FAST Unveils FAST ProPublish to Help the Publishing Industry Improve Production and Delivery of Digital Content

NEEDHAM, MA — 2 March 2005 — Fast Search & Transfer™ (FAST™), the leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, today announced the availability of FAST ProPublish™, the industry’s first complete enterprise search-based publication production management and delivery solution. FAST ProPublish, the latest Search Derivative Application (SDA) to leverage the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP™), gives professional and business publishers a powerful solution for gathering and processing data, resulting in the improved delivery of job-critical information to both online and off-line users. It is also the only solution that combines high-performance and scalability with the intelligence, accuracy and extensibility needed to power the complex search and navigation requirements of business professionals.

Professionals in legal, tax, medical, financial, and scientific industries rely on authoritative published content to instantly obtain the current, accurate information needed to perform their jobs. In the past, subscribers have struggled with inflexible user interfaces, complex query syntax and limited navigation. In addition, based on their experiences with popular Web search sites, business professionals have come to expect intuitive, immediate results. To accommodate the growing expectations of their customers, publishers need a simple, scalable and reliable search platform with the most advanced search and navigation features available.

With FAST ProPublish, publishers can now provide an easy-to-use, yet powerful Web-based interface designed specifically for researchers. This interface, combined with the product’s advanced contextual navigation and relevancy tuning, allows business users to rapidly find the right information. The out-of-the-box application framework, templates, and user interface components delivered in FAST ProPublish facilitate the easy construction of powerful researcher-centric user interfaces. This enables publishers to drive revenue by providing their customers with unmatched levels of search, navigation, categorization, and personalization.

Capabilities specifically designed for the business and production managers within publishing groups include the FAST Production Manager, an easy-to-use graphical tool that allows publishers to easily perform live updates on their online and offline published content, protect it from unauthorized use, and manage content processing, subscriptions and site structure. The product’s modular Content Processing Pipeline offers stages for automated entity extraction, linguistic analysis, and content classification, thus reducing production costs associated with creating publications. In addition, Publishers can rest easy knowing their valuable information assets won’t be compromised or utilized outside the scope of the license. FAST ProPublish includes support for both controlling access and administering content licenses. The publications can be restricted to a given user for a given period of time and even be timed-out at the end of the subscription.

“Publishers have long struggled with ways to quickly and effectively collect and process content from a wide variety data sources to meet the demands of their subscribers,” commented Ali I. Riaz, FAST’s chief operating officer. “By offering the first complete solution for Publishing and basing it upon FAST ESP, FAST is once again demonstrating its innovation and commitment to turning search into a strategic differentiator. With six of the top nine commercial publishers and more than 300 other publishers already relying on FAST to quickly deliver and update professional reference information, FAST ProPublish will expand FAST’s presence and further solidify its established leadership position in the Publishing market by providing the most powerful search-based solutions available.”

“FAST ProPublish is positioned to truly transform the method by which publishers gather and process information for their end users and the means by which those end users navigate and retrieve information,” said Phillip Claiborne, CTO of Municipal Code Corporation. “Since FAST ProPublish is based on FAST’s scalable search platform and includes all the major components required for publishing professional information, both publishers and their customers will benefit from this complete publishing solution.”

FAST has transformed enterprise search from a powerful, yet narrowly perceived function, into an enterprise-wide strategic and tactical capability of pivotal importance. FAST ESP and FAST’s portfolio of solutions and SDAs supply a complete information retrieval solution ideal for a growing number of key vertical markets and applications including e-Commerce and Internet Portals, Financial Services; Government; Life Sciences; Media and Publishing; and Telecom. For FAST, the search never stops.

For further information about FAST ProPublish, please visit: http://www.fastsearch.com/ProPublish.

ABOUT FAST
FAST creates the real-time search and filter technology solutions that are behind the scenes at the world’s best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST’s flexible and scalable integrated technology platform elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FAST’s powerful enterprise search technology solutions are used by more than 1,500 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), AT&T, Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Dell, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, FirstGov.gov (GSA), IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Nordstrom, Overture, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo.

FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Additionally, the FAST Group has business partners and customers in a number of other locations, such as Brazil, Canada and Australia. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

© 2005 Fast Search & Transfer ASA - Fast Search & Transfer, FAST, FAST ESP, FAST Data Search, FAST Marketrac, FAST AdVisor, FAST InStream, FAST ImPulse, FAST Search Best Practices, FAST SBP, FAST ProPublish, and the FAST four-colored logo are trademarks of Fast Search & Transfer ASA. All rights reserved. FAST disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.