The purpose of our group is to provide and promote best practices to Hampton Roads Laserfiche Users so that we can more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of our customers.
Hampton Roads User Group Mission Statement

User Groups have become the rage with Laserfiche, and thank goodness! What an invaluable resource for learning more about this information technology specialty, keeping up with your network (‘cause there’s never enough time!) and maybe even offering some of your time and talent to provide leadership for your group.

Public and private agencies are hungry for easy to implement initiatives for Laserfiche, easy fixes to everyday problems and practical knowledge and experience about the different Laserfiche applications. You can find these ideas and more in your User Group.

Empower your User Group to share what they know, learn what they want, and provide access to information and resources to meet their needs.

Some of the ways in which the Hampton Roads User Group is empowered include:

• All presentations are provided based on member input and requests. We (the group leaders and our VAR) develop and deliver what the members ask for.
• All members are contributors to the Hampton Roads User Group Website. Members can keep their contact information current, and post or join in the newly established Discussion Board.
• Current leadership welcomes members who are interested in expanding their role to become a group leader. All User Groups require some degree of coordination, communication and overall support.

This approach – empowering the users – has made this group’s experience meaningful and fun for the members, the group leadership and the VAR.

Remember – It’s YOUR User Group!!

But then we were looking at a new program, new processes and new documents for this Housing Affordability Grant program. Applicants send in a signed application with a copy of their federal return, which we must retain. When they are entered in the database designed for this process, a “cover sheet” is printed and placed on top. Since the cover sheet is the same format for all the documents, it was an easy Quick Fields fit. But we didn’t want to have to try to OCR the name and other data into the Laserfiche document template, because it’s already available in the program’s database and user entry or even OCR entry would potentially lead to errors and repairing. 100% accuracy could be achieved only by using the database data. So, we have Quick Fields OCR the parcel number and go get the name and other information from the database based on the parcel number match! So simple and yet, without the right tool, a complex programmatic issue!

More to come very soon about a Virginia Statewide User Group Seminar Dec 1st in Chesterfield, VA. Stay tuned ….

Training will cover electronic records, both scanned documents as well as other electronically stored records (such as databases, Word files, Excel, etc). Retention and destruction requirements and using the retention schedules will all be included as well.

One of our members, Corey Smith, from the Library of Virginia, has provided some information that provides excellent background and will help everyone attending come prepared with specific, pertinent questions.

Corey says:

“As your primary interest is with electronic records that are scanned and in a database, I would like to mention that records follow the same retention period regardless of format. Caveats come into play as retention periods differ and some records may not be the best candidate for a particular format. For example, a record with a 50 yr retention would not be recommended to kept on a CD. The life expectancy of a CD is only 20 yrs. Because of this, anything with a permanent retention or with a long retention would not be recommended for a CD format.

“On our LVA Website, you can access our updated Electronic Records Guidelines that can hopefully provide some additional information for your benefit.

“To give you an idea of what’s considered personal identifying information, under section “C” of 18.2-186.3 in the Code of Virginia, it defines certain types of personal identifying information.”

If you’re in the Central Virginia area, we hope to see you at our User Group meeting!

Our Agenda:

• Welcome/introductions
• Group business & info
• Lightning Talks (Mini-Success Stories) – each person has up to 3 minutes to talk about something cool they learned or did with Laserfiche recently
• Library of Virginia presentation, followed by questions from attendees

For directions to the meeting, visit the Albemarle Website. Of course refreshments will be provided!

In typical fashion, the meeting provided those 3 key elements to the success of everything: food, folks, and fun. But in the midst of all of this frivolity, a lot of information was shared, too.

Debbie Wolff started the meeting out with a discussion on budget-saving/cost-cutting measures which can be realized through business process optimizations. This discussion led to some ideas about ways the group could discuss this topic regularly, including through our established user group Website.

We then moved on to a permitting demonstration by Jonathan Kim, a Presales Engineer with Laserfiche. His Web demonstration consisted of walking us through the process of applying for a permit to install a new water heater, from citizen, to government, and back again, using Laserfiche Workflow to automate the process. What a great advantage it was for both Laserfiche and our User Group to have someone on the west coast do a demonstration for us on the east coast without having to go through airport security!

We wrapped the meeting up with some updates from one of our local value-added resellers, Unity Business Systems, as well as some updates on what was “going on” at Laserfiche by way of Melissa Henley, lead marketing writer at Laserfiche as well as one of our user group’s strongest cheerleaders.

The great attendance and positive response at the meeting, as well as an exciting agenda for our next gathering have all signs pointing towards a bright future.

All aboard!

Repositories and licenses cost money. So does scanning. How can we best use our existing resources?

Change your repository settings!

Changing your repository options, specifically the ‘logout automatically’ option, will prevent your users from becoming license hogs. That person who logs in and then leaves for lunch will be logged off automatically, freeing up a license for another user.

In Hampton, we’ve adopted a 1:5 user license ratio for both FX and RX licenses. Due to the fact that licenses are concurrent, we believe that it’s reasonable to expect that any user, particularly retrieve or read-only users, will access Laserfiche, find what they need and then exit the system.

What kind of scanning devices do you have available?

While scanners are “the” option when it comes to high quantity document capture, almost all types of copy machines have scanning capability and can easily scan to e-mail. Ask your IT Department or manufacturer representative to set the image to either tiff or pdf and add all users to the email setting.

Even if all of your office staff are not Laserfiche users, being able to copy/scan to e-mail prevents the proliferation of paper, which could be another significant cost savings for you.

Do all of your users know, understand and use Laserfiche’s e-mail utility?

This again will decrease the proliferation of paper in your office and to your clients or the public.

Are you fully utilizing your LSAP?

Your time is valuable to your employer and we all pay for software support. When you have questions, contact your reseller and employ their assistance with answers and best practices. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

What’s in Laserfiche?

If Laserfiche has become the new dumping ground (in addition to your network, pc’s, and ancillary devices…) then your data – and your server – could use some basic management.

1. Purge your data; set up your Records Management Edition if you have it – practice good records management!
2. Check your folder structure.
3. Manage your volumes.
4. Use your Column Display wisely.

See Laserfiche’s “Performance Tuning for Laserfiche Systems” (available on the Support Site) for more information.

Please share your efficiencies! We all need insightful tips and tricks to maximize our resources.

Better still, I continue to get a steady stream of new requests from individuals interested in joining in next time, guaranteeing an even bigger affair when we meet again on May 7th at the same location.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to thank those who made this first event a successful one:

• Debbie Wolff from City of Hampton, who is serving as the co-chair of our group.
• Jan Stringer from International Cooperating Ministries in Hampton, who helped provide the goodies.
• John Lane from Unity Business Systems, our Value Added Reseller, who provided some of our freebies.
• Cameron Waite from the City of Norfolk, who helped with the minutes and note-taking.
• Rosalind Collins from the City of Charlottesville, who lent ideas about our possible group structure and logistics.
• Melissa Henley and Brian Lim from Laserfiche, who provided support and helped create our logo.

These are exciting times for us in Hampton Roads, and we look forward to these meetings as a cost-effective and beneficial way for us to share ideas, talk about best practices, and train each other.

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.

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

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.

• 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.

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?

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).

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!

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….