The budget crunch is upon all of us, and, as a result, we’re all looking at where the little efficiencies are to stretch our existing dollars as far as possible. With Laserfiche there are many aspects to consider when making decisions.
Repositories and licenses cost money. So does scanning. How can we best use our existing resources?
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What a great time we all had as interested members from 9 different cities converged at the Norfolk City Hall conference room for the kick-off of our newly formed Hampton Roads User Group. For those who might be reading this from outside of Virginia, I’ll tell you that Hampton Roads is a geographic area comprised of many cities and counties along the southeastern shoreline of Virginia. More information about our little “neighborhood” can be found here.
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With the support of the Eaton County Information Systems Office, the Eaton County Prosecutor’s Office has successfully transitioned from dependence on physical paper file folders. In fact, we are among the first prosecutor offices in the USA to go paperless!
Changing to electronic files isn’t a revolutionary idea; many private industries have already made the switch. But our change has been a revolutionary improvement in how we do the People’s business, and is a harbinger of the future for many other prosecutor offices.
I think it’s important to show my colleagues that there’s a better way to do business. So, on our Website, we include information on why we chose Laserfiche, how it works, the benefits and our tips and suggestions for success. There’s a frequently asked questions section that answers questions like “How do you handle discovery?” and “What happens if your computer crashes?” We had such a positive response to that page that we created and posted videos about how we work, so other prosecutors’ offices can see the benefits of Laserfiche first hand.
One of the other things I do is talk about Laserfiche whenever I can. We host on-site visits from other prosecutors’ offices interested in seeing how “paperless” we really are. (Instead of six file cabinets, we now only need a single drawer – and it doesn’t even hold paper. We use it to hold evidence CDs.) The fact that we haven’t lost a single file in over three years is earth-shattering to other prosecutors.
I also present at industry conferences. Last year, I lectured for the National College of District Attorneys (NCDA) and the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) National Advocacy Center about our paperless file management system. During these presentations, I show screenshots of our Laserfiche repository and explain our various work processes. I also like to show photos of the “before” and “after” in our office. It’s a great way to spread the word that there’s a better way to work than with paper.
We have just added to our Laserfiche software Audit Trail-Advanced, Integrator’s Toolkit, Quick Fields and several of its components (such as Pattern Matching) for our sheriff’s office and a new repository for our County Counsel.
I am very excited about Audit Trail. It will not only allow us to track who is doing what in Laserfiche, but also to add the watermarks to the printed and e-mailed documents that we have been needing desperately. As a District Attorney’s office, having the correct information on the document (like when it was printed) can be very helpful when you’re going to produce documents for discovery.
I now have a new goal. That is to learn SQL 2005 Reports so I can actually write reports for the Audit Trail…Always something new to learn.
Suzanne Brean
Linn County District Attorney’s Office
Linn County, Oregon
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:
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:
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.
Our implementation of Laserfiche 7 is very stable and mature, and great care must be taken as we migrate up to version 8.
My current plan is to stand up new hardware as a Laserfiche 8 server. I am not sure that our size warrants a separate server for Weblink and Web Access, but it might. If WebAccess 8 truly is a client replacement I may end up with most of my Client users switching to WebAccess. SQL and file storage on separate boxes, of course.
Having a new LF8 server will allow our migration to occur over a much longer period of time than an in-place upgrade. (I’m not sure if in-place upgrades are even POSSIBLE from 7 to 8.)
This will also allow us to work (with our VAR) on rewriting our custom code and rewriting our Workflows. The new possibilities of Workflow are very exciting, but it will take some work to re-create our old workflows. Of course, this gives us an opportunity to remake them better - faster - stronger! (smarter?)
In the end we should have a nicely tuned and updated Laserfiche 8 implementation.
What are your plans, and what timeline are you thinking about?
One of our departments was recently faced with the task of finding an alternate means of storage for a very large volume of information housed on the main server. Although we knew Laserfiche was the answer to the storage dilemma, we were still faced with the task of converting thousands of PDF documents to Laserfiche format with minimal staff interaction.
