One employee can waste up to 10 hours a month on document inefficiencies. Working on incorrect or outdated files, wasting time searching for documents or looking for the right version, and generating duplication, those behaviors decrease dramatically the productivity and increase the operational costs. Challenges that most probably your company is facing, just right now.

With Alfred Finder, we are literally speeding up the searching process, by extending Alfresco’s search capabilities and providing users with a new user-friendly web application.

In the previous blog post, we introduced 4 new ways to find documents on an Alfresco back end.

We first walked through the search bar, which allows you to narrow your search, by applying multiple chips in the same query. Then we showed how to refine your search, by selecting a specific property or value, in the Facet panel.

Before discovering the other two ways to find documents, let’s enjoy an extract from the last Alfred Finder webinar.

Workers take up to 8 attempts to find the right document and information and 1/3 of us spend between 10-25 minutes searching, every time we want to find a document.

Alfred Finder has been built with the mission to get results in less than 3 seconds and, to get that mission, we have optimized the way people can search for documents.

Let’s describe how to find documents via the Explorer panel and Advanced Search Options.

1. Explorer and queries panels

The Explorer panel is used to narrow down the search in a specific folder. In this panel, you will find the tree view of the data in Alfresco.

Under the Query panel, you can select the Previous or Saved searches. 

In the first scenario, any query executed in the search bar will also be visible under the previous queries. The previous queries are temporary and will be deleted when you close Alfred Finder. 

If you need to perform the same search several times, our tip is to save that specific search. You can execute it again and get the same results, just by clicking on the Saved queries.

2. Advanced search options 

The advanced search options allow you to build more complex queries, based on multiple criteria or filters. In particular, the advanced search allows OR queries. While typing, the auto-completion allows the following:

• Auto-completion on a property name
• Auto-completion on closing and opening parentheses
• Auto-completion on the logic operator (AND and OR)
• Auto-completion on the relation (contains or should be equal to)

Hope you liked the blog article. In the next one, we’ll talk about how to configure the layout and optimize it to improve your experience.