowledge

FAST PSP (Personal Search Platform) is a powerful addition to any corporate ESP installation. Learn how to empower your employees to avoid Google clutter and find information quickly and efficiently in order to perform their job duties productively.

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Contextual Insight

Contextual Insight (CI) is what you get when you mix scalable search with information extraction and XML technologies. Together, these enable you to conduct sub-document level search, retrieval and analysis, and open up the door to creating more semantically oriented search applications having a strong knowledge discovery element. We provide an overview of how these elements come together in ESP, some of the primitives that exist for applications to use, and how ESP matchers are used to implement much of this.

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Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is disguised in a lot of hype. Using customer case studies, this session takes a pragmatic view of available Semantic Web technologies for augmenting and improving business processes. Enterprise search is a platform that can accelerate the development of knowledge representations. By providing text and data mining features in structural and natural language content, models can be built that are specific to the business and targeted business processes. The enterprise search platform can leverage such information models to provide an information infrastructure that is a foundation for rapid deployment of business innovations.

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FAST Global Services:Your Partner in Search

Educational information is presented on the methodologies for plan development, technology deployment, and system management of our customers’ and partners’ long-term search goals. Helpful recommendations and resources are discussed, including implementation criteria, an Infotool demo, and the FAST Knowledge Base.

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Implementation Criteria: Design and Deployment

The purchase of a new enterprise technology brings the challenge of implementation. It is critical to ensure the new technology operates consistently and in conjunction with the rest of your organization. In order to achieve an adaptable technology that works with your business’ ever-changing needs, steps must be taken to identify your criteria, data readiness, and risk analysis. Hosted by Professional Services, we explain how you can be best prepared for a smooth implementation and deployment of a new technology.

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Managing Your Search Strategy

To achieve continuously high quality results from your search solution, it is highly desirable to adopt a proactive management program allowing you to leverage the technology and avert conditions that would impact your users and customers. Hosted by AMS, this presentation is intended for both customers and partners who are interested in learning best practices around different areas of their application, including system migration, changing architecture to map growth, and datacenter management.

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Production System Maintenance Tips and Tools

Learn about five common issues and the solutions for managing FAST search technology. Hosted by FAST Technical Support, we provide helpful tips based on some of the common questions that arise on system backup, network environment, third party software, index profile, and disk space. Attendees gain beneficial tips for better managing your search.

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Search Uptime and Hosting Best Practices

For many organizations, search is the most important tool on their site. This presentation will provide an overview of best practices for hosting search 24/7 with service uptime requirements of 99.5% or higher. Attendees will learn about network design, server design, and monitoring of both.

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