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In a move to further penetrate the enterprise search market, Microsoft today unveiled FAST Search for SharePoint, which will offer high-end enterprise search capabilities in connection with its widely deployed SharePoint server.

FAST Search is built on FAST ESP, technology Microsoft acquired last year when it bought Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian enterprise search company.

Jared Spataro, director of enterprise search at Microsoft, told InternetNews.com that FAST Search for SharePoint will be tied closely to the next release of SharePoint. He could not give a release date, but said there will be more announcements in the coming months.

Microsoft has been trying to carve out a space for itself in the search engine business for some time. While the market includes other major enterprise vendors like IBM and specialized players like Autonomy, Microsoft has also been concentrating heavily on thwarting Google's rise as a power in enterprise search. For instance, it took Google Search Appliance head-on by giving away Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 technology. For good measure, Microsoft included free connectors with Search Server Express that index content from EMC's Documentum and IBM's FileNet.

Google's response was to bring consultants Adhere Solutions into its Enterprise Program, which includes developers, consultants and independent software vendors providing value-added services for its enterprise products. By doing this, it got connectors based on technology from Adhere partner MuseGlobal, a content integration vendor, that tap into 5,400 sources of data.

Microsoft is now picking up the slack. "With FAST Search for SharePoint, we're unleashing the potential of high-end search capabilities to help companies cut costs and increase productivity," Spataro said. "People have largely thought of enterprise search as confined to searching applications within the firewall, and that will be the target."

It will not, however, be the only target for this new product. While FAST Search for SharePoint will help users search applications and customer data behind the firewall, it will also enable enterprises to add search capabilities to their externally facing Web sites, Spataro said.

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