We understand the importance of finding what you're looking for; the purpose of this article is to highlight some key features and search tips to make searching our knowledge base as easy and efficient as possible. 

Where to search

You can search our knowledge base from every page except the Home page and Search results page. 

• On all other pages, the search field is located at the top left:

When you type your search word or phrase and press Enter, you're taken to the Search results page with a list of matching articles. If there are a lot of results, they'll be spread across multiple pages; click the buttons below the list to navigate back and forth between pages.

Filtered Search

Once you navigate to a category (or section or article within a category) and perform a search, results will be filtered to just articles in that category.

For example, if you navigate to the Communications Enterprise category and search "message":

Your search results are filtered to only articles in the Communications Enterprise category:

This search method ensures you can more easily find the articles you want in the category you're actually interested in.

Search tips/best practices

Help documentation is only helpful if it can be found, so let's review a few common but important tips to keep in mind when searching.

Exact search

This is perhaps the most important search tip but one that's often neglected. In many cases, when you're searching on more than one word, the most effective way to do so is to put double quotation marks ("") around the phrase.

EXAMPLE: If I search on send a message, I'll see articles that include one or more of those three words but likely not in that sequential order (i.e., the words will likely be scattered throughout an article). This often muddies the search results and yields too many results. To prevent this, I can search "send a message" to instead focus results to only articles containing that exact phrase.

Exact search is a great way to exclude common but less relevant results, and is recommended when you have an idea what you're looking for. With that said, in cases where you need a more general search, or may not know exactly what you're trying to find, this method may actually work against you and exclude too many articles (and perhaps the one you're looking for!). 

NOTE: You must use double quotation marks ("") around the phrase; single quotation marks ('') will not work.

Exclude a word or phrase

In addition to your search term, you can use the minus symbol (-) to exclude a specific word or phrase from the search results. To do so, just add it in front of the search term you want to exclude.

EXAMPLE: A search for send message -group will yield articles containing the words "send" and "message" but exclude articles that contain the word "group." I can further focus my search by combining an exact search with an exclusion: If I search "send message" -group, I'll only see articles containing the exact phrase "send message" that do NOT include the word "group."

Find multiple words

Use double quotation marks (") around each word in a set of words to find articles that must contain ALL those words.

EXAMPLE: Entering "send" "message" "group" retrieves articles that contain all three words, in any order. Make sure you put spaces between the search words or the search handles the text as a single string.