We waste a lot of time searching for documents. It doesn’t matter if you store files locally or in the cloud; the images, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks we use every day have a terrible habit of disappearing.

It’s not that they evaporate into thin air. Some files do get deleted in error, but in the vast majority of cases the files are there – just lost in the shuffle. Forgetting the name of a document or folder is the most common reason they go missing, but that’s only one factor making company files generally hard to find.

Let’s take a look at the others.

Search capability stinks

Generally speaking, the tools most people have ready access to when they need to search for a document or data point are pretty poor. Even when they’re only searching a PC’s built-in hard drive, standard search bars located in Office and Mac folders are maddeningly slow and tend to throw up loads of false-positives.

If a file isn’t in the search index (meaning you’ve searched for it already in the past), if you haven’t remembered the name of the file accurately, or if you haven’t had the foresight to add memorable tags to a file’s meta-info fields, expect to do a lot of waiting – and a lot of scrolling.

If the search involves a company file server, the waiting and scrolling can increase by an order of magnitude.

And if the file is located on the synced local folder of a cloud storage service like Google Drive or DropBox, it may not be searchable at all with native operating system search tools.

Document importance is hard to identify

The options to distinguish files with high-importance or sensitivity is limited with standard file systems and search tools. For example, the raw notes from a marketing brainstorm meeting have a different level of importance than a customer case study, which requires multiple levels of editing and approvals between various stakeholders. Most document management systems give you limited options to mark something as important. Starring or ‘pinning’ documents in some platforms means they exist in separate lists, but may not get any special prominence in terms of how they are listed in folders or indexes.

Documents have different lifespans

For filing purposes, its useful to divide documents into content with long-term importance and the more transitory files that are useful immediately, but don’t see much use in six or twelve months. But standard file management and search tools don’t make it easy to distinguish between documents referenced frequently, and those whose importance will quickly fade.

A file that houses company IP, or sets out a strategic vision for the next fiscal year is clearly evergreen. The media distribution list for an upcoming company announcement will lose its importance when the communication campaign concludes.

Apart from the column indicating when a file was created or last edited, standard options for differentiating between different document lifespans are limited.

Adding contextual information isn’t straightforward

How often do you create or send a document without adding information about what the doc is or why you’re sharing it? If you’re sending or receiving something via company its standard practice to explain what’s attached and why it’s essential, but adding that information to a file’s meta-description is a step few people take. If a file is being shared via a cloud service like Google Drive, you might not even get a note – just a notification confirming you now have access.

Ideally, when you share a file you also share its vital meta-information; namely what the file is, why it was created, and how it should be used. Even if that information is included in a covering email, the information only lives in the recipient’s inbox.

How to make files easier to find

Instead of relying on the slow and limited ‘search folder’ function built into Macs and PCs, businesses need something that automatically indexes everything in your company’s file servers, and returns targeted results immediately.

It helps to make the use of tags and keywords standard practice when naming files. That will enable a dedicated file search system to look inside documents, images, PDFs and OCRs to find precisely what you’re looking for.

You also need something that can adapt to any file server and doesn’t depend on other technologies to function.

Want to know more? Ask us about Searchlysi – our dedicated company file search and indexing tool – today.