HCL Domino Workspace – Central Search
Central Search does not search across the HCL Domino Workspace services
The magnifier in the global navigation bar opens Central Search, which currently offers search scopes for Chat and Files.
From an enterprise user perspective, I would expect Central Search to provide a genuinely global search experience across HCL Domino Workspace.
HCL Domino Workspace currently provides the following services:
Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Chat, Meetings, Files, Forms, Group Calendar, and Boards.
I would expect Central Search to be connected to these services so that users can search for relevant content and objects across the HCL Domino Workspace environment.
For example, if I search for a specific term, I would expect Central Search to be able to return relevant results from Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Chat, Files, Boards, and the other services where users create or store searchable content.
At a minimum, I would expect Central Search to cover the services that contain user-generated content or objects. This would include emails, calendar entries, contacts, files, boards, and similar content.
For example, searching for test returned three results consisting of two Chat messages and one PDF. At the same time, my inbox contained a thread titled “Re: Test again” with the body “another test 5678”, and my Calendar contained an event called “UX Test Quick Meeting A”. Neither the email nor the calendar event appeared in Central Search.
Mail has its own, differently styled search field inside the Verse view. I could not find an equivalent search within the Calendar service. As a result, users currently need to know which search mechanism to use depending on which service they are looking at.
Enterprise user perspective
I think it is important to consider Central Search from the perspective of users working in large enterprise environments.
In established enterprise platforms such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, a global search is generally understood to mean a search across the different applications and content types within the platform. Users do not normally expect to have to know which individual application contains the information they are looking for before they can search for it.
For HCL Domino Workspace, I would expect Central Search to provide the same basic concept. It should be a central entry point for finding information across the entire HCL Domino Workspace environment.
I also think search quality is about more than simply returning results. For an enterprise search experience to be genuinely useful, it needs to be:
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Comprehensive, covering the relevant HCL Domino Workspace services and content types
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Fast, so that search feels immediate even with large amounts of enterprise data
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Context-aware, so that users can understand what each result represents
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Well presented, clearly showing where a result comes from, such as Mail, Calendar, Files, Contacts, or Boards
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Easy to filter and refine, potentially offering different result views or filters depending on the content type
For example, if I search for a person’s name, I should ideally be able to see relevant emails, calendar entries, contacts, files, and other related content in a way that makes the source and context immediately clear.
Overall observation
For me, Central Search should be a core functionality of HCL Domino Workspace, not simply an additional search option for a subset of services.
The current implementation is a good starting point, but having results from only Chat and Files significantly limits the usefulness of a feature that is presented as Central Search.
I would therefore recommend making the All scope genuinely comprehensive and connecting Central Search to the relevant HCL Domino Workspace services. Service-specific searches can still exist for advanced scenarios, but users should be able to start with one global search and trust that HCL Domino Workspace will find relevant content regardless of which service it belongs to.
The overall goal should be that users can simply search from the global navigation, quickly find the information they need, immediately understand where each result comes from, and then move directly to the relevant service or object.