The City of Niagara Falls, ON, implemented Laserfiche^® in 2001 to provide all departments with a central location to store and manage information. Over the years, each department had developed its own method for organizing files, and the city chose Laserfiche primarily because its flexible folder structure and unified metadata model would accommodate these various filing systems.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the city clerk, staff quickly adopted the new system and began scanning documents into the Laserfiche repository. But the project lost momentum when the clerk retired. Many departments didn’t take the time to develop effective file structures in Laserfiche, and staff soon began adding documents to the repository without properly recording document metadata. As a result, they couldn’t make the best use of the Laserfiche search tools, and many departments continued to rely on their old, paper-based filing systems.

In 2005, Bill Matson, the city’s records and elections coordinator, undertook an initiative to reorganize the city’s document repository and help staff use Laserfiche more effectively. As part of this process, he worked with departments to recreate their current filing structures in Laserfiche and to design document templates that would capture the most useful metadata. Thanks to Matson’s intervention, staff soon integrated Laserfiche into their everyday work processes, and the city significantly increased the return on its Laserfiche investment.

“I tell people that Laserfiche is a great system—you just have to make sure you’re using it correctly,” Matson says. “Unfortunately, we started scanning documents into the repository without taking the time to think about how we’d search for them later on. Ultimately, our own lack of foresight kept us from using Laserfiche to its full potential.

“For example, one of our more mundane tasks is to maintain a library of press clippings that deal with city business. Prior to 2005, multiple people scanned these clippings into Laserfiche, resulting in duplicate files scattered across a number of folders. Worse, we didn’t capture consistent metadata—clippings about the city’s budget, for instance, were assigned a variety of subjects, from ‘Budget’ to ‘Finances’ to ‘Fiscal Information.’

“To correct these problems, we created a separate Laserfiche folder for press clippings, with subfolders for each year. We also designed a new template to capture key metadata, including the clipping’s date, type and subject. To ensure consistency, we provided staff with drop-down lists of types and subjects to choose from, rather than allowing them to enter free text. This uniformity has made searches easier—and a lot more accurate.”

Instant access to information helps staff throughout the city work more efficiently. Staff in the clerk’s office, for example, can quickly locate agreements, leases, correspondence and other documents dealing with important city business. Staff in the municipal works department can easily find the maps, schematics and engineering plans they need to improve and repair city infrastructure. And staff in the planning department can promptly retrieve zoning and other information in response to citizens’ requests.

Matson notes that the planning department includes some of the city’s most avid Laserfiche users, and he attributes their success to careful project planning. Over the years, he explains, staff had created around 20 document categories—such as “Zoning,” “Subdivisions” and “Tourism”—and they then organized documents within each category alphabetically. Prior to scanning documents into the repository, they recreated this file structure in Laserfiche. Because of this foresight, staff can locate documents simply by browsing to the relevant folder. They can also use Laserfiche to perform more elaborate searches, including full-text searches across large numbers of documents.

In addition to helping staff find information, Laserfiche helps them share it with citizens. “In the past, responding to information requests usually involved a trip to the records room,” Matson says. “Once we found the correct file, we had to take it apart, photocopy the relevant pages and then either mail or fax them to the requestor. Now, when someone calls with a request, I can locate the relevant documents in just a few seconds, and then e-mail the electronic files from within the Laserfiche repository. The citizen literally receives the documents before I hang up the phone.”

In many situations, however, citizens simply visit the city’s Website to find the documents they need. Using the WebLink™ module, the city’s Information Services staff provide the public with online access to a variety of documents stored in Laserfiche, including bylaws, council agendas and meeting minutes. Matson reports that requests for printed copies of these items have dropped significantly, while citizens have become better informed about issues the council members discuss.

Along with its Web publishing capabilities, Laserfiche includes a number of other features that benefit the city’s IS staff. Integration with Microsoft^® Active Directory^® simplifies security management and eliminates the need to create separate Laserfiche accounts for each user. Support for a variety of standard and specialized scanners enables departments to use their current hardware with Laserfiche. And a flexible application programming interface promotes rapid integration between Laserfiche and the other applications staff use every day.

“We first integrated Laserfiche with our Vadim^® accounts payable software,” says Dave Etherington, the city’s network services manager. “Because of this integration, staff can easily retrieve scanned invoices and other Laserfiche documents from within Vadim, eliminating the need to switch between systems or log in to multiple applications.”

From Etherington’s perspective, though, Laserfiche’s most useful features are also the most straightforward. “It gives us a great deal of control over who can access information, and it eliminates worries about lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “It’s also a lot smarter to store documents on one server than in multiple file rooms. We back up all of our servers nightly, and we do an off-site backup of our entire Laserfiche repository once a week. If anything unexpected happens, we know we’ll be able to recover our information and get back to work.”

The city is currently in talks with its Laserfiche reseller, IKON Office Solutions, about implementing two additional Laserfiche modules: Agenda Manager™ and Records Management Edition™. Agenda Manager will help the city automate nearly every aspect of the agenda creation and distribution process, while the Records Management Edition will help staff more easily manage record retention schedules.

As he looks forward to installing these additional Laserfiche modules, Matson thinks about the lessons he and his colleagues have learned in the years since their first Laserfiche installation. “In hindsight, there are things we should have done differently,” he says. “But we’ve really turned things around, and I know we’ll continue to have success with Laserfiche in the future.”

Posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 4:57 pm under Government Newsletter, State & Local Government. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.