WorkSite 8.3 Express Search/WorkSite Miner.

This tool has been out a while, but unless you jumped to WorkSite 8.3 with the Velocity search engine or are lucky enough to be one of the WorkSite 8.4 with IDOL implementations you probably haven’t used it.

We’ve just completed an 8.4 upgrade and so we’ve had chance to use this tool. It basically works like a desktop search. It sits in your system tray until required and can be activated with a simple key press (default is Ctrl+Ctrl). Then simply type in a term and hit return. The term will then be searched across your default library (this can be altered using the drop down).

You can use usual boolean operators (AND, OR) and also you can use key fields to be more specific e.g. in this example above To: to denote where an email is to me (you can also search doc numbers, document or workspace names etc). Right click on the documents returned and you get the usual WorkSite DMS menu options.

Apart from a quick way to launch your documents I see the real power of this application being for finding emails. Something that is difficult in the standard FileSite or DeskSite applications given the volumes of email in a typical document management system (DMS) library.

As mentioned you can search quickly using the Express Search and its key fields for email (To: etc), plus adding say a word or two you expect to be in the body. If the number of emails is large you can click the “Show All Results” and launch the WorkSite Miner application.

Again this is a simple application that basically searches, but on the fly you can “slice” up the results in a very easy way. Either by ordering using the columns, dragging the columns into groupings, adding further search terms etc. Nothing earth shatteringly new, but very effective.

This gives a much more flexible way to order your results to try and identify the item you are looking for. This is particularly useful for emails, especially now that on a typical legal case you could see thousands of emails.

Also from within the Miner application you can preview the documents and emails (like Quickview in FileSite) and right click on them to get the standard WorkSite DMS actions.

I really hope that the Miner capabilities of “slicing” up your results are integrated into FileSite in the future. But in the meantime this really simple product that takes advantage of the newer search engines in WorkSite 8.3 and 8.4 (and 8.5!) will be a great addition to WorkSite on the desktop.