FAST Solutions Services and Support Offerings

原文链接：http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/en/us/Fast.aspx

You need peace of mind and peak performance around the clock and around the world. That's why every FAST solution is supported by a team of experts to help minimize its installation effort and maximize its potential.

Whether you need to know that you’re running your search solutions at the lowest cost or your team members need training in FAST solutions, Microsoft provides services and support for every stage of a customer’s solution life cycle.

• FAST Managed Search
  A total managed care offering for those seeking alternatives to managing their FAST search solutions in-house.

• FAST Professional Services
  Consulting services that help your organization develop, implement, and manage FAST solutions—and to do so quickly and cost effectively.

• FAST Search Business Consulting (FAST SBC)
  Consulting services that empower organizations to innovate and gain competitive advantage through search-enabled business transformation.

• FAST Technical Support
  A service designed to resolve product-related issues and to address product-related questions quickly and efficiently.

•  FAST University
  A structured learning service that provides technical training for customers and partners who want to gain an in-depth understanding of our search technology.

FAST Managed Search

FAST Managed Search cost-effectively handles your mission-critical search application. Our skilled technicians proactively monitor business changes that impact the search solution, performing regular index maintenance and performance tuning to make sure your solution adapts to changes in your business and keeps delivering peak performance. We also take care of routine management, providing monthly performance and service-level agreement (SLA) compliance reports and communicating early and often with your IT leaders.

To maintain your search installation effectively, FAST Managed Search:

• Monitors your search application and its subsystems and provides you with reports on system health, performance, top queries, and more.

• Optimizes performance by reviewing the application performance/relevancy, and implements recommended measures.

• Provides around-the-clock hosting in a fully serviced FAST data center that exceeds Class 3 standards.

• Maintains the search index to ensure continued high-quality search results.

• Aligns application and maintenance road maps to organizational plans and priorities.

• Maps implications of required changes to system load, user patterns, data model, interfaces, and user functionality.

• Performs preventative and scheduled application upgrades, including API support, upgrades, patches, backup, and query log rotation.

• FAST Professional Services

FAST Professional Services offers flexible engagements that range from advisory services to full turnkey deliverables. Our global team of more than 100 search engineers helps across the entire solution life cycle, from business strategy and solution design to application management and system health checks.

We work closely with customers to:

• Define their strategic objectives, analyze the available opportunities fully, develop appropriate business cases, and lay out implementation maps.

• Design effective search solutions, create detailed project plans, and identify key performance indicators (KPIs).

• Implement search solutions that match the business objectives and fit with accepted quality assurance procedures.

• Educate their staff on search best practices, from implementation to management.

• Manage and host customers’ search applications actively.

• Support customers with search management consulting.

• Provide services that help them evaluate and improve on their search solutions.

Mini Case Study: FAST Professional Services Helps AutoTrader Scale with Its Business

AutoTrader.com is the Web’s top automobile classifieds marketplace. Customers’ expectations were growing at least as fast as the site itself. AutoTrader.com had to scale up faster and more nimbly—and become easier to run. The auto mart turned to FAST and was able to implement a winning solution in just four months. The FAST solution was integrated quickly into the existing Oracle technology: A cluster of 24 servers sits at each of AutoTrader.com’s data centers, peaking at 100–120 queries a second per server each day. The result? AutoTrader.com soon saw a surge in the number of listings that the site could display in response to a customer’s search—from 500 to 8,000. The solution opened up many new possibilities, among them, keyword searches on the site’s Research and Compare section, and low, high, and average prices for cars within a geographic area—two features that customers love.

FAST Search Business Consulting (FAST SBC)

For customers who share the Microsoft vision of business transformation through search, FAST SBC offers this premier consulting service designed specifically to help senior business leaders identify new, disruptive, search-driven opportunities and to define a clear execution road map to capitalize on them.

Each consulting engagement is customized to serve the client’s unique needs. Here is a quick sample of the services we offer:

Search overview

• Review the FAST high-level product/technology road map.

• Understand search and market trends impacting your business.

• Examine opportunities relative to search-driven solutions.

Search benefit and road mapping

• Identify new business opportunities leveraging search-driven solutions.

• Align corporate strategy with market dynamics and business need.

• Define objectives and criteria of each phase, and anchor search road map with corporate strategy and direction.

Search metrics

• Define success criteria for implementation of FAST.

• Define KPIs for measurement and continuous business improvement.

• Success measurement framework.

Organizational planning

• Analyze requirements and goals of the business.

• Align project and operational requirements with company goals.

• Develop organizational blueprint, including optimal organizational design/proposal.

FAST Technical Support

Our support centers are located strategically around the world and are available to deliver “follow-the-sun” support to our customers. High customer satisfaction is our number one priority. Support engineers are trained to assist with FAST product issues, understand your search application requirements, and provide effective resolutions to technical problems in a timely manner. You can select a support offering that best meets the needs of your organization and helps ensure the highest availability of your search application.

Standard Support is the basic support offering designed for customers with business hours support needs. It includes:

• Software updates (patches and service packs) and upgrades to the latest major releases.

• E-mail and Web-based ticket submission.

• Regional business hours phone support.

• 24x7 access to the FAST Knowledge Base.

• Emergency issue-handling during business hours.

Premium Support is designed for global corporations with mission-critical support requirements. It’s the answer for applications for which downtime is not an option. Customers receive a special toll-free phone number to call to get immediate access to skilled engineers who are available around the clock, seven days a week, ready to handle emergency production outages.