Northeast Virtual User Group Starts Off With a Bang
February 17th, 2010 Comment on this article
The Northeast Virtual User Group held its inaugural meeting earlier this month – and it’s already inspired at least one Laserfiche user to start her own user group!
The first-ever online regional user group attracted nearly 30 attendees from the New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey areas eager to learn more about Laserfiche—and how to start their own local user groups.
It couldn’t have come at a better time, says Ruth McGrath, database developer/analyst for the City of Northampton, MA MIS Department.
“With money so tight in my city, training is at a standstill, and Laserfiche is new to us. A user group is going to fill a gap that may have otherwise caused the entire program to grind to a halt,” McGrath says, noting that she’s already working on starting her own chapter. “I’m the sole IT person in Northampton working on all facets of Laserfiche from installation and training to system administration,” she explains. “I want to make sure my users are as involved as possible and I foresee the user group as being a great tool in that effort.”
The idea to host a virtual regional user group was inspired in part by the success of regional user groups in Virginia, as well as the very real need to get training and share best practices when budgets have been cut and staff need to do more with less. As McGrath puts it, “Like my city clerk says, ‘With Laserfiche, I really will be able to do the work of five people with just three.’”
The virtual user group included an Avante demonstration by Laserfiche staff to show how Workflow can reduce the costs of manual business processes, and do so in a way that simplifies purchasing, administering and supporting the system.
The Quick Fields video tutorials located on the Laserfiche Support Site
The Q&A session that followed turned into an ad hoc tour of the Laserfiche Support Site to track down specific issues and reference video tutorials. McGrath, for instance, had trouble entering a pattern matching expression setting up a Quick Fields session. Between being able to refer to video tutorials and compare notes with other users who’d run into the same problem, she found her answer: “I had square brackets instead of round,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s really good to have someone to bounce my code against.”
McGrath says as an IT person, she’d like to be able to interact online with other administrators in the future. But right now, she sees how valuable a local group will be. “I can see if something needs training, we can set up training and offer it to our whole user group,” she says.
Did you know you can download the Gilroy case study from the Support Site's "Case Study" section?
“I’m hoping my users are going to hear little things and get ideas,” she adds. McGrath says a Planning Department staff member has already sent her a link to a past Laserfiche GME about Gilroy, CA, where staff are using an integration between the bank’s check-scanning utility and Laserfiche to process checks —ultimately reducing bank fees by 56% and eliminating three days of “float” time—and wondered if they could do the same. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to set all this up?’” she jokes, “But really, the more our users pick up, the more they’re going to get invested in using Laserfiche and the more they’re going to take away from it.”
The next meeting of the Northeastern Virtual User Group is scheduled for March 2nd. Membership is open to all Laserfiche users located in the Northeastern United States (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont). Join now.
If you’re interested in joining a Laserfiche User Group in your area, please post on the Laserfiche User Group Forum on the Laserfiche Support Site.
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Tags: user groups