Municipal Government Archive
June 10th, 2009 by Hobey Echlin
Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.
So much so that in just three years, Saco has set a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well.
So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
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Tags: assessor's office, e-government, engineering, Enterprise, green, Planning, Public Works Department, ROI, Wastewater, Web Access, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Local Government, Municipal Government, Newsletters | Be the first to comment »
May 5th, 2009 by Hobey Echlin
To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.
The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.
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Tags: accela integration, Audit Trail, Building Department, Finance Department, GIS, Import Agent, IT, Laserfiche Toolkit, law enforcement, Local Government, Public Works Department, Quick Fields, Snapshot, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Local Government, Municipal Government, Newsletters | 3 Comments »
March 25th, 2009 by Melissa Henley
The Challenge
The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department faced a considerable challenge: increasing operational efficiency while transitioning from their rapidly-declining Document and Image Processing System (DIPS). Their current DIPS was slowing down information access and hampering staff productivity, due to an aging, ineffective query function. Whatever system the department chose, however, had to eventually integrate with the council’s planned enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Lesley Cox, Local Taxation Manager, knew that the revenue and benefits department was working with a limited budget and had to procure the best-quality system available. By implementing a Laserfiche® digital document management solution, she was able to centralise the department’s records in a single repository, saving her staff time and aggravation while simplifying future integration with the council-wide CRM system.
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Tags: international, Local Government, Quick Fields, UK, Workflow
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March 3rd, 2009
Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win.
That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that the improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.
“That’s the thing about Laserfiche,” says Todd Pickthorn, an IT expert with the Marshall School District. “Once you’ve completed one project with Laserfiche, your eyes open up to the new projects that are possible. That’s been the case with all the agencies we’re working with. When one makes an improvement, everybody reaps the rewards.”
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Tags: Enterprise, Local Government, ROI, WebLink
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February 3rd, 2009 by Melissa Henley
In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.
As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”
“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
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Tags: GIS, integration, Local Government, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Local Government, Municipal Government, Newsletters | 3 Comments »
January 9th, 2009 by Hobey Echlin
Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.
“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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Tags: disaster recovery, implementation, Local Government, Quick Fields, ROI, Snapshot, WebLink, Workflow
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Laserfiche Luminaries, Municipal Government | Be the first to comment »
December 16th, 2008
Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
The problem Rosalind Collins faced as Charlottesville, VA’s Laserfiche Administrator was not unique.
As Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue, she championed the need for a document management solution that brought Laserfiche to Charlottesville in 2000. But after years of successfully streamlining business practices in her own office and others, she was frustrated more of the city departments weren’t realizing the cost and time savings she and her staff enjoyed. Collins faced a dilemma: did she throw up her hands in frustration or would she roll up her sleeves and do something about it?
The way she tells it, she did a little bit of both: She started her own regional Laserfiche User Group.
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Tags: user groups
Posted in Customer Stories, Local Government, Municipal Government, UserNews | 2 Comments »
December 5th, 2008
In order to minimize budgetary costs for taxpayers, local governments are forever searching for more creative and efficient ways to streamline operations. Toward that end, Upper Deerfield Township has turned to document management software to build a government database that’s turning its government paperwork into electronic images and its government staff into some of the most productive in New Jersey, according to one expert who knows a little about local government.
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Tags: Agenda Manager, Audit Trail, Local Government, Web Access, WebLink, Workflow
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November 11th, 2008
Since its incorporation in 1921, the city of Lynwood, CA, has endeavored to build a safe, self-reliant and pride-filled community that welcomes citizens and businesses alike. But while this goal hasn’t changed much in the past 80-plus years, the demands of residents and city staff have. With a Laserfiche document management system at the heart of its technology strategy, however, Lynwood is positioned to meet the needs of its more than 73,000 residents, and to continue on its path of forward progress. Full story »
Tags: compliance, disaster recovery, Local Government, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Local Government, Municipal Government | 3 Comments »
November 4th, 2008 by Hobey Echlin
Compared to other cities in Nevada, Boulder City is something of an anomaly. Unlike nearby Las Vegas and the rest of Henderson County, BC is relatively quaint, with a population of just 15,000.
