(Photo: __Olga__)

Q:

Can Laserfiche somehow be configured to work for companies that are using Google mail to send documents using the email function from the client?

Thanks,

Michael H.

A:

Hello Michael,

Yes, you can.  The “Send Document in E-mail” function in the Laserfiche client requires a MAPI compliant email client to talk to. This feature is  found in desktop clients such as Outlook, Lotus Notes or Thunderbird. Strictly web-based email will not work out of the box with this feature. However, it is possible to configure Gmail to run through a MAPI client, which would allow you to use the “Send Document in E-mail” feature. Check out this information from Microsoft about how to set up Gmail in Outlook or, if you don’t want to use Exchange, check out the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.  If you have any more questions please let us know.

Best regards,

Bobby G

What does your favorite t-shirt have to do with ECM?

Do you have a favorite t-shirt? Is it your lucky shirt?  Or is it the one you take out of your closet when your favorite team makes the play offs…you know, the one that you’ve worn for the last ten years on a Sunday afternoon? (queue The Rascals’ hit song here).  When I was in college I noticed what a staple “the t-shirt” is in every starving students wardrobe, and I thought to myself everyone has got to own a t-shirt, even my professors. Right there and then I had an epiphany and said “I am going to go into the t-shirt business.”

When I reflect on those years and the steps I took to learn how to screen print, I saw some parallels with what I do now in ECM project management.

When I got started, I was presented with an opportunity to work on a t-shirt printing job for a student organization. The order: 250 shirts for an annual cultural event.  When I was selected as the vendor of choice I knew I had quite a bit to prepare for. Part the preparation process required working with the customer to determine the size break down of the order.  i.e. How many smalls, mediums and larges should be printed? Getting the answer wrong would affect my pocketbook directly.

Thanks to my entrepreneurial spirit, I learned early on that the reason for a needs analysis is to avoid waste.  This is just as true when planning the initial phase of an ECM roll out– the needs analysis. You have to know who’s in the organization, what problems they are facing, and what opportunities exist to streamline their processes. You also need to know who is going to be scanning, who is a part of the data entry process and what types of workflows need to be implemented. To help guide our customers through this process, Laserfiche created a whitepaper titled “Planning and Implementing an EDMS” that goes through some additional details to keep in mind when conducting a needs analysis for ECM projects.

The paper covers topics such as

• How do you design an implementation plan that meets each department’s
  needs?
• How do you promote fast staff acceptance?
• How do you integrate the EDMS with other critical software applications?
• How do you leverage the EDMS to enhance service delivery?

Take it from me, this paper is even better than a XXL t-shirt at covering your … back!

What’s Your Learning Style?  Reading, Watching and/or Doing?

As a person for whom words are all-important, it’s hard for me to see past my own bias and understand that people learn in wildly different ways. But I’ve had to face that reality even within my own team of technical writers—and no amount of me saying “You’ve got words, why do you need videos?!” changes the fact that my team has to think “out of the box” and beyond the word.

Theories of learning style center on key types: those who learn by hearing (auditory), those who learn by doing (kinesthetic or tactile), those who learn by seeing (visual), and those who learn by reading (verbal). We’re all kinesthetic learners to some extent—our regional training courses travel with dozens of laptops because we know people learn better when they click through tasks themselves. But what the User Education team is concerned with is learners on the visual–verbal continuum. Purely visual learners like shapes and images and diagrams. Verbal learners like words.

Even within the User Education team, we have a range of preferences: some of us firmly prefer words, some prefer images. This means we’ve developed different types of materials for people who use our software, and we have passionate advocates of each. In the last couple years we have created lots of videos—everything from broad product overviews to focused feature investigations—accessible via a link on the Support Site home page (support.laserfiche.com), to add to our collection of hundreds of white papers, tech tips, and Knowledge Base articles.

Videos are uncharted territory for technical writers here at Laserfiche. And honestly, if it weren’t for others on my team, it might never have occurred to me to offer information in any form other than white papers. But I see the value we’re adding, and I’d encourage everyone out there who’s disseminating information to think about the different ways people process and (hopefully) retain information, and present your materials thoughtfully.

How about you? What’s your learning preference and can you get beyond your bias?

Case Study: Virtual Clustering for Marina Medical Billing Company
The Problem
In 2008, Marina Medical Billing Company came to Laserfiche looking for an enterprise content management solution, and asking for a rigorous stress test to prove capability.  The company had previously implemented a digital document management solution, but found it lacking; the product was unable to accommodate their current—let alone anticipated—document load …

How Google Voice Helped My Productivity

One of the side effects of heading up Laserfiche’s marketing is that I get a lot of sales calls.  I don’t want to say this is a problem, because at times these calls are really helpful.  But due to the sheer number of calls, there’s an impact on my productivity.  I had always assumed that …