Search in BMC Helix Digital Workplace

Search with keywords helps your end users find what they need easily and quickly. Search in BMC Helix Digital Workplace can be configured to provide results relevant to the user's intent. Focused results improve work efficiency because users don't waste time viewing irrelevant results.

(Version 23.3.03 and later) When a user starts typing in the global search field, the typed text is highlighted in suggestions. The suggestions that appear are based on previous searches stored in the browser's local storage.

After performing a search with the appropriate keywords, the results that are the closest match to the search text are displayed, irrespective of their source or type.

End users get a list of the relevant search results from the keyword search. They can also find answers to their queries by using BMC HelixGPT. For more information, see Generating-AI-retrieved-answers-for-end-users-through-BMC-HelixGPT.

As the administrator, you must understand how search works to assist your business users.

How search works

The search bar on the My Activity, Catalog, and studio pages means end users can search multiple sources from a single place and easily find what they need. Sources of search may be catalog items, knowledge articles, locations, and so on. The application performs a federated search, which means that the search phrase is sent to more than ten different search engines, each configured to provide the best possible results from individual search sources. Administrators configure search options for each source. An advanced ranking technology displays the most relevant search results at the top of the list.

The following image shows the different search sources:

As an administrator, you can improve search results by setting the parameters that control different searches. For more information about how to configure search, see Configuring-search.

How search with wildcards works

Wildcard search helps end users find what they’re looking for, even if they don't know the exact term. Wildcards allow users to search for partial terms, alternate spellings, and variations of a term without specifying an exact term match or without having to append the % symbol to a part of a search term. Wildcards broaden the search results and provide a higher chance of finding the required information.

Important

For end users to leverage the benefits of using wildcards, administrators must enable this feature. If not enabled, end users need to manually append the % symbol at the beginning or the end of an incomplete search term to get the results.

Administrators can enable the use of wildcards when searching for BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog items. For more information, see Configuring-search. Also, they can enable the wildcard-related settings for the integrated providers, such as the RKM pluggable provider and Helix ITSM Provider. For example, if administrators enable the rkm.search.force.wildcards setting in the RKM pluggable provider, users can search by entering only parts of the title. Learn more about enabling search-related settings for the pluggable providers in Integrating-with-other-applications-by-using-providers. These settings are disabled by default because they interfere with the full-text search, language-specific tokenization, stemming, and relevance logic. For certain sources, wildcards are always supported, and the administrator doesn't have an option to disable them; for example, appointments.

Types of wildcards in BMC Helix Digital Workplace

BMC Helix Digital Workplace supports two types of wildcards:

Leading wildcard—End users can omit the beginning of a search term and don't need to append the % symbol before the search query. The leading wildcard automatically matches any characters that precede the specified search query. For example, if the end user enters flow, the search might return workflow in the results.
Trailing wildcard—End users can omit the end of a search term and don't need to append the % symbol after the search query. The trailing wildcard automatically matches any characters that follow the specified search query. For example, if the end user enters work, the search might return workflow and workaround terms in the results.

The actual search results with wildcards may vary from the results that users expect to receive. The search results are determined by the following factors:

Sources that end users search for by using wildcards.
Not all sources support the wildcard search. For example, end users can't search for BMC Helix Digital Workplace locations and assets by using wildcards. This use case is different from enabling wildcards. For certain sources, the wildcard search is not supported, and the administrator has no options to enable it.
Fields by which the search is executed.
When end users perform a wildcard search, the system searches in records that are associated with a searched-for source and retrieves information from the designated fields within these records. While searching in the fields, the system analyzes whether these fields are indexed for Full Text Search (FTS) or not. For example, when the end user searches for a catalog service in the Global search field by using the wildcard, the search is performed by the Title, Description, and Tag fields, and the search checks whether these fields are indexed for FTS.

Important

Leading wildcards are not supported if the search is performed on fields that are indexed for FTS. Only trailing wildcards are supported for these fields.

For example, the search for a catalog service is performed by the Title, Description, and Tag fields. All these fields are indexed for FTS by default. So, leading wildcards are not recognized in search for catalog services. If the end user searches for a service with the title Hardware and enters ware, the search won't return hardware in the results. However, if the end user enters hard, the search will return the Hardware service in the results because the trailing wildcard is used automatically.

List of sources that support the wildcard search

The following table lists the sources that support the wildcard search and indicates whether each source supports both leading and trailing wildcards or only trailing wildcards:

Source	Wildcards must be enabled to work	Supported type of wildcard	Location where the wildcard search is supported in the end-user console	Fields on which the search is performed	Are the searched-for fields indexed for FTS?
BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog items	Yes How to enable wildcards The administrator must enable the Allow wildcards setting. For more information, see Configuring-search.	Trailing only	In the Global search field	Title Description Tag	Yes Leading wildcards are not supported starting with 23.3.01.
BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog requests	Yes How to enable wildcards The administrator must enable the Allow wildcards setting. For more information, see Configuring-search.	Trailing only	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	Title Request ID Order ID Order Description
Appointments	No	Trailing only	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	Notes Incident Number
Knowledge articles from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management	Yes How to enable wildcards The administrator must enable the rkm.search.force.wildcards setting in the RKM pluggable provider. For more information, see Integrating-with-other-applications-by-using-providers.	Trailing only	In the Global search field	Title Digest (contains ID, Keywords, Content)
BMC Service Request Management SRDs	Yes How to enable wildcards The administrator must enable the srd.search.force.wildcards setting in the Helix ITSM pluggable provider. For more information, see Integrating-with-other-applications-by-using-providers.	Trailing only	In the Global search field	Title Description Keywords
On Behalf Of users	Yes How to enable wildcards The administrator must enable the obo.search.prefixWildcard setting in the Helix ITSM pluggable provider. For more information, see Integrating-with-other-applications-by-using-providers.	Leading and trailing	In the Request as someone else dialog box in the user profile In the Request for field in a service request	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM forms: CTM:People 4 (Remedy Login ID) 1000000019 (First Name) 1000000018 (Last Name) 1000000017 (Full Name) 1000000048 (Internet E-mail) 1000000036 (Mail Station) OBO:Ppl Search-SupportGrpAssoc_Outer_Join 4 (Remedy Login ID) 1000000019 (First Name) 1000000018 (Last Name) 1000000048 (Internet E-mail) 1000000036 (Mail Station)	No. If an organization has a custom setup where certain fields are manually indexed for FTS in the BMC Helix ITSM forms, leading wildcards are not supported when the search is performed by these fields. Best practice: Indexing fields for FTS manually might cause unexpected search results and, therefore, is not recommended.
Users	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field In the Collaborators dialog box in a service request In the Collaborators section of the user preferences page In the Add approver dialog box in Approval settings In the Reassign approval dialog box in a service request In the Social section of the user preferences page In the posts when tagging users	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM form: CTM:People 4 (Remedy Login ID) 1000000019 (First Name) 1000000018 (Last Name) 1000000017 (Full Name) 1000000048 (Internet E-mail) 1000000036 (Mail Station)
Quick links	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM form: SRS:QuickLinks 304260010 (Display Name) 304304900 (Description)
SRD requests	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM form: MYIT:Service_Request 301244700 (summary) 1000000829 (requested) 1000000025 (requestedByFullName) 420003100 (subtitle) 1000000017 (requestFullName) 303490600 (orderId) 303490700 (orderDesc)
SRD requests by submitted responses	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM form: SRD:MultipleQuestionResponse 303630000 (Answer In Char) 303935200 (Answer Internal) 303669500 (Menu Label)
Approval search	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM forms: AP:Detail-Signature 14516 14506 SRM:Request 1000003297 (Customer First Name) 1000003298 (Customer Last Name) 1000000025 (Customer Full Name) 1000000019 (First Name) 1000000018 (Last Name) 1000000017 (Full Name) 303490600 (CartID) 303490700 (CartName) SB:ServiceRequestStub 536870926 (Request For User Id) 536870950 (Request For User First Name) 536870953 (Request For User Last Name) 536870925 (Requesting User Id) 536870946 (Requesting User First Name) 536870947 (Requesting User Last Name) 536870951 (Order ID) 304412841 (Order Description) CHG:Infrastructure Change 1000003297 (Customer First Name) 1000003298 (Customer Last Name) 1000000019 (First Name) 1000000018 (Last Name) 1000000000 (Description) 1000000182 (Infrastructure Change ID)
User groups	No	Leading and trailing	The wildcard search for user groups is supported in the Admin console: In the Admin console, in the Send to picker window for user groups on the New Broadcasts page. In the Admin console, on the Group tab on the Service Availability page	All fields in the following BMC Helix ITSM form: Group 8 (Long Group Name) 105 (Group Name)
BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog requests by submitted responses	No	Leading and trailing	In the Global search field From the Events filter in the Active or Past events sections on the My Activity page or a studio page that has an events component added to it	-	No Important: The searched-for fields cannot be manually indexed for FTS.
Service Health items	No	Leading and trailing	In the search field on the My Stuff page on the Service Health tab	- {{/confluence_table-filter}}

The indicated list of sources might not be exhaustive, and additional sources might be supported.

How search results are ranked by relevance

Search results for different sources are returned by using an improved ranking technology. The setting displays the most relevant results at the top of all results. The content of the primary search results from the different sources is re-ranked by using the Okapi BM25 ranking function. During this second round of ranking, the search result data is parsed into a single document corpus. The parsing process uses a text processing pipeline that includes:

Upper- to lowercase transformation.
Punctuation removal.
Tokenization (breaking sentences into words).
(English only) Lemmatization (determining basic word forms; for example, the basic form of "better" is "good").
Stop word filtering (overly common words of the language are removed).

When all of the search result documents are parsed, the corpus represents a record of the total number of documents, the average size of each document, and the number of documents that would match a particular search term. Each document within the corpus has a record of the number of unique terms within that document, and the number of occurrences of each unique term. These values are then used to determine the relevance score of each term within the user’s search query. The user’s query is also parsed by the same pipeline to facilitate matching.

Scenario

Mary is a new hire at the Petramco company and she wants to investigate the medical benefits provided for the employees. Mary utilizes re-ranking, initiates the search "Medical and dental benefits" and finds the information immediately. She does not waste time looking for the correct knowledge article or pinging other colleagues.

The search results are ranked in a descending order:

(Top result) Dental Benefits
(Top result) Benefits Dental Request or Inquiry
Employee Benefits
Employee Benefits Application Login Issue
How to Add a Dependent Service
Private Medical Benefits