Ten months after plunking down a lavish $1.2 billion in cash for the publicly traded, financially compromised Norwegian ISV Fast Search and Transfer, Microsoft has produced a roadmap of where it's going in enterprise search.

The roadmap, sparse on detail, says it's going to take Microsoft what looks like at least another year to get the integrated product it's aiming for out, to wit, SharePoint enlivened with Fast search.

Microsoft says this anticipated new server won't be available until the next release of Office, widely known as Office 14 and expected next year.

Lest customers tire of waiting and wander away to Google search - despite the acknowledged popularity of SharePoint - Microsoft's going to put out some special "tide-me-over" widgetry called ESP for SharePoint and encourage customers to buy its high-end Fast search capabilities now with a defined licensing path to the promised Fast Search for SharePoint when it finally comes out.

It's for people holding SharePoint Enterprise Client Access Licenses (CALs).

Fast is supposed to be able to search through billions of documents; SharePoint now can't do better than 50 million. Fast results can also be analyzed, grouped and sorted.

Oh, yes, Microsoft is also planning on having something called Fast Search for Internet Business that extends Fast ESP to a platform for building search-driven revenue-producing web site "experiences." (ESP = Enterprise Search Platform)

It's supposed to beta in the second half.

Microsoft claims it has the largest team of engineers and researchers in the world dedicated to enterprise search.

Right before Microsoft swooped in and rescued Fast last year, it was being investigated by Norway's version of the SEC for its revenue-recognition practices and collapsing license revenues. It eventually had to restate its 2006-2007 results. The accounting fraud investigation is still ongoing and the company's former CEO-turned-Microsoft corporate VP of enterprise search left the company a few weeks ago.