Lesson #4: Tagging and Searching

Tagging has become a popular way to organize contacts, photos, Web pages and practically anything else that matters to a particular person.

You see the real value of tagging when you need to find something. While you can search on the content, name, and other attributes of documents, tags can provide that extra piece of information to help you pinpoint exactly what you need.

 

Task #4a: Adding Tags

Playing the role of a team member on a project, you might have documents that you want to include in a project stored in several locations. Tagging makes it easy to identify these documents, which we will make available to the rest of the project team in a later lesson.

  1. Right-click one of the documents you uploaded and select Tag.

  2. In the popup that appears, enter project phoenix101.
    Be sure to leave a space between the two keywords.

  3. Click Add.
    Later, you can add new tags or delete tags that you already applied.

  4. Click OK.
    If the Tags column appears in the Document Manager view, you should be able to see the tags you just applied. You may need to resize the column to show all the text displayed. If you don't see the Tags column, click the View button to add it to the Document Manager view.

 

Task #4b: Searching for Documents

You can search by the name, content, and other attributes, such as tags, of documents. While in most cases, you will probably be doing a quick search to find everything using keywords, in some cases, you may want to enter a more specific set of criteria. We will use both methods in this lesson.

  1. In the breadcrumb, click on your account folder.
    We are navigating to the top of the folder structure because we do not know exactly where the content we are trying to find is stored. If you were to search while still in your user folder you would only find content in your user folder and its sub-folders.

  2. In the search window at the upper right of the Document Manager view, enter “fax” and click the Search icon.
    The “hit list” includes anything with “fax” in the contents of the document. While this is useful, we are more interested in looking for content by tags.

  3. Click the Expand icon in the search window.
    The view now expands to include more precise search options. While you use this search window, the system will ignore any text you entered (in our case, fax) in the Quick Search field.

  4. Click the button next to Add More Search Criteria.

  5. From the Select Property drop-down list, select Tags. Click Add.

  6. Next to Tags contain all of the following, enter phoenix101.

  7. Click Search.
    Voila! You have found your documents included in the project. Do not leave the search window just yet since we need to start the next lesson with these search results.

 

Task #4c: Saved Search

Most searches may be run one-time but in some cases you want to run the same search over and over again. The reason may be purely for your own benefit: for example, Show me all the documents added to this folder in the last week so that I know which documents to review. In other cases the search might be useful to other people such as the team members on Project Phoenix. Keep that in mind when we get to the Wiki portion of these lessons.

  1. In the search results window, click the Save Search button.
    It is on the right-side towards the bottom.

  2. In the pop-up that appears, enter Project Phoenix and click OK.
    The saved search is now available at any time. Similar to a bookmark it shows you a particular collection of documents you want to refer to later. The saved search appears in the same place as bookmarks.

  3. Click the Expand button to collapse the search options.
    You should still be in the root of the folder structure.

  4. Click on Bookmarks located to left of the breadcrumb.
    You now see a drop-down list of bookmarks and saved searches.

  5. Select Project Phoenix under Searches.
    The hit list is back with the same list of documents that have been tagged with phoenix101.

  6. Click the Expand button at the top of the search window to collapse the results again.

 

What's next

Now that you have seen how search works, we will use it to share documents with other users. In the next lesson we will use a Wiki which gives you a great deal of flexibility in how you collaborate and share with others.