I tried contacting support to see if this was a bug, but was told to go to the community because I am a free user
I added an Organization Guest to a Team, but that Guest can’t seem to search for any conversations.
They are able to browse through all Team conversations and conversations that are part of Public Projects. That’s normal, since they are part of the Team. Same goes for Tasks.
But if they use the Search Box to search for a keyword, only results matching Tasks with that keyword show, but not conversations.
If a full Organizational member in the same Team does exactly the same search, then both Tasks and Conversations show in the results.
To further verify this, if the guest uses Advanced search with an empty keyword, a Task filter shows all Tasks but a Conversation filter always has 0 results.
If this is by design, it doesn’t make any sense since the conversations are browseable and van be viewed. So this is why I think it’s a bug.
@Marty_Potter Thanks for spelling this out. A few things could be going on here. Here is what we can expect from the different ways of searching for conversations in Asana.
When the guest or any user does a basic search (type in the search bar and results pre-populate):
If we search for a conversation, we must search for the title of the conversation. Only a title can pre-populate, not any text from the body of the conversation.
When the guest or any user does a basic search and presses enter to search:
Any element of the conversation should appear in a list of search results. So, while a basic search with pre-populated results will only understand conversation titles, after we press enter the search results will include the body of any conversation containing a related word.
When the guest or any user does an advanced search:
Many more options exist, but at the very least the search results will include titles and the body of the conversations.
We can narrow the search to conversations by clicking the conversations option:
Next steps:
We’ll need to determine if tweaking the search criteria will create a solution or if this is a bug to report.
Please ensure that the guest user is searching for the conversation correctly, per the outline above.
If the first step doesn’t provide a solution, please share a screenshot of 1)the search criteria (what their search process looks like) and 2)search results. Once we have those images we’ll be able to determine a cause.
You can see that in both screens the Team Conversation called “Introductions” is visible, but the guest cannot see it in the search results.
Same goes for choosing the Conversations filter in the advanced search as you describe, but the results show no conversations. Selecting ALL will show only Tasks. The only way the guest can ever see the conversations is by selecting Tam Conversations and browsing manually.
@Marty_Potter I only see a basic search image for the Guest. I see that they’ve searched for “introductions” and nothing appears.
Could you add an image of the search results the Guest sees when they do a full advanced search as mentioned in my post above? When we have that we’ll have a full picture of the situation and we’ll be able to determine next steps. Thanks!
You can see that if the Guest chooses Team Conversations, all conversations show as expected. There are about 10 conversations currently available that are visible from here.
Advanced Search results are the same as the above screen if the Filter is set to Conversations. If Tasks is chosen, Tasks show correctly. If ALL is chosen, then only Tasks show but no Conversations.
Thank you for this detail, @Marty_Potter. Looks like this is indeed a bug! We’ve reported it to our product team and hopefully we’ll see an update soon.
I think I’ve found another bug, not sure, it might be by design…
Take for example a task with the word “Tutorials” in the title.
If I do an advanced search for a partial word, eg “tutorial”, no match it found. If I change the search to use the same filter settings but change the search term to “tutorials” the Task is found as a result.
This doesn’t make sense since partial matches are found when I start typing in the search box (ie a normal search not an advanced search).
On a side note, is there a reason why Asana does not do searches on text within Task conversations? Sometimes I can’t remember the title of a Task, but might want to search for a term that might have been used as part of the task conversation.
Also it might be cool to be able to enter multiple search terms using boolean functions like “video and tutorial”, “video or tutorial”, “video not tutorial” etc. I haven’t seen a guide that says this is possible
Thanks for the feedback, Marty! It does seem off that part of the word doesn’t bring up the result you’re looking for. Are you sure the task wasn’t hidden under “Show more tasks” when you did the basic search? Could you double check that what you’re seeing isn’t described here: Using Search & Advanced Search in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide and let us know?
Thanks for the thought but no, the issue doesn’t affect Basic Search, as typing “tutorial” correctly shows the only task I have with “tutorials” in the title.
The Advanced Search, for me anyway, shows no results when i search for “tutorial”, but when the full term “tutorials” is entered, the task is displayed in the results.
I can easily replicate the problem in a Personal Project…
@Alexis are you able to provide any updates on the progress of both these bugs? I just tested the first bug again and it’s still there. I’m worried that as our conversations grow, my teams are not going to be able to find what they are looking for. Thanks
Hi Marty - The team is aware of these bugs and they’ve had to prioritize addressing them, keeping in mind other bugs that have been reported. Unfortunately I can’t provide a timeline, but I can assure you our team is aware. Thanks.
