Do you ever scroll through social media sites like TikTok or Pinterest, looking for life hacks that will save you time and effort to your already overloaded day? I do! Who doesn’t want to simplify and better their life when it comes to things like cleaning the house or skincare? My whole life I’ve heard my father say, “Work smarter, not harder!” Honestly, he’s said it so much that it probably ranks not far behind his prolific use of “I love you!”
Do you know who else cares about us and wants us to have a simpler and better life, and wants to equip us to work smarter, not harder? SAS! In this post, you will learn how SAS Intelligence and Investigation Management uses the search feature, My Searches, to allow users to manage, save, and reuse frequently run personalized searches, to their Home page.
Suppose that you’re a drug enforcement agent and one of your roles requires you to monitor relationships between drug activities for minors in your local city. To do this, you need to keep informed about things like drug crimes and drug use by minors in the community. Instead of spending all your time opening each report one at a time to see if there are updates or if anything new comes in, you can configure and save a My Searches search for frequent use. When saved, this tailored search is available right from your home page contributing to a fast and efficient work environment. The sooner you know details the quicker you can act on the information. This doesn’t only benefit you with performing your job faster, but the timeliness afforded by it also enables an accelerated timeline in creating a better quality of life for the community.
Let’s look at My Searches. As mentioned, this search is accessed and managed from the Home page. The saved search is displayed as a clickable link and can be managed through the three-vertical-dot-menu on the right.
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The My Searches shown below has been created and saved to return all Crime Reports where the details field contains the word “drug”, and the Postcode/ZIP is “75234”.
When accessed, the search results are shown on the Search page. In the picture below we can see the search query and results. If I needed to refine the search temporarily, I would click the advanced search icon and make the change. To refine the search permanently, I would return to the Home page and use the My Searches menu to make the change. We also see that, in this instance, the results have been configured to be displayed in Detail View.
Here is a view of the configuration.
I have the ability to configure my results to include a map search and to display in Map View if the Crime Reports have a location entered with assigned latitude and longitude coordinates.
I can also see that My Searches permits sharing saved searches with other users or groups, depending on the permissions applied by the administrator. Here, I have configured my search to share with other Intel Reporters in my group enabling them to save a copy of the search to their Home page, as well.
And, lastly, as if personalized searches from your Home page wasn’t enough, SAS, in working smarter, not harder, enables your administrator to configure a batch search. Batch searches are your saved searches run at a specified time, and then emailed right to your fingertips. When batch is selected, you will receive an email detailing the results of your search and links to those results. With appropriate permissions when you click on a result, the result opens in your solution and appears the same as if you ran the query from your home page. This setting is enabled by your administrator then the box checked when you construct your search.
As you can see, SAS really does care about its customers and continues to work hard at creating ways in the law enforcement solution to make your work quicker and easier, in turn helping you work smarter, not harder.
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