Speaking at the SharePoint Community conference, New Zealand's first SharePoint user conference, Letford says besides being a booster of user productivity by providing semantically meaningful searches, the technology will be dovetailed into office social networking.

"Social networking is a huge bet for Microsoft and we want to amplify [management of social network postings] with search," he says. Users will look at a series of documents and tag and rate them for value, as is typically done on social networks, and this will be fed into the criteria for future searches. As such, the documents found by most people in the organisation to be of high value will appear at the top of the search list.

Users will do the same when ranking expertise in the organisation: rating the people according to the value of the information they have previously supplied -- perhaps coloured by an impression of the ease with which they communicate.

"So when you do a search of expertise in your organisation you'll get the top people at the top of your relevance list."

In ordinary office productivity work, the FAST search tool will give more meaningful results than an ordinary search engine on unstructured data, because of its ability to recognise the semantics of such elements as a date or an address, Letford says. Its pipeline architecture enables different inquiries to be made concurrently on a stream of documents as they pass down the pipe, meaning multifaceted queries can be executed more efficiently.