Search

The box in the centre of the top bar, on every staff page.

0.12.0-rc.3 navigation refresh

Search also remains visible on phones in the refreshed navigation. ArrowDown enters results, Escape returns to the field, and failed requests offer retry. See finding your way around.

It searches pages, people, devices, loans, submissions, tickets, products and articles at once. Type two or more characters and results appear grouped by kind. Pick one to jump straight to it.

Why there is no People tab

Because search is the way in. A person is found by typing their name, not by opening a directory and filtering it.

Pressing Enter on a person opens the full results at /people, which is the closest thing to a people list. But the fast path is the search box, and it is worth teaching your team to use it rather than navigating.

What you can type

Type	Finds
A page name	The page — “costs” opens Costs, “repairs” opens Submissions
A name	People, matched on first, last or display name
A username	People
A serial number	Devices, and the repairs and loans against them
A loan number	The loan device and who has it
A ticket number	The ticket — #412 and 412 both work
A ticket subject	Tickets
A submission number	The repair — #12 and 12 both work
A product name	Stock items
An article title	Help centre articles, and your own runbooks

Partial matches work. Typing broo finds Riley Brooks.

Choosing a person when your account is campus-limited

0.12.0-rc.3 campus safeguard

In the candidate source, people pickers match full names as well as partial names. If your account is limited to specific campuses, they use local people records with campus access checked. They do not fall back to a live SIS lookup or import an external ID when the connector cannot establish the person’s campus. If a person is missing, a whole-school administrator must import the record and assign its campus first.

Tickets and submissions answer as one list, newest first, each row saying which queue it is in. Somebody ringing the desk does not know whether their laptop became a ticket or a submission, and they should not have to guess correctly to be found. You see whichever half your permissions cover.

Submissions have their own number, separate from ticket numbers — so #412 may be both a ticket and a submission, which is why the results say which is which. When you upgrade, the submissions already in your database are numbered oldest to newest, so the numbering reads as a history rather than starting from the day you upgraded. Existing links and any id you have already quoted in an email still work: the number is an addition, not a replacement. You can still find a submission by the serial number of the device it is against.

Pages

Typing part of a page’s name offers the page itself, above the records. These appear as you type, because they are answered by your browser rather than by the server.

It understands the words people actually use rather than only the words on the tab: repairs finds Submissions, papercut finds Printers, jamf and intune find Fleet health, wifi finds Network. Only pages your school has switched on are offered.

Pages you have hidden from your own navigation are still found, and marked hidden from your navigation so you know why the tab is not there. See your account.

From search to work

The reason search is central rather than decorative: almost every job at a service desk starts with identifying a person or a device.

• A student at the counter says their laptop is broken. Type their name, open their person page, see their devices, raise a repair against the right one.
• A serial number is on a device on the bench with no note. Type it, and you have the owner and any open repair.
• Somebody asks who has loan 14. Type 14.

The assistant does this too

The assistant answers the same questions in sentences, and can act on the answer. “Open repairs for Riley Brooks” returns a clickable table instead of a search result you then filter.

Use search when you know what you are looking for. Use the assistant when you have a question.

What search does not cover

Audit log entries. The logs page has its own search, because the questions you ask of an audit log are different.

Ticket bodies. Ticket subjects and numbers are searched; the words inside a ticket are not. The tickets page has its own filtering.

Anything in another system, unless you ask. If your school runs Zendesk or Web Help Desk alongside Plugboard, the search box can reach it — see below. It is off until an administrator turns it on, and it is never searched as you type.

Your external helpdesk

If your school runs an external ticketing system, the search results carry an Also search your external helpdesk button underneath them. Press it and the matching tickets from that system appear in their own section, each row named with the system it came from and marked as leaving Plugboard. Clicking one opens it in that system, in a new tab.

It is off until an administrator turns it on. In Admin → Connectors, open your Zendesk or Web Help Desk connector and switch on the federated search setting. Two things to know before you do:

• Searches run as the connector’s account, not as the person searching. Plugboard holds one credential for your helpdesk. If you restrict your agents in that system — to their own group’s tickets, say — then Plugboard’s search can show a technician tickets they could not see by signing into the helpdesk themselves. Plugboard cannot tell from the outside whether that applies to you, which is why this is your decision rather than a default.
• It uses your helpdesk’s API quota, and that quota belongs to your school’s account. This is why it is a button rather than something that fires as you type, and why the same search twice in a minute only asks once.

Why it is a separate press. Your own results appear as you type and never wait for the external system. If your helpdesk is slow or unreachable, the section says so — “… did not respond, results may be incomplete” — rather than leaving the search box spinning. A system that does not answer within a few seconds is dropped for that search, and Plugboard’s own results are unaffected.

Permissions

Each part of the results is filtered by the permission that guards its own page. Search itself needs no permission beyond being signed in.

Results	Need
People	client.view
Devices	device.view
Loans	loan.view
Submissions	repair.view
Tickets	ticket.view
Stock items	stock.manage
Help centre articles	Nothing — published articles are school-wide
Runbooks	The documentation space’s own rules, including restricted spaces

A part you do not have the permission for is left out of the results entirely — not shown empty. So a technician who works the ticket queue sees tickets and no people; somebody on the loans desk sees loans and no ticket subjects.

You do not need client.view to use search any more. If your school gave somebody that permission mainly so the search box would work for them, it is worth revisiting: it is no longer needed for search, and it grants more than search does.

Two things are correctly scoped and always have been:

• Campuses. On a deployment with more than one site, search never returns a record belonging to a campus you do not administer.
• Runbooks. Documentation results respect the space’s own visibility rules, including restricted spaces.

This page said the opposite until 22 August 2026

It read “Search only returns what you are allowed to see… the query itself is scoped, so a result you cannot open is never shown.” That was never true of anything but campuses and runbooks, and it is corrected here rather than quietly deleted, because anybody who set up a narrow role on the strength of it should know to check it.

The per-section permissions described above shipped later the same day, which is what closed that gap. The notice is kept rather than deleted because it covers a period during which the product behaved differently from its documentation, and a school that read the old text and granted client.view on the strength of it still has that grant in place.