“We’re close to Las Vegas, we’re close to the Hoover Dam, but we’re surrounded by 200 miles of land. It’s like a buffer around us,” explains City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom. “Clark County has been one the fastest growing counties in the country. We’ve taken steps to not grow so rapidly.”
But even as modest Boulder City seems buffered from the noisy neon of its neighbors, it still faced the same information management concerns as every other city in the state. Especially since late 2007, when the state legislature passed a resolution mandating that all government agencies in Nevada be able to honor requests for public records within five working days. Full story »
Tags: Agenda Manager, Local Government, Local Government, records management, RME, WebLink
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Local Government, Municipal Government | 2 Comments »
October 14th, 2008
Visionaries are not always thinking about the future as they leave the past behind. Sometimes, they are just looking to make a change.
That was Glens Falls Records Management Tech/City Historian Wayne Wright 11 years ago. When he thumbed through a Laserfiche brochure back then, he was thinking about the bulky bound volumes of birth, death and marriage certificates the City Clerk’s office staff wrestled with on top of the copier thirty to forty times each day. A decade later Laserfiche is helping most every aspect of Glens Falls government run more efficiently, largely through the single-minded effort of an administrator who just wanted to make a change.
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Tags: Local Government, Local Government, microfilm, Quick Fields, records management, ROI
Posted in Customer Stories, Laserfiche Luminaries, Local Government, Municipal Government, UserNews | Be the first to comment »
October 10th, 2008 by Hobey Echlin
“Police departments in general create a lot of paperwork and kill a lot of trees,” says Jeffrey Beahen, Chief of Police for Elk River, MN.
But Beahen’s department is saving trees and racking up awards—including one for Excellence in Innovation in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) just this year.
“Our peers are John Hopkins University, the San Diego Police Department, the Canadian Research Center and the Dutch National Police,” Beahen notes proudly. “And little old Elk River is up on the porch with the big dogs.”
Elk Rapids, home to 24,000 and located on the outskirts of greater Minneapolis, got up on that porch thanks to Beahen’s vision of giving his officers every technological advantage available—with Laserfiche playing a vital role in both that vision and that advantage.
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Tags: law enforcement, Local Government, Local Government, police
Posted in Customer Stories, Law Enforcement, Local Government, Municipal Government | 1 Comment »
October 7th, 2008 by Melissa Henley
Nestled along the Sheep River Valley in the heart of the Alberta Foothills, the town of Okotoks, AB, is the second-fastest growing community in Canada, with a 46 percent growth rate since 2001.
According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Okotoks “can fairly call itself the greenest community in Canada, maybe the world,” as it is one of the first municipalities to establish growth targets balancing infrastructure development and environmental conservation. And true to its motto of “Historic Past, Sustainable Future,” Okotoks has received national and international recognition for its environmental initiatives, so it’s no surprise they turned to Laserfiche to reduce paper consumption. Full story »
Tags: Canada, green, Local Government, records management, RME, WebLink, Workflow
Posted in Customer Stories, Government Newsletter, Local Government, Municipal Government | 1 Comment »
October 3rd, 2008
The versatility of Laserfiche’s electronic document technology has inspired creative applications that have taken the paper out of countless government agencies and operations over the past 20 years. Now it’s reaching outside the office into that bastion of paper rustling, public government meetings.
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Tags: Agenda Manager, Local Government, Local Government
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September 19th, 2008
In Westminster, MA, the fire department uses Laserfiche primarily to convert its retention of documents from paper to digital storage. For Fire Chief Brenton Macaloney, installing Laserfiche proved vital to saving time, money and headaches when the town suffered a total loss of electronic data.
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Tags: fire department, Local Government
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