Searching for Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011

Paul Nieuwelaar, 23 March 2011

In my last few blog posts, I’ve been showing various ways of creating and using Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011. In this post, I will be showing how to search for Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 now uses the built in functionality of the ‘Quick Search’ feature to easily find Articles in a way that is more familiar to the end user. Where as in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, the functionality for searching for an Article was completely different to how the Quick Search worked, as you can see in the image below.

You can immediately see how in Dynamics CRM 2011 users will be able to get familiar with searching for Articles a lot faster than you would need to in Dynamics CRM 4.0, as all the options are now built into the ribbon.

You can conduct a search from any Article view (Draft, Published, or All), however no matter what view you search from, only published articles will be returned. You will notice the search options appear on the ribbon when you click into the Quick Search box. You can also click into the ‘Search’ tab of the ribbon, under Search Tools, which will open the Search options.

Using the search options you can specify whether to search all text in the Article (Full-Text Search), just keywords in the Article (Keyword Search), just the title of the Article (Title Search), just the subject of the Article (Subject Search), or by Article number (Article Number Search). Optionally, you can then choose to search in a specific Subject by clicking on ‘Subject’. You will then have the option to search for Exact Words or to use like words.

Once you have set your options you can simply type your phrase into the Quick Search to find any matching Articles. By default the search options are set to Full-Text Search, using Exact Words, in all Subjects, which is useful for quickly searching all Articles.

That’s all there is to searching for Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011. If you would like more information on creating and using Articles you can refer to my previous posts:
Creating an Article in Dynamics CRM 2011
Creating and Editing an Article Template in Dynamics CRM 2011
Commenting on an Article in Dynamics CRM 2011
How to Insert an Image into your Dynamics CRM Article

In my next posts I will be going over some of the brand new features to Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011, starting with customizing the Article form.