Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Nextcloud Tagging & Search.

If you’ve ever dug through a shared drive looking for one specific contract or invoice and come up empty, this episode is for you. Nextcloud’s tagging and search features exist to solve exactly that problem — helping everyone at NZRT find documents quickly, stay organized, and meet record retention requirements without a lot of manual hunting.

Let’s start with the tag system. At NZRT, tags aren’t just freeform labels — admins create and maintain a standardized set so that everyone is tagging consistently. There are eight standard tags you’ll encounter across the vault, and each one has a defined purpose and a specific set of people responsible for applying it.

The first is “invoice,” which you’d apply to financial documents. That one is handled by our Finance agent and xc. Next is “contract,” used for legal agreements, applied by our Client & Strategy agent and xc. Then there’s “draft,” which marks anything still in progress — and that one is for everyone to use, not just a specific role.

Once something has been signed off or finalized, it gets the “approved” tag, and that’s applied by xc, Finance, or Client & Strategy depending on the document. The “confidential” tag marks restricted access files and is controlled by xc and our Handling agent. If a document has been synced across to the Dolibarr ERP system, it gets tagged “dolibarr,” and that’s managed by our Email & Integration agent and xc. Similarly, blog and website content gets a “wordpress” tag, applied by the Email and Publishing agents. And finally, anything heading into long-term storage picks up the “archive” tag, courtesy of our Data agent or xc.

So those eight tags give you a clean, shared vocabulary across the whole team. Instead of everyone inventing their own labels, you’ve got a consistent layer of metadata that makes searching reliable.

Speaking of searching — let’s talk about how the full-text search capability works under the hood. There’s a configuration step that enables the full-text search feature in Nextcloud. In plain terms, two extensions get switched on: one that provides the search interface inside Nextcloud itself, and one that connects it to Elasticsearch, which is the underlying search engine doing the heavy lifting. Once those are active, you run an indexing command that goes through all your existing documents and makes their contents searchable. So it’s not just searching file names — it’s looking inside PDFs, Word documents, and other files to find the actual words you’re looking for.

Once that’s set up, you can run some pretty powerful queries. Think of these like structured search requests. For example, you could search for all invoices from 2026 that were tagged by the Finance role — the system would return every document matching all three of those criteria at once. Or you could ask for all approved contract PDFs — filtering by file type, tag, and approval status simultaneously. You’re essentially layering filters together rather than doing one broad search and then manually sifting through results.

Now, why does all of this matter in the NZRT context? Tagging is tied directly to compliance. When documents are consistently tagged, it becomes much easier to apply and verify record retention policies — you know what’s been approved, what’s still a draft, what’s confidential, and what’s been archived. Without that consistency, things slip through the cracks.

There are also two agents with specific roles in keeping this system healthy. EDM — that’s our Email and Integration agent, ema — manages the tag hierarchy itself. So if you think a new tag should be added or an existing one needs changing, that goes through ema. And our Data agent, dai, uses tags as part of reporting and analytics work — so good tagging discipline directly feeds into the quality of the data that drives decisions.

If you want to go deeper, there are a few related topics worth exploring in the wiki. Document Management Overview gives you the broader picture of how files are structured and governed. The Files App article covers the day-to-day interface you’re working in. And NZRT Folder Structure explains how the directory layout is set up, which pairs naturally with tagging to give you both location-based and label-based ways to find what you need.

The short version: tag consistently using the standard set, use the search system to filter across multiple criteria at once, and you’ll spend a lot less time hunting for documents and a lot more time actually working with them.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.