Laserfiche is pleased to announce the release of Agenda Manager 8.0. This release makes submitting, preparing, and approving agenda items more collaborative and comprehensive.

Significant new features include the ability to save draft agenda items, hassle-free staff report editing, flexible item management and approval, and department-level collaboration.

Agenda Manager 8.0 enhancements include:

• Department Level Collaboration: Agenda Manager 8 extends the agenda workflow to the department level, enabling each department in an organization to have its own approval process within any meeting type. (Last month’s tech tip provides more information on this feature.)
• Flexible Re-Routing: Approvers can send an item back to any stage in the approval process for modification or correction. This simplifies approval by returning the item directly to the person or department that needs to make the change.
• Approval Delegation: Delegate approval to someone else while you are not available to review submitted items. Both the approver and the delegate will receive e-mail notifications of item status, and Agenda Manager will track if the approver or delegate performed the approval. Administrators can also assign delegates. (Take a look at this month’s tech tip for more information.)
• Observer Role: Interested parties, such as a department supervisor, can have read-only access to any items submitted for an agenda, in order to view the submission and approval process for a particular agenda.
• In-Place Document Editing: With Agenda Manager 8, you just open, edit and save a document, instead of saving the document to your local drive, making changes, saving it again and uploading it back to the server.
• Automated Check-Out: When approvers open an item’s staff report or other attachment, it’s automatically locked until they close it again, preventing changes from being accidentally overwritten by other users.
• Draft Agenda Items: Create working drafts without having every item ready for approval. Administrators can assign draft items to users to complete and resubmit.
• Add Comments: Approvers can add comments to an item at any stage, regardless of whether they are ready to approve or reject it.
• Split Agenda Packet Publishing: Preparers can create agenda packets that split the agenda and its supporting documents into separate files, which can be published to the Web or to Laserfiche—allowing access to specific parts of the agenda packet without downloading the entire thing.
• Posting Version: Create an agenda without attachment titles or links, suitable for posting or distributing at a meeting.
• Publish to Laserfiche: Automatically upload the agenda and agenda packet to a Laserfiche repository.
• Improved User Interface: In Agenda Manager 8, a number of functions and processes—including creating a workflow, submitting and editing items, and approving items—have been modified to make them more streamlined and efficient. Users only see the meeting types they have access to, which makes working with Agenda Manager simpler. And because you can choose to have item submission forms filled in from drop-down lists, submitting items is easier and error-free.

Also in Agenda Manager 8, help files are hosted online, allowing them to be updated by Laserfiche much more frequently.

Tags: Agenda Manager

Posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 1:49 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this post.