Self-Help Desk Feature: Flexible Search Tools

Information is useless unless users can easily find it! We have designed an extensive search capability based on the Notes view and full text search engines.

Home Page Quick Search

The Self-Help Desk application Home Page includes a quick search box below the navigator.



Users simply enter a term or phrase, and click Search. The results are returned as a list of document links to the hits, for example:



The special search options are defined in the Search Wizard, and apply to the quick search.

Notes Search Bar in Any View

Because it is Notes-based, users can use the standard Full Text Search Bar in any view. Users are directed to the Search view, where all document types are included, thus resulting in a true cross-database search. In addition, this view provides the ability to sort all documents by Title, PostedOn date, or Author.

Search Wizard

When users click Advanced in the quick search box on the Home Page or click the Search Wizard action button from the Search view, they open the Search Wizard. The first tab on the Search Wizard is the standard full text search option. The differences are that you can select Any of these words (ORs are automatically inserted), All of these words (ANDs are inserted), Boolean Phrase (if you know your "ORs and ANDs"), or Phrase (the whole phrase is quoted). You can also do a spell check on your search.



You can affect the outcome of the search by setting the Search Options before searching:



These settings are "sticky", meaning that they are saved to your NOTES.INI and are used everywhere you try to search from (except the Notes full text search bar).

Another thing that affects the outcome of searches is the Don't Search List configured by the database administrator in the Application Settings:




This list of words is used to strip out superfluous words from the search a user may conduct. This ensures a greater number of useful hits by eliminating common words
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The second type of search searches just the Keywords fields of documents to find a cross-section of similar documents. Users can choose multiple keywords, and can select Any or All of the keywords to expand the or contract the scope.



The third type of search is the "Ask" interface. Users enter a free-form question in Step 1, and the wizard searches the Questions fields of all documents to find matching terms. Step 2 returns a list of all questions from those documents. The user selects a question and then finds the matching documents in the embedded view, clicks the document to open it.



If the user can't find the answer, the button allows them to compose a Question document in the user support forum.

Match Keyword Search

When reading a document, users can click the button to create a list of all documents that contain matching keywords. This way they can read related documents without ever having to use the search features. If there are no matching documents, they are given the option to open the Search Wizard.

Domain Search

If desired, you can include the Self-Help Database in your Domain Search index. This way, users will find information from the database while searching across all databases in your domain.