Many documentation workflows require accessing related documents from multiple locations. They may be separated according to security, control, ownership, or simply convenience. But this becomes a pain point when you need to pull information from multiple documents. Your workflow is disrupted by constant browsing for files or broad searches which may take too long.
Deteyo search allows you to search multiple specific directories without changing the underlying folder structure. You can think of this as a Virtual Folder containing only the directories you want to search. You can even configure the order of the results and the file types you want returned.
Virtual Folders are such a simple idea, yet enable some powerful benefits, like speeding up search, managing document structure changes, and implementing basic version control.
Bypassing folders and file types that don't contain useful information limits the amount of data that the search engine has to traverse. This directly speeds up your results. Combined with the ability to join different sub directories, it is likely you can replace all of your search needs with one or two virtual folders. There is no 'correct' usage except the one that works for you and your team.
Sometimes change is necessary. However, moving folders which other team members rely on typically requires significant planning, communication, and often confusion. But if your team is using deteyo search, changes to virtual folder settings can be swiftly communicated and implemented with minimal stress.
If files are simply being relocated, simply communicate and update the new virtual folder settings. If migration is expected to take time or happen in batches, simply ensure the new settings include both the old and the new directories. Files can be moved when appropriate without disrupting user access.
Controlling the order in which directories are searched can enable functional version control! Our recommendation is to maintain a folder which contains ONLY the latest, active, released, or controlled versions of documents. Users who only need active information need only search one folder. Users who need to see the version history can add folders which contain inactive, unreleased, or obsolete versions, but can still arrange it such that the active revision is always first in the results list.