Turbocharge Remote Work with Instant Text Search
By Elizabeth Thede, Special for USA DAILY CHRONICLES
You are working remotely and need to find the critical ProjectXYZ Atlantic file to continue. You could spend hours trying to remember where you last saw it. Or you could instantly locate the critical ProjectXYZ Atlantic file, jump right in, and get to work.
How do you instantly locate the right file or files and get to work? Use a search product like dtSearch. For background, dtSearch enterprise and developer products can run “on premises” or on cloud platforms to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with attachments, databases and web-based data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes, many dtSearch customers are large enterprises like Fortune 100 companies and federal, state and international government agencies. But anyone can use dtSearch to search data.
To get started, just install dtSearch and tell it to build an index of your files. Indexing is easy: just point dtSearch at the folders you want to index, and dtSearch will do the rest. No need to tell dtSearch if you have Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, Access databases, OneNote files, PDFs, web-based formats like HTML and XML, or even compressed archives like ZIP or RAR. A single index can hold up to a terabyte of data, and there is no limit on the number of terabyte indexes you can create.
Once dtSearch is done indexing, you can instantly search all of your data for ProjectXYZ Atlantic. In addition to word and phrase searching, dtSearch lets you do combined full-text and metadata Boolean and/or/not searching like ProjectXYZ Atlantic and Project567 Pacific and not Project247 Antarctica with a metadata heading of Acute. Or you could do proximity searching like ProjectXYZ within 8 words in either direction of Project247, or within 255 words in front of Project247. Or you could do concept searching, so if Project567 is renamed ProjectQRS, you can still find it in a search for Project567.
dtSearch even lets you do really advanced searching like locating specific hash values or finding valid credit card numbers in data. After a search, dtSearch will show you the retrieved documents with highlighted hits. And once you find the key file, you can hit the launch button and the file will automatically open in its correct application for further work.
To further efficiency, dtSearch also lets you search through your own local emails. To do that, dtSearch can work through Outlook to do indexing and then you can instantly search and even launch retrieved emails in Outlook. Or if you have a collection of emails outside of Outlook, you can index and search them just as you would your Microsoft Word and other files, again seeing the highlighted hits in the emails.
When dtSearch goes through emails, as when it goes through any file, it picks up not only the full text of the email message but also any metadata. That way, you can search for emails only if they contain ProjectXYZ Atlantic along with a specific author tag. dtSearch also goes through the full text of attachments, including multilevel nested attachments. If ProjectXYZ Atlantic is mentioned in an Access database embedded in a Microsoft Word file contained in a ZIP attachment, dtSearch will still find it.
Also, there is a specific type of searching that dtSearch has called fuzzy searching. Fuzzy searching sifts through minor typographical errors like everyone makes in emails. If ProjectXYZ Atlantic is mistyped as ProjectXY7Z AtlanMic in an email or attachment, dtSearch can still find that with a small level of fuzziness on. And fuzzy searching also works great for sifting through OCR errors in documents. (More on OCR and document search.)
Beyond searching your own local data, your organization can also set up a central archive of data and allow secure remote access through dtSearch. That way, everyone working remotely can have instant search access to the same centralized technical documentation, for example. Here, instead of running on a PC, dtSearch would run on a server within the enterprise, or on a hosting service like Azure or AWS. And the same 25+ search options also apply to this type of remote data searching as well.
With the dtSearch Engine, an enterprise can enable even more advanced precision search features. For example, with drill-down faceted searching through different metadata levels, a remote worker can, with a few clicks, instantly hone in on just the right subsections or facets of technical documentation prior to executing a search.
The dtSearch Engine also includes enterprise-driven advanced data classification options. What these do is granularly filter the data each remote searcher can see, so that person 1 only retrieves authorized data within that person’s scope, person 2 only retrieves authorized data within that person’s scope, etc. For this type of classification, the dtSearch Engine can use any combination of metadata in documents, metadata in a backend database like SQL or NoSQL or SharePoint, or even full-text data. That way, if the enterprise wants to restrict anything that contains ProjectABC in the full text or the metadata to just a few individuals, they can.
Go to dtSearch.com, and download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation version to turbocharge your own remote work.
RELATED: Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
