CustomerFirst TechSearch Option

Overview
TechSearch is a document search and retrieval facility that has been integrated with the CustomerFirst
product line. Based on Fulcrums SearchServer technology, TechSearch allows users to identify, index,
and search collections of external documents and database fields. If you have developed significant
information resources outside of CustomerFirst (e.g. FAQs, product documentation, white papers, or web
pages), TechSearch provides a mechanism that allows you to leverage this existing knowledge from
within CustomerFirst. Users who require more flexibility than our Resolution Search facility currently
provides can also use TechSearch to search against any field (e.g. close descriptions, history comments)
in the data base.

Architecture/Installation
The TechSearch architecture is based on a modern thin-client/server model. TechSearch has its own
separate setup program for configuring the server and defining sets of external documents and data base
fields to be indexed.

Using TechSearch
CustomerFirst users can use the TechSearch
panel to search for documents related to a
particular word or group of words.
TechSearch can be invoked directly from the
main menu or from an incidents Resolution
Search panel. The Criteria tabpage is used to
define the query. The Results tabpage
displays a listing of matching documents
and/or database records.
The bottom portion of the Criteria tabpage
displays a listing of all the libraries that can be
used in a search request. The user can
determine which libraries should be used for a
particular search request.

Choosing a Query Type and Entering your Query

Queries can be entered in the editbox at the top of the tabpage. The form of the query depends on
whether you choose to use Boolean Search or Intuitive Search. You can make your choice using the
radio buttons grouped under Query Type.
With Boolean Search, the words in your
search request are treated as individual
search terms. You can use normal
Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR,
parenthesis for grouping) to combine
search terms together to more accurately

Type
Keyword
Keyword
Panel Name

Characteristics
Value
Error
Printer
Incident

OBJECTLINE - 132, avenue Joseph Kessel - 78961 Voisins-le-Bretonneux Cedex

Tel: 01 34 52 30 00 - Fax: 01 34 52 30 01 Email : infos@objectline.fr Web : www.objectline.fr

define your search. The CustomerFirst Resolution Search process used in our system today is an
example of one form of Boolean Search. In fact, if you invoke TechSearch from the Resolution Search
tabpage of the Incident panel, the editbox will default to a Boolean search request using the characteristic
values already associated with the incident in question. For example, TechSearch would generate the
Boolean expression (Error OR Printer) AND Incident for the set of characteristic values shown above.
TechSearch, however, uses Fuzzy Logic to evaluate how successfully a document satisfies your search
request. Whereas traditional Boolean as employed in standard CustomerFirst Resolution Search process
allows only for TRUE or FALSE, fuzzy logic employs varying degrees of TRUEness or success so that
potentially relevant documents are not excluded simply because they do not satisfy your search criteria
completely. This flexibility and robustness ensures that even overly specific search requests are still likely
to return meaningful results. Since TechSearch employs fuzzy logic, it will generally produce a larger
result set than the one obtained using the standard Resolution Search.
Intuitive Search attempts to parallel the way humans actually think about textual search and retrieval.
Instead of entering in a Boolean statement consisting of individual search terms, end-users using intuitive
search can simply enter a phrase or string of words. The TechSearch server will apply linguistic
processing to this phrase to create its own expanded query request. Individual words are reduced to their
base forms (e.g. plural nouns are reduced to their singular form, verbs are transformed to the present
tense). Statistically based weights are assigned to each word based on the frequency in which they
appear in a given library, and then the most relevant terms from the query are expanded (e.g. synonyms,
conjugations) into a new query that is used to search for matches in the library.
Selecting the Search within current results option will cause the TechSearch server to apply your query
against the documents contained in the Results. An effective search strategy is to use Intuitive searching
to gather an initial result set and then use Boolean searching against the returned documents to prune
out irrelevant documents.

Viewing your Search Results

The Results tabpage contains a viewer
that will display over 100 of the most
popular document types, including:
Word, WordPerfect, PDF, Excel, Lotus
123, and programming language source
code.
That is, Microsoft Word documents with
all of their original formatting can be
displayed directly in the viewer without
the need to invoke the Word program
itself.
The viewer, which can be expanded to
full-screen size, highlights the matched
search terms in red in each document
The buttons to the right of the viewer
are used to navigate directly to
highlighted words.
The results are listed on the top half of
the panel based on their relevance as
determined by TechSearchs Critical
Terms Ordered ranking scheme. You can view a document or data base reference by double-clicking on
the row in the listbox.

OBJECTLINE - 132, avenue Joseph Kessel - 78961 Voisins-le-Bretonneux Cedex

Tel: 01 34 52 30 00 - Fax: 01 34 52 30 01 Email : infos@objectline.fr Web : www.objectline.fr