One of the challenges I continually face when I perform my support role is to locate historical support cases that is relevant to the support case at hand.

The CRM system used by the department I'm in has access to all details of every support case and in addition, it exposes a web interface with all the details provided.

After seeing a colleague search his system with Google Desktop Search, I was impressed, and decided to install Google Desktop Search to search all my correspondence. At the same time, I discovered that GDS can search any other types of document, as long as a suitable plug-in has been written. I've downloaded the GDS SDK, but I haven't had time to figure it out yet.

While thinking about how to search our CRM faster, I decided to write a Delphi application that pulls all the case details via the web interface and put it onto my machine, then, GDS would be able to index it as it currently supports indexing of files in the system.

Side note: Also, I decided to index my machine at home, and guess what I've discovered? Google appears to be sending application error information back to itself, but did not identify that error as coming from Google Desktop Search. Why? I've no idea at all. In fact, I found this out using Sysinternal's TCPView application. For safety's sake, I've zapped out the OS details at the top of the error dialog. What's with the caption “Error”? Why not make it “Google Desktop Search Error” instead? What exactly is Google sending back to itself? And why is the application data encrypted or encoded? If Google wants to encrypt / encode the data, fine. Let me see the data first before encryping or encoding it. At first glance, it appears to be MIME encoded, and when I ran it across a simple Delphi application I wrote, I saw “ImageBase”.

With the details of all support cases on my machine, I'm able to search for relevant cases in under 2 seconds, hence, I'm having increased productivity when I need to search for similar support cases!