Configuring an Organization-Defined Search
Remember being the new person on your team, just trying to set up a simple search filter in your system, but instead faced with overwhelming data and options? Or maybe you’ve been on the team for a while, but some internal processes have changed, automatically making your filter obsolete. Either way, SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence simplifies that chaos with the Organization Defined Searches control. These are preset, customized searches that the organization defines and shares to users right on their personalized Home page.
In this post, you will learn how to configure an Organization Defined search control to create a Search to share with specific users. We learned in a previous post that when a Home page is created, group restrictions are assigned to each component on the page, which includes the Organization Defined Searches control. In this way, an administrator manages role permissions on each control on a single Home page rather than creating multiple Home pages with multiple combinations of controls, based on the different needs of various groups that access the control.
The Organization Defined Searches control is only available on the Home page, so to configure the control, I must have administrator privileges and be signed into the administrator interface, with the appropriate homepage open.
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Suppose that your law enforcement agency has several groups including intelligence reporters. Malcolm is a newly hired agent and has been assigned to the intelreporters’ group that monitors crime reports. The managers have recently decided that all intelreporters need to monitor auto crimes specific to the city of Paisley.
As the administrator, I create a new Organization-Defined search to return all Crime Reports where the Offense Category is Auto Crimes, and the City is Paisley. Since Malcolm is not the only intelreporter that monitors the auto crime scene, I will share this search with all intelligence reporters.
To configure the search, I first need the Organization Defined Searches control added to the homepage. I make selections in the Properties pane. There is a field to select Group restrictions. This is the control’s property that enables me to select the groups of users who can see the Organization Defined Searches control itself. Not everyone needs to have the control, so I select a few user groups that won’t use it.
Now that the control is on the Homepage, let’s create the search that intel reporters will need. I use the menu tab Searches to add a new search. In the Organization-Defined tab, I create a new search query where the results show all crime reports with an auto crime offense in Paisley city.
In Shared role groups, I select the intel reporters. Remember only groups defined in the Shared role groups field will be able to access this specific search. This is a different setting from the group restrictions I set in the properties pane, for users to see the control itself. Each new organization defined search will have the option to designate who will see the search.
Back on the Searches tab, I see that the new Search is saved in the table.
It now also automatically appears in the Organization-Defined section of the shared role group user’s Home page. Here is Malcolm’s home page, as an intel reporter.
Organization-defined searches are a quick and efficient way to share searches directly from the organization to the users. Only administrators can edit or delete Organization searches. In the next post, we’ll look at how users can copy an organization-defined search and edit the search to suit their needs. The saved organization-defined search will then appear in their My Searches section.
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