A Search Journey

[gates2]

Hi All!

I sent some support site feedback to my Avaya AE and he suggested I post it here as a quicker and more direct way to submit feedback.

I had six screenshots in my original email, and this post limits me to four, so the last two will just be links instead.

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I have a document called the “Administrator Guide for Avaya Communication Manager” that I use fairly frequently. My doc is for an older release, so I went to the Avaya Support site today to try and find it for our current release, 5.21.

First I searched for the phrase “Administrator Guide for Avaya Communication Manager 5.2” and received 1000+ results.



I could see CM administrator guides for other releases listed as a Content Type of Manuals. So I wanted to filter by that Content Type but it wasn’t listed in the Content Type filter sidebar on the left. A few of the Administrator Guides didn’t have a Release number in the title so I tried those but they were all older (release 3 or 4).

Next I tried to broaden my phrase so I searched for just “Communication Manager Administration”.



This also yielded 1000+ results but this time Manuals was a content type I could filter by. I did that and my only results were for Aura Messaging.



Same for the phrase “communication manager 5.2.1” and selecting Manual. It was again just an Aura Messaging result.



At this point I took a break from the Avaya Support site and tried Google instead. I took the exact name of my older administration document and appended “5.2” or “5” or “5.2.1” to the end of it but that wasn’t finding the document.

So I came back to the Avaya Support site and tried specifying Avaya Aura Communication Manager as the Product:

Screenshot link: http://i.imgur.com/2iyaN.jpg

Again, no option to select Manual as the Content Type. There was an Administration & System Programming Content Type that looked promising, but since the older release CM administration documents were listed as Manual, that was where I figured my current release document would be.

Screenshot link: http://i.imgur.com/gebLR.jpg

Without Manual as an option I chose Administration & System Programming as the Content Type. This time I found what I was looking for, three lines down.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with all of this. I spent 20 or 30 minutes trying to find a support document that I thought for sure I would have no problem finding, since I had an older version and an exact name to search for. I see three specific things that tripped me up:

1. The naming convention for the CM system administration guide is not consistent between releases
2. The system admin document is tagged different between releases (some are “Manuals” and some are “Administration & System Programming)
3. The search feature was not able to recognize what I was searching for, even though I was very close, and direct me to the correct resource.

[mmmackin]

Gates2,

Thank you for this feedback! It was detailed, well supported with screenshots, and very helpful. We are working on refining our search tool, so you should see improvements soon.

Part of the issue you are experiencing is that we have extended our search to "crawl" multiple content collections, and unfortunately, how publishers codify their content by type varies across these different systems. We are trying to align this now. "Manuals", by the way, is a tricky one as this ambiguous concept can include up to 8 different document types, from programming guides to release notes. Most likely, "Manual" as a content type will go away, and you will only see the more granular filters, such as "Administration & System Programming", "User Guides", etc.

Here is a tip, in the meantime, for a "shorter search journey" in 3 steps:

1. Click Downloads & Documents in the top menu.
2. In Product field, enter the product's partial or full name -- system will automatically display a list of products that you can select that match your entry. Choose Release "5.2.x".
3. Search results will start automatically returning based on this selection. To refine results, select the filter called "Administration & System Programming." The most recent version of the Admin guide will appear near the top of the list.