We discovered that files can be quickly imported into Laserfiche by making a few simple changes to the user options for handling new documents. When the “Always show Document Metadata dialog” box within the New Document Options window is deselected, the user is not prompted for action each time a document is processed, which saves valuable staff and processing time (path: Tools/Options/New Documents).
After making the appropriate changes to the user options, we simply pulled the PDF files from the main server to the desired Laserfiche location (copy and paste). The files were reselected, OCRed and indexed (process: select all files/choose “Snapshot” from the “Action” menu/click “OK”). Once the OCR and indexing functions were complete, the files were once again selected and the electronic documents removed to reveal fully OCRed and indexed Laserfiche images/TIFs (process: select all files/choose “Delete Electronic Files” from the “Action” menu).
The County of Hawai`i’s Office of the Corporation Counsel is fully enjoying the use of Laserfiche. Our staff members enjoy the flexibility of making Laserfiche “our own” – suited for our unique office. We enjoy the simple features such as emailing directly from Laserfiche, dragging & dropping documents, Bates Numbering and the efficient search tools. Our Counseling & Drafting Division within our Department has reaped the benefits of using Laserfiche. The response time to our clients has been outstanding. We get a lot more done in less time and because of this the morale of our staff has gone up.
We are currently working on implementing Phase II of Laserfiche within our Litigation Division. This is a very exciting time for our staff! Litigation files can be quite a challenge due to its complex and voluminous size but we have faith that Laserfiche is up for the challenge to make Phase II a success! We are already off to a great start. The Bates Numbering feature is really big for us! At times, a file can have over 1,000 pages that need numbering – the process of using Bates Numbering surely beats hearing that old “Bates” clunker machine 1,000+ times in one day! The use of the redaction tool has also proved beneficial to confidential information that must be kept hidden. If anyone has experience with legal files using Laserfiche, we’d love to hear from you!
Laserfiche has truly helped our department purge many, many boxes of files. In fact, we were able to donate several filing cabinets to a local high school that lost their filing cabinets in a fire.
What’s next for our department? We are working on using Digital Signatures for our documents. We are very excited about this new technology as it will open many new doors for our staff members.
One more exciting event for our office is our 6th Annual Municipal Attorney’s Training Conference to be held at the beautiful Hilton Waikoloa Village. We are fortunate to have Steve Hackney from the Laserfiche Institute conduct training sessions for our users. We are thrilled to have this valuable training brought to our island. Many of our County employees are interested in attending and plan to walk away with some knowledge that will benefit them in their daily work lives using Laserfiche! Welcome to Hawai`i, Steve!
Our office is just as active with our Laserfiche program as the volcanoes are erupting on our island!
Till next time…..aloha & mahalo!
Aloha Laserfiche community from the beautiful Big Island of Hawaii!
As we celebrate King Kamehameha holiday today, we officially unveiled the release of Laserfiche Weblink for the Clerk-Council Office. It is yet another exciting milestone in our project to implement Laserfiche to 7 departments here in our County . That’s right ; an enterprise plan to roll it out to 7 key departments in a year and we are almost there ! Wwwhheeewww….. So how did we do it? That will be in my next blog. A lot of credit goes to my IT colleagues who tirelessly worked with me in making this happen.
Now back to Weblink…. Check out our press release about Laserfiche Weblink. This media release was sent to all Big Island newspapers plus the 2 big newspapers based in Honolulu with state wide circulation. It is actually published today in the Hilo newspaper. Talk about coverage…..
Mahalo ( Hawaiian 101… that means ‘Thank You’ ) to Alex Huang for his Weblink customization class in the recent Laserfiche User Conference. I certainly used all that he taught in customizing our Weblink site.
What’s coming up in the horizon for me ? I am hosting a site visit from another Hawaii County whose IT folks have been wanting to meet with us regarding our Laserfiche system… Yeah, well, that’s another blog too….