Filed in folders
Somebody decided the tree: by year, then by branch, then by client — or by client, then by year. Look for it the other way round and it is not there. And the person who filed it is never the person looking for it three years later.
Index keeps files and finds them again. You do not navigate to a document, you describe it — type, date, client, amount — and the answer comes back before you have finished asking, because what gets searched is the metadata and not the documents. Which fields exist, which file types are accepted and who can open what is all configuration.
Every filter you add takes candidates off the table. That is why it is fast: the search never touches a document until you open one — it runs over the metadata, which is small, indexed, and made for exactly this.
Somebody decided the tree: by year, then by branch, then by client — or by client, then by year. Look for it the other way round and it is not there. And the person who filed it is never the person looking for it three years later.
The file carries its own fields, so there is no single right path to it: type and date find it, and so do client and amount. Nobody has to remember a convention — and adding a field later does not mean moving a single document.
A file can be uploaded by hand, dropped by a scanner, pushed in by another system, or left behind by a process that just finished. All of it lands in the same index with the same fields — otherwise there would be two places to look, which is the problem all over again.
Metadata that arrives with the file is metadata nobody has to type. What a process already knows about a document — whose it is, what it is, when it was signed — travels with it.
Six pieces. Five of them exist so that the sixth — the search — can be as fast and as simple as it is.
Filters that stack and an answer that changes while you type. No syntax to learn and no manual: you describe what you are looking for.
One, a hundred, or a whole folder, with their metadata set on the way in. A file that comes in without fields is a file nobody will find.
What is accepted, and which fields each type asks for. An invoice and a contract are not described the same way, and they do not have to be.
The fields, their types, and which ones are required. It is the only thing that gets searched, so it is the part worth designing — and it changes without touching the documents.
Who can see, open and download, down to the individual file. A file that is not yours does not appear in your results: the button is not hidden, the file is.
What is in there, how much it weighs, what people are searching for and what they are not finding. Searches that come back empty are the best list of what still needs indexing.
The shared drive with sixty thousand files and four naming conventions. Tell us what you need to find in there and we will tell you which fields it takes — and how long the first search will take.
Talk to us