When your document management system is handling thousands of documents (if not millions), a user challenge often becomes findability – the ability of the user to find or locate that right document. DOCOVA contains a core set of components to aid in this: Tag clouds, full-text search, sorting & categorization, and security (not displaying a document, etc that the person is not entitled to access).

In DOCOVA V3, we introduce another feature to improve findability: Filtering.

Folder View filtering provides administrators the ability to define default filters to determine what a user sees when they first open a folder view.  For example, when a folder opens, a filter can automatically show only documents,etc relevant to that user's department or job title.  Filtering does not impact security.  By clearing a filter the user will be able to see all of the documents they are entitled to view within a folder.

The metadata fields available for filtering are the View Columns that have been defined in the DOCOVA home database and displayed in the folder view.  Therefore, any field that is available to the user when they look at the view can act as a filter.  The filter is setup in the folder properties, under the User Experience Tab.

After a user has opened a folder they are able to further filter the selected documents and/or change the default filter. These changes will not be saved and will be reset to defaults when the user navigates away from the folder.  Note that there is only one default filter allowed per folder.

The steps to setup folder filtering are as follows:

1. Create View Column documents for the fields that are to be used for filtering as needed.
2. Manually edit each user profile OR more likely, develop an agent to update each user profile to set the value for the Attribute and Value fields for each user.
3. Update the User Experience settings in the Folder Properties.






In this case the filter is setup to act on the field called DATACLASS.  This particular user has the filter set to only show documents where the DATACLASS has the value of "restricted".  Note the orange line indicates that a filter is active and what Meta Data field is being filtered.



If the user clears the filter they will see all of the documents.