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Frequently
when I am on-site at a customer, questions come up like “I
sure wish I could do…”. Many times the answer
is, “You can, just go here and…” and it
is functionally that is built in and has been available to
the user all along. This can be a source of frustration to
and often can easily be solved simply by some follow-up training
sessions. As we all know, you never retain 100% of the material
covered in any initial training class. With all of the “big
picture” topics, some of the small details don’t
always stick but can be very useful in getting the full benefit
from the software. Some of these enhance the user’s
experience\understanding and others can make them much more
efficient in their use of the software.
This is why we recommend follow-up sessions which can happen
either by our team or facilitated internally by your group.
Either way, we find it very beneficial to users do this type
of knowledge sharing on a monthly or quarterly basis.
From a SmarTeam perspective, one such example I have recently
seen when on-site at a customer is searching. SmarTeam has
2 main types of searching – ‘Search by Attribute’
and ‘Search by Example’.
The 1st one, ‘Search By Attribute’ is by far the
most common I see used. It allows you to browse the class
tree and then enter your search criteria in the profile card.
Typically
users utilize the ‘*’ or wildcard functionality.
This works very well for 80% of you standard searching requirements
but what gets overlooked is some of the advanced functionality.
There are many other condition modifiers that can be used
in this screen.
When using the above
conditions, you must include text values in Quotes.
Utilizing some of these conditions can greatly increase the
uses ability to find what they need. This functionality also
can greatly help administrators do reporting and exception
reports to find patterns in their stored metadata.
Undocumented Tip:
One additional criteria I get asked about is searching for
‘Blank’ or Null fields. To do this, just put double
quotes in the field - Example: “” This will return
all records that do not have information in that field\attribute.
The 2nd type, ‘Search by Example’ is also commonly
referred to as ‘Advanced Searching’. This type
of search is very much like Microsoft Access where you drag
and drop the fields you want in your search results. You can
easily enter in search criteria in the grid using any of the
above condition modifiers.
Doing
‘Or’ conditions is actually much easier using
this search screen. The above example will find all files
with a revision Greater or Equal to “a” and a
status of “Released” or “Checked In”.
Using the “Search by Attribute”, you would have
to run 2 separate searches to get the same results list which
is more time consuming and less friendly to the user.
This is just one of many examples of topics that could be
covered with follow-up training sessions or seminars. Internal
user groups most likely can come up with many additional topics
for discussions.
Please contact your sales representative to schedule an on-site
visit to perform periodic update training sessions to get
the most out of your software investment.
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