Since attending the 2007 Laserfiche Institute Conference, Martha Rodillas is no longer just the private secretary to the Hawaii County Corporation Counsel. She’s fast becoming the Laserfiche guru for the county‘s government offices. And, since Rodillas attended the conference, Laserfiche is no longer simply a database used to store the county‘s information. It‘s quickly becoming the interactive document management system it was engineered to be.

Such transformations are what the Laserfiche Institute Conference is all about, and Rodillas says the 2007 conference more than met her expectations. A year‘s worth of planning and coordination by Laserfiche staff goes into three days of workshops, seminars and informal gatherings where users meet and learn from each other.

What aspects of the conference did Rodillas like best?

“I liked everything about it, from the way the conference was organized, to the break-out sessions, to everything I learned,” she says. “Perhaps the best thing about the conference was the number of contacts I made. Meeting the Laserfiche engineers who design the software, and learning from them first-hand, was also very valuable.”

What did the corporation counsel‘s office get out of her attendance? The first thing Rodillas did when she got back to the office was add Microsoft^® Word^® and Outlook^® buttons to the Laserfiche toolbars on everyone‘s workstation. Although this is a small change, it definitely saves staff time and is one of many tips Rodillas picked up at the conference that she was able to implement herself. She then called her Laserfiche VAR, who helped her with customizations that she hadn‘t even known were possible until she attended the conference.

Along with the immediate improvements, Rodillas left the conference with some big ideas for the future. The informal networking sessions that took place after each day‘s scheduled events allowed her to learn how county clerks in other parts of the country were using their Laserfiche systems. She‘s now thinking about implementing Web-based access to her office‘s document repository, as well as installing electronic signature pads. “That was a feature I never would have seen if I hadn‘t attended the conference,” she notes.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of attending the conference, though, was the way it made her a more confident Laserfiche user. For example, several sessions gave her the chance to design and create repositories, helping her get a clearer understanding of these processes without the trial and error involved in designing and creating repositories on her own.

Rodillas plans to attend the 2008 conference and hopes to bring several of her co-workers with her as well. “I took excellent notes at last year‘s conference,” she says. “When I got home, I held mini-training sessions to share what I‘d learned with everyone else. Now, staff in other departments come to me to ask how to do things.”

Posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 3:25 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.