Your Files are a Hot Mess. We can Help.
This morning we officially announced our upcoming enterprise file search product, DirectSearch, which will change the way you work with files, and even change the way you work with other humans.
DirectSearch solves several problems. The files you need, day in and day out, are scattered on your own computer, on a server somewhere, on a cloud somewhere, in online folders like Dropbox or Google Drive, and on other platforms like Slack, ShareFile, and Salesforce. Managing these separate silos is time consuming and migraine inducing.
Joe in marketing desperately needs the graphics that Ellen in engineering shared with you last week, but did Ellen send them as an email attachment, or did she send you a link to them on Google Drive? And if so, which of your three Google accounts was that?
Good luck finding those files, and good luck finding them quickly. You need to open a bunch of browser tabs, log in to everything, search each silo, and even then, the results aren’t that reliable. Oh look, there’s the graphic Ellen sent you last year, for a different project. Isn’t it ironic that it’s nearly impossible to find anything in Google Drive? You’d think Google would have perfected the search stuff.
The cloud/SaaS apps themselves are not the problem. We all love them, use them, need them to do our jobs. But these new(ish) services have enabled this pervasive chaos, and DirectSearch is a tool for working more efficiently in this chaos.
Finding files requires way too much effort. To be clear, the problem is not necessarily the volume of files. Typically, you’re probably only working on a few files at any given time. When you get a new task, you create a new file. When you complete the task, that file quickly becomes less important. As you move on to your next task, you start a new file. So you’re not necessarily juggling more files at any one time, but you are using more tools than ever to work on your files. So files that you have recently worked on are now scattered across more silos than ever, resulting in that pervasive chaos.
If you’re in enterprise IT, or executive management, multiply this problem by everyone who works for your company. And then multiply that by the insane liability of files strewn all over, with no centralized way of tracking who has access, when and from where, and so on. The sheer number of productivity tools employees use these days makes it virtually impossible to reconcile what is happening with corporate IP.
Working more efficiently also means working smarter. DirectSearch is loaded with features to learn what files are important based on your search behaviors. Over time, your search results will be more and more relevant, and more accurate, to save you more time. The more you use DirectSearch, the more personalized it gets. For example, files matching your query sent to you by your boss, or files with your number-one client’s name in the title, will appear at the top of the list as DirectSearch understands how you work with files and with people. We built it so you can search by name, sender, date/date range, file type, keyword, content, etc. — and find them fast, in less than a second, whether they’re on your own laptop or Dropbox or Slack.
If this grabs you, click here to join our beta program. Can we help you find something?
