Enhance Productivity With Windows Search

Over the past couple days I have been considering a number of technologies that enhance my productivity and while a couple come to mind (which I will likely share in future blog posts) there is one that I hadn’t considered much in the past, probably due to its simplicity. Among the tools I use most is Windows Search for XP (for the latest version).

While this tool isn’t installed by default on Windows XP is it a default feature in Windows Vista. Essentially this tool installs a taskbar add-in an enhanced indexing engine that indexes the contents of your desktop files and Microsoft Outlook. After it completes indexing it allow the users to search the desktop files for keywords with an extremely high degree of accuracy.

While I try to keep a very clean file system I inevitably lose track of some of the relevant documents that I am looking for since I often don’t recall if they were stored in my ever growing Exchange file, my various PST (personal stores) that are necessary to address my corporate message quotas, or within the “My Documents” folders. Since the Windows Search software indexes each of the storage locations it provides a convenient, one stop tool to find all of my project data.

Although this tool doesn’t address my imaged data, which I need to structure and store much more diligently, I have been extremely pleased with the way it handles my Office and text oriented documents and have had a noticeable improvement in finding documents on demand.