Today we are pleased to announce the addition of Search to the suite of tools that Shareflow provides to help you focus on your most important conversations and stay organized.

At Zenbe, we’ve been using Shareflow internally since February.  Over the past six months we’ve built up a rich database of important conversations, documents and media spanning a wide variety of topics.  Although Shareflow automatically keeps your conversations organized by topic or “flow”, sometimes you want to search through your conversation history for a specific message or group of messages related to a specific topic. Shareflow search makes it easy to find the exact message or file you are looking for regardless of when it was posted or what topic it was posted under.

Search Tips

The next time you login to Shareflow you’ll see the new search box in the top left corner of your screen.

From the search box you can search across all post types or choose a specific post type from the drop down list on the left.  Clicking the “go” button or hitting return will provide you with a list of all posts matching your query in the flow you have selected from the flow list.  If you want to search all of your flows, just be sure to select “All Flows” before running your query.  You’ll be able to search all of the text in any post or comment.  We also index emails, file names, file extensions and meta data about events and maps.  You can even get a list of all posts by a certain user by just searching for their name.

So how can you use this feature to improve your productivity and organization?

Here’s just one example of how we use search at Zenbe.  As we’ve built out Shareflow we’ve generated a lot of documentation about the system. Sometimes I need to refer back to a specific design document or user guide we’ve created as a pdf and stored on Shareflow.  To find these files all I have to do is search in “All Flows” for “pdf shareflow”.  If I know the document I’m looking for is stored in a specific flow, I can drill down to that specific topic by selecting the flow in the left sidebar.

Getting creative

Although Shareflow is great at helping you organize and search the conversations your team is collaborating on, it’s also a flexible tool that can be used in a variety of ways.  I like to use Shareflow as a personal information database for notes to myself, blog posts I want to read later, and files that people send me.  The new search feature makes it possible to mine this personal journal for specific notes or files.  This in conjunction with our mobile application makes Shareflow a great way to keep all your important information at your fingertips.

We’d love to hear your creative ideas on how Shareflow helps you focus on what matters.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.