We have all been there. Looking for something that we know is there - but we don't remember exactly where it is. The same goes for content in Actimo. It is pretty common behaviour that employees wants to re-vist a news message, find specific information in a handbook or something else.
You can help your employees by building a search function that will search the entire app or a given section of the app for specific content. However, please note that it is not possible to search among content in posts and comments in social groups or on social wall.
In this playbook we will demonstrate how to build and use a search function in two different scenarios:
Scenario 1: Create an overall search function
You can easily create a search function for all messages in the app - making it easy and quick for your contacts to find relevant content.
Navigate to the editor and create a message
Add a text field with your headline eg. “Search the app”
Add a message feed
Tick on the “Show search bar” and “Display messages only upon search”
We recommend to sort by and show “First published date”
Click save
With this feed you have created a message with a search field that searches for messages and only shows the messages when a search term has been entered.
The search landing page will look like this in the app:
When your contacts enter a search term, the search will be done automatically. The search will be done in the title and body text of all your published messages in the app. However, please note that it will only search among messages that have a category.
Let’s show two examples of how the search function works:
First, we will search for “Employee Handbook”. The search results appear as we have a message with “Employee Handbook” as the title.
Second, we will search for “Loudspeaker” (as we remember something about a message mentioning a Loudspeaker, but we do not remember the title of the message). The search results appear as we have a message mentioning “Loudspeaker” in the body text.
Pro tip!
If you want you can create a category called “Search” and add it to all messages without a category. This will make these messages searchable as well.
Scenario 2: Create a search function in a given section of your app
Perhaps you have a section in your app with an Employee Handbook, a list of policies, manuals or something else where the content is presented in a feed. If so, you can create a search function that will make it easy for the contacts to search for specific content in that feed.
In this example we will demonstrate how to create a search function in a section with an Employee Handbook. All our Employee Handbook messages are presented on a landing page with a feed showing messages with an “Employee Handbook” category.
Navigate to the landing page where you want to create a search function
Add a message feed above the existing feed that you want to enable search for
Add the category for the messages in the feed - in this example we add the category “Employee Handbook”
Tick on the “Show search bar” and “Display messages only upon search”
Click save
This will create a search field at the top of the message. Upon entering text in this field, it will search among messages with the category “Employee Handbook”.
In the app it will look like this and - as explained above - if we search for eg. “Vacation” it will find the messages with “Vacation” in the title or body text.
