No municipality has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche community more visibly this year than Norfolk, VA. So much so that the city’s in-house Laserfiche champions have encouraged user interaction by co-founding the Hampton Roads User Group, one of an unprecedented number of user groups that have sprung up across the state in the last two years.

The way W. Alondo McClees, Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Systems Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of Revenue, explains it, he and his colleagues were just “filling a need” when he and users from three other Virginia municipalities (Fredericksburg, Hanover and Charlottesville) first initiated a statewide Laserfiche user group for their Commissioner of Revenue offices at a 2007 regional conference.

“After our initial meeting near Richmond, there were a few of us on the same page—like Bev Rosato [from Frederick County] and Amy Johnson [from Hanover],” McClees says. “It’s like that line in ‘Robots’: ‘See a need, fill a need’: ‘You’re using Laserfiche? We are too! Let’s try to get together,’” he recalls.

Laserfiche reseller Unity Business Systems (UBS) saw the value of establishing user groups throughout its service areas, and was soon helping with invite lists, as well as hosting quarterly conference calls between the user group leaders. “The calls let us provide updates on the happenings in our own user groups as well as feedback to UBS on what current and potential users of Laserfiche think about the product and its modules,” says McClees. “The user groups themselves give our reseller the opportunity to ask candid questions and get honest feedback from users who use the product in an everyday, real-world setting. We’ve been able to give immediate and direct feedback to both Laserfiche and UBS about proposed ideas, events and the software itself. This is something that any organization would be hard-pressed to acquire through an e-mail or phone call. It’s just a great platform to share ideas.”

Sharing great ideas, of course, is ultimately what user groups are all about—which has proven even more valuable to the Laserfiche-curious. “We’ve been able to include offices that are not using Laserfiche, but wanted to know more about its true impact in a real-world setting,” says McClees. “We get people asking for references because they hear about the user group.” He remembers a recent call from the Virginia Port Authority. “They asked us a lot about Laserfiche and how we’d been using it,” McClees remembers. He must have left a good impression; the Virginia Port Authority just last week announced its decision to choose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management system over 27 other vendors.

“What started out as a user group for a small niche of Virginia municipalities has grown to include every industry: medical, financial, legal, clerical, religious and others,” he says. “We’re not only seeing attendance from people who already have Laserfiche, but also from people who are curious about the software or who are getting ready to implement it and want to know what to expect.”

Norfolk itself, ironically enough, finds itself among the latter as it prepares to upgrade to Records Management Edition (RME) and version 8.1 this month.

“Seeing other folks using RME has helped us figure out what we need to do before it even gets here,” McClees says. “One thing we learned is that we don’t have to redo our folder structure—we can use shortcuts and still have people find documents. So it’s the best of both worlds: business as usual, but with that solid, secure records management.”

“Every time we see a demo, everything seems that much more accessible—it takes the fear out of it, because it’s not that different from what we’re already doing,” he adds.

But the value to the Laserfiche community as a whole, McClees says, is unique and beyond compare. “Users and organizations face two challenges when budgets are tight and people don’t have a lot of time to research new products,” he observes. “First, they’re jaded by bad experiences with other software, so they might miss out on the message of a product that could truly fit their needs. Secondly, there’s usually a poor network of support within and between organizations that are using similar products.”

With revenues falling short, conferences and training can be cut from a budget. Set against this backdrop, McClees notes, the Virginia user group phenomena becomes even more necessary and relevant to success stories, beginning with individuals, spreading to the group and then back to the organizations they serve.

“I can’t think of another software product that has a community attached to it. There are many enterprise-level products that have user groups, but they don’t seem to have a community,” McClees says. “When I talk to people at a Laserfiche user group, I’m talking to my friends. We all care about how each other’s organizations are succeeding. It’s more than people getting together talking about software. When people see what we are doing, they want to be a part of it.”

And perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the Virginia user groups and Hampton Roads in particular, is how much the user groups have become part of the greater Laserfiche culture. “We continue to share ideas such as partnering with Laserfiche to help create user group logos, acquire space on the Laserfiche forums area of the Support site, and update the entire Laserfiche community on our progress through the use of Luminary blog posts,” McClees says. “We also have a Hampton Roads User Group Google Site for the purpose of disseminating documents, updating our users on our upcoming events and activities, and to advertise what we do—without clogging e-mail boxes.”

But for McClees, Laserfiche’s true value comes not just from its community, but from its ease of support: “We’re in an industry with a steadily decreasing workforce. Government IT people are retiring and they’re not immediately being replaced due to budgetary constraints. So it’s really important that we don’t have to spend 50% of our time looking over our shoulders at an application. Being able to quickly go into the administration console to do auditing is a Laserfiche tool I really appreciate. The security is robust and important—for example, I lock down people’s ability to e-mail records that are restricted by Virginia code.

“I look at Laserfiche like it’s just one less thing I have to worry about, and that’s critical to me.”

Tags: Laserfiche Luminaries, records management, user groups

Posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 3:58 pm under Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Municipal Government, Newsletters, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.