25+ years of MS file serving technologies and Sharepoint & OneDrive are missing BASIC SEARCH capabilities?
Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash
Remember in the early 90’s and installing file servers using LAN Manager with MS-DOS and Windows for Workgroups v3.11? Do you remember the old 8 “dot” 3 file naming convention? This was 8 alphanumeric characters, then a “dot”, and then another 3 characters. Often referred to as Short FileName or SFN. For example; filename.txt While limited, this actually worked well for years and was eventually expanded with Long FileName or LFN.
Right from the very beginning there was always a way to “find” or “search” for a SFN or LFN document based on just “part” of the filename. Let me try to explain with some examples.
This is what works if you know the entire filename;
dir filename.txt
And this works if you search for just the end of the filename;
dir *name.txt
Or this if just “part” of the middle is known;
dir *nam*
All pretty simple stuff right?
SO, this appears to have changed when using the online web interface of Microsoft’s flagship products; Sharepoint or OneDrive.
Unbelievable you say!? For sure Microsoft allows for BASIC SEARCH that has been around for over 25 years!! Well give it a try … log into your Sharepoint or OneDrive web interface and perform some searches.
TIP: if you prefix the web search with filename: it will search just the filename and not the “contents” of the file.
Ok, say for a document with the filename "0267F243469.pdf"
Try searching with:
filename:*F243469.pdf
or
filename:*F243469
or
filename:*F2434*
What’s that? It doesn’t work ?!?!?! Tell me it isn’t true!
To make things even more confusing … some searches do sort-of work, but it depends. Searching the beginning of a filename can work:
filename:026*
Or if there are some delimiters in the filename that happen to separate the search term, like:
file.name.txt, file-name.txt, file_name.txt
Then these can work:
filename:name
or
filename:nam*
Otherwise you are stuck. If you have a large repository of thousands of files then searching for a document can be a huge challenge. Or worse, you believe the file doesn’t exist (even though it does!)
Obviously many many other (ie. competitive) online solutions DO support the ability to search the middle or end part of a filename (not just the beginning or a delimited word).
Which leads me to this.
If you feel (like I do) that Microsoft should support the same basic search capabilities we have all been using for years and years, then please up-vote the feedback request here:
Apparently if there are 100 or more votes within 90 days then Microsoft “will respond”.
(not sure what that means)
Here’s hoping.
Disclaimer: If you notice any mistakes in this article please let me know and I will make the appropriate corrections!