Jan Helge Sageflat and Stein Danielsen, both Director of Product Development at FAST have given a great presentation at the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. I have seen the online webcast of this session.
FAST ESP is a enterprise Search platform which delivers a great search tool on the market for enterprise organizations. But i believe that also for smaller organizations with the need for an extended search (nicer UX, Federated Search, Navigators and lots of customizable parts) this could be a solution. The webcast contains several demos around FAST ESP in combination with Silverlight and MOSS 2007. It shows us that even the FAST ESP platform does not contain any visualization components, that the use of todays technology like Silverlight and MOSS 2007 can use this platform as an engine for displaying rich search and search results components.
The development team at FAST has created some FAST ESP Web Parts which available for free at codeplex. These projects contains both binairy and source code files. As stated on their project site:
"This project provides a set of installable Web parts for integrating FAST ESP search capabilities with SharePoint Server 2007. With these Web parts SharePoint administrtors can quickly build ESP-based search sites in SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate Web parts.
After installing this package you will be able to expose ESP search capabilities within SharePoint Server 2007 sites using the following Web parts:
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Search Box -- Web part that supports creation of a search box for query term submission
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Result List -- Web part that displays search results and supports sorting, pagination, and navigator-based filtering
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Navigators -- Web part for displaying dynamic navigators that profile search results across a set of pre-defined dimensions and allow users to refine the search through navigation clicks
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Breadcrumb -- Web part for displaying the search term(s) and list of navigators used to obtain the current result set
Search Site Template – Template for linking together the various Web parts to build a complete search site in one step. These Web parts are designed to be open and extensible. We encourage you to download them and experiment. Customize them to fit your branding and user experience requirements. Extend them to fit your search requirements. Or, build new Web parts altogether. And most importantly share your work with the community for the benefit of all. "
You can find these FAST ESP Web Parts here and the online webcast here