_{Best Practices for Successful Search Results within the Trimble Viewpoint Customer Portal}

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The Trimble Viewpoint Knowledge Base has thousands of articles that answer many questions about the software. Searching the Knowledge Base to find the article that you need can sometimes be challenging. Here are some tips to make you search more fruitful.

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Access the Knowledge Base from the Main Menu. Enter search terms and product name in the "What you are searching for"? box. For example, enter "void payroll check Vista".

Tip: for Best results, only use the keywords and not complete sentences. Unless you have an error message, then entering the exact error message will get the best results.

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You can also access the Knowledge Base further down on the Trimble Viewpoint Customer portal page (see image above).

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Once on the Knowledge Base page you will see Product Filters on the left. These will be the Software Products that you own and can be used to limit the search results.

Begin the search by entering some keywords for your topic. Again, if you have an error message, entering the exact error message is best. Include the Product Name in the search. All articles have the Product and Module listed in the summary of the article, so adding the product name to your search will improve your results. Results are returned for Knowledge Based Articles, Issues, and Products Info (when available). You can switch between these tabs to see the different results.

A little "behind the scenes" information:

• Operators - When you don't specify an operator in your article search, the search engine determines the best operator to use.

Many searches use "AND" as the default operator. When you search for multiple terms, all the terms must match to generate a result. Matching on all terms tends to produce search results that are more relevant that searches using the "OR" operator, where matches on any of the search query terms appear in the results.

If the search engine doesn't return any results that match all the terms, it looks for matches using the "OR" operator. With the "OR" operator, the search engine boosts documents that contain more terms from the search query, so that they appear higher in the results list.

• Frequency - This algorithm calculates the frequency with which a term appears with each article. The algorithm then weighs them against each other to produce the initial set of search results.
• Relevancy - Articles that are frequently viewed or that are frequently attached to cases appear higher in the results. Article ownership and recent activity also boost an article in the results list.
• Proximity of Terms - Articles that contain all the keywords in a search are ranked highest, followed by articles with fewer keywords, followed by articles with single keyword matches. Terms that are closer together in the matched document, with few or no intervening words, are ranked higher in the list.
• Exact Matches - Matches on exact keywords are ranked higher than matches on synonyms or lemmatized terms.
• Title Field - If any search terms match words in an article title, the article is boosted in the results.

I hope these tips help with your Knowledge Base searches. If you have any questions, we can be reached on our website, ConstrucTech Consulting.

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