A few weeks ago, I shared some advice I gave to a new Laserfiche user. As I said then, one of the best things about the Laserfiche community is the willingness to ask each other for help when we need it, and many people who read the GME on our installation have e-mailed me with questions.

I recently got a question from Patricia Anglin, a user in St. John, New Brunswick, about our filing structure. In St. John, the city was expanding Laserfiche from their Office of the Common Clerk to their Building Inspections and Finance Department, and Patricia asked for my advice on how best to set up their template fields.

While the province of New Brunswick has a “Municipal Records Authority” to help develop a filing structure, unfortunately, here in Ontario, we don’t have any standards to follow that would help us develop a filing structure. That type of direction would actually be of some assistance to us!

As far as templates and fields in Laserfiche, our Finance Division uses the following fields:

• Document Type (this contains a drop-down menu to select how to fill this field out)
• Year
• Month
• Company/Name
• Subdivision

While this works for us, my best advice is to think about the type of information you are scanning and more importantly, what bits of information would be useful for future searches? These are the fields you want to set up. To take it one step further, whatever fields you choose to create, use as many drop-down menus as you can since this will aid any future searches someone might perform.

For example, if you are setting up a field called “Month”, set up a drop-down list with the 12 months to select from. That way it will be consistent. Otherwise, someone searching for a document who tries to fill in this field to help with this search won’t know if they are to put in “January”, “Jan”, “Jan.”, “01″, etc. If you are filling in information into a field and then want to search for it later, you have to match it keystroke for keystroke, so drop-downs are incredibly helpful to ensure consistency.

Of course, there is more than one way to do a search. But if you’re trying to use the benefit of templates and fields, drop-downs can be a great aid. So just think about how someone might search for this information in the future and you will be the best one to come up with your own naming conventions.

I’m interested if anyone else has advice on how best to set up a filing structure, or what naming conventions they use.

One of the best things about being a Laserfiche user is getting to share my knowledge to help other users. Recently, Dale Miller, a user in Peoria County, IL, contacted me for my advice. Dale had read the recent GME written about our installation here in Niagara Falls, and, like us, had installed Laserfiche but wasn’t using it to its full capacity. Dale had a few questions about how we use our system:

• How many areas in your organization use Laserfiche and in what capacity?
• The article implies that it’s important to set up a logical file structure. Do you feel this is important?
• Has WebLink significantly reduced the number of requests for documents that your staff receives from citizens, because they can get it themselves from the Web?
• At the end of the article, you state that “there are things we should have done differently.” What are these things?
• Finally, is there any other advice you could provide to someone like us, who is just getting started with Laserfiche?

I know these are pretty common questions about Laserfiche, so I thought other users might benefit from hearing how I answered Dale’s questions.

Just about every department within our municipality uses Laserfiche to some degree, mostly for scanning of certain types of records or, in some cases, all incoming correspondence. For example, our clerk’s office scans all by-laws, agreements, council agendas and council minutes. Other departments, like our planning office, scan all incoming correspondence.

It’s important to set up a logical file structure because after a few years of use, when you search for a document that has a certain word or phrase and Laserfiche finds 143 documents that contain that phrase, people get frustrated that they now have to sort through all those hits to find the one they were really looking for. So setting up a file structure that might mirror your paper filing system or setting up various fields that can be filled out when scanning the document will help narrow down those searches so you find what you’re looking for a lot more quickly.

WebLink has been a great addition to Laserfiche. It’s one add-on that really works well for us. I believe it does reduce the number of documents we give out, mainly our council agenda. We used to have several requests here in the office from the public every week before a council meeting from people wanting to pick up a hard copy. Now, we hardly ever give out hard copies.

When we set up our Laserfiche system, the main thing we should have done differently was set up our electronic file structure to mirror our paper filing structure. This brings a certain familiarity about the system to new users. If they know how to find a file in a cabinet, well now they can look through the same cabinet (in this case, folder) within Laserfiche to find a record. There are several ways to find a document, and a simple browse through the folders is just one of them. Another is using the search functions to look for key words and phrases and again, as discussed earlier, using template fields to help narrow search results so it’s simple to find exactly what you’re looking for. These are all things that need to be thought of ahead of time, and this is what was lacking with our system and where I would have taken some extra time in the beginning to really plan what we needed to do.

If you’re just getting started with Laserfiche, having a Laserfiche “Champion” in each department helps quite a bit. In other words, you need to find someone that might be more of a frequent user to get some extra training and really be someone that others can turn to if they are having trouble searching or scanning. This helps promote its use and also gives you someone to watch to make sure documents are properly scanned into their respective folders and not just dumped into the system for someone else to try and find later.

The key strength of the Laserfiche community, as Nien-Ling says, is how we work together to solve common problems. I’d be interested to hear if any of you have advice for new users on how to get their systems off to a strong start.