For the 70 Laserfiche users and curious information managers who attended Laserfiche International’s first ever “Paperless Office” seminar in Hong Kong last month, simple storage issues were understandably a major concern. “There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘An inch of gold for a foot of land,’” explains Phyllis Chen, Director of Laserfiche International. “But here, office space can cost $2000US a square foot, so it’s more like ‘A foot of gold for an inch of land!’”

Add to that the speed at which Hong Kong does business, and you can see why, with just three weeks notice, nearly twice the expected number of participants showed up.

“I spoke with an architect at the workshop who’d just finished building a 3000 sq. ft. facility to store a client’s documents,” says Chen, “but by the time he’d finished, they already needed a second one built!”

Regional Manager Linda Ding with Laserfiche International Director Phyllis Chen at the Hong Kong Workshop

The Laserfiche Community may find some comfort in knowing your colleagues in Hong Kong face the same paper headaches you do – and the same challenges keeping information active once it’s been stored. Says Linda Ding, Laserfiche Regional Manager/Asia Pacific, “We’re really defining what a paperless office is by setting a standard for electronic document management. It’s not just scanning – it’s a larger conversation about what tools can help business go about achieving their objectives.”

One attendee, for instance, who was storing documents as PDFs asked what Laserfiche could do for him. Ding says the “BPM Through Workflow” demonstration showed him how, besides storing his documents, he could use Laserfiche to classify them, file them according to a folder structure and eventually delete them based on a retention schedule.

“A major point we wanted to get across is to get people from small- to mid-sized organizations thinking of ECM this comprehensively. It’s not just being able to capture and distribute, but also using Workflow and integrating with SharePoint to create operational flexibility,” says Ding. “And when you’re doing business in a global economic hub like Hong Kong, Web deployment is a major topic.”

Attendees networking during a break

Bill Young of Laserfiche Reseller Y-Digit Enterprise Solution Ltd. says the “Paperless Office” workshop encouraged his users to make sure their document management keeps up with their pace of business. “People saw how Laserfiche can help them in ways they may never have anticipated. A lot of them are using only 20%-30% of their Laserfiche system. They just didn’t know about Workflow, BPM and ECM,” Young says. “The workshop really helped us bridge the gap.”

Perhaps the greatest testament to the success of the workshop – and the future success attendees will have using Laserfiche – could be seen in the response to the workshop’s Workflow demo. “People were impressed with how a complicated process like account approval could be handled,” recalls Ding. “But then they saw how simple the Workflow Designer Interface is that it’s just ‘drag and drop.’ They saw it’s as comprehensive as you need it to and it’s as simple as you want it be.”

Tags: international

Posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:42 am under UserNews. You can comment on this post.