Internet search engines

A customer inspired me to look at how to improve SambaJAM, so that it would fit into their everyday workflow. Many of us use Google Calendar to keep a track of meetings and important dates. Well it is now possible to use Google Calendar while in SambaJAM.

Our Web Dashlet can be used to embed web pages of other sites and in addition allows users to embed their Google Calendars.

We have put together a guide below on how you can add your Google Calendar to your SambaJAM Dashboard using our Web Dashlet.

A key part of using a collaboration platform like SambaJAM is having all your documents and content in one central place so that you and your team members can easily find what you're looking for across your projects and organisation. Because we understand the value of keeping the work (AKA knowledge) different projects and groups have generated for an organisation (sometimes referred to as Knowledge Management) our next focus when we designed SambaJAM was the search to ensure everyone can find what they're looking for easily and quickly.

As an enterprise product, we provide full text search so you can search both the properties (metadata) of your content and inside your content's text while also respecting the security of the content to ensure users only see what they're allowed to see.

We provide two search tools in our application - a quick search box to perform Google style searches, and an extremely new and intuitive advanced search interface to allow you to build complex search queries to drill down to exactly what you're looking for.

Quick Search

Along the top header of SambaJAM, you'll see search box in the top right corner to quickly search all the content across the spaces you belong to in SambaJAM. Using the dropdown on the right hand side, you can easily change the 'scope' of the search so you can limit your search to all the spaces you belong to, the current space you're working on, or to only search people if you're looking for someone's contact details.

Because this is a "quick" search, instead of the search sending you to another screen to view the results, and losing the current screen and work you're on, the results appear immediately in a dropdown below the search box - and as with all our content, we let you see the thumbnails of documents so you can quickly recognise documents visually.

If you know part of the word or phrase you're searching for, we also support "wildcard" searches so you can use a "*" to widen your searches. For example, if you know the document you're searching for starts with "IMG" but you can't remember the rest of the title, you can use "IMG*" to find all documents with "IMG" at the beginning of their name such as IMG_4685.jpg, IMG_4686.jpg etc. You can also restrict searches to a specific file type such as JPEG photos using "JPG" in the search box as below:

Advanced Search

If you've ever used an Advanced Search form before, you're probably bewildered with a number of complex options and fields required so you can build complex search queries to drill down to content deeper than you can using just keywords. We didn't like this approach as it requires the user to understand what each of the fields do and generally isn't the way people search.

When you search for something online, you tend to type in a specific keyword or term(s) to find what you're looking for. If that doesn't work, only then do you want to drill down further to build your complex search queries searching on things such as where the content is, when it was created, by whom, and whether its a document, wiki, event or another type of content. We've re-enforced this process with the Advanced Search page.

Search results are complemented by a list of filters you can use to narrow the search even further to specific content in spaces, content types or tags. By dragging these into the query box or clicking on them, the search results will instantly refresh to show you a narrower selection of results, which should make it easier to drill down to exactly what you're looking for!

With SambaJAM's search tools, you should never again be stuck looking for the information you need to complete your work, and searching should be a lot quicker and intuitive to do than other systems you've used in the past!

Sign up for our private beta today to have a go yourself and let us know what you think!