With unemployment rates hovering around 10%, stocks subject to wild swings and experts unable to agree whether the country is likely to dip into a double recession, cities across the country are being forced to confront deeper and deeper budget cuts. Full story »

When making the case for upgrading Shakopee, MN, to Laserfiche Avante, Carrie Duckett, the city’s Information Technology Coordinator, did her due diligence. “To date, there hasn’t been one Minnesota city that’s purchased Laserfiche and left for one of its main competitors. But in 2010 alone, six of the state’s cities and counties migrated onto Laserfiche from a competitive system.” Full story »

One would think granting citizens around-the-clock access to their local government offices and officials might be met with some resistance. O’Fallon, IL, deputy clerk Maryanne Fair loves it.

“Our municipal Website is like having city hall open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” she says. “My office is only open from 8:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M., but even after hours, people can still find what they need.”
Full story »

A decade ago, staff from the Planning and Public Works Department in the City of Lakewood, CO, created the Digital Archives Group (DAG) to find more efficient ways to manage 30 years’ worth of maps, plats and plans. Full story »

In the decade since the City of Eugene, OR, first implemented Laserfiche to “get everyone on the same page,” as former city recorder Mary Feldman put it, Laserfiche has been deployed to the City Manager’s Office, City Attorney’s Office and Public Works Administration, Planning and Development, Police, Wastewater, City Prosecutor, and Municipal Court. As Department Application Team Manager Loring G. Hummel explains, this resulted in four separate Laserfiche services, one of which included multiple workgroups that shared concurrent licenses between the City Manager’s Office, Planning, and Public Works Administration.
Full story »

Oshkosh, WI, a city of just over 65,000 residents, has an impressive statistic to share: IT Director Tony Neumann and his staff of just seven have maintained the same budget over the last ten years. In fact, the IT department’s operational expenses have actually dropped by 33% since 2000.

Not surprisingly, against this backdrop of budgetary efficiency, Neumann and his team have initiated several infrastructural enhancements to the city’s technology wheelhouse that have resulted most recently in a redesign of the city’s website. Completed in May 2010, the redesign is the culmination of an e-Government Web strategy used by virtually all of Oshkosh’s departments to provide automated information and services to citizens. Helping to drive these services, Neumann says, is Oshkosh’s use of the Laserfiche WebLink 8 public portal, a key component of Laserfiche’s enterprise content management (ECM) suite. Full story »

The City of Stillwater is one of Minnesota’s oldest historic communities, which you can see using one of its newest technologies, its Laserfiche WebLink 8 public portal. In only a few clicks, you’ll find minutes from City Council meetings dating back to 1888, as well as other public documents. In fact, providing a Web content portal is only one of the ways the city saves staff time and costs with its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system—proving Stillwater to be not just one of the state’s oldest cities, but one of its wisest, as well.
Full story »

The Town of Florence, AZ, is a modest town of just over 20,000 located between Phoenix and Tucson. Even with its small size, Florence has always had big ideas for how to use Laserfiche to do more with less, growing its system from a simple archiving tool to a town-wide enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) solution.

“Our approach to technology has always been to be proactive, not reactive,” says Town Clerk Lisa Garcia.
Full story »

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes teamwork to change a city. For Westminster, a city of nearly 100,000 people located in Southern California’s Orange County, the need to change was highlighted when a new Assistant City Clerk—Pat Jacquez-Nares—came onboard.
Full story »

When you think of Vail, you think of a winter wonderland of world-class skiing by day and cozy, snowed-in evenings in front of a roaring fire by night. So do the wealth of seasonal visitors and second homeowners that make their way to the outdoor recreation destination in numbers that can quadruple the town’s modest population of 5,000 residents. “Vail’s a small town with a huge national and international visitor population which can grow to over 20,000 at times,” says Michael Wolfe, the Town’s records manager.
Full story »

No municipality has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche community more visibly this year than Norfolk, VA. So much so that the city’s in-house Laserfiche champions have encouraged user interaction by co-founding the Hampton Roads User Group, one of an unprecedented number of user groups that have sprung up across the state in the last two years.

The way W. Alondo McClees, Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Systems Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of Revenue, explains it, he and his colleagues were just “filling a need” when he and users from three other Virginia municipalities (Fredericksburg, Hanover and Charlottesville) first initiated a statewide Laserfiche user group for their Commissioner of Revenue offices at a 2007 regional conference.
Full story »

When Wendi Smith accompanied her friend Kristy DeLong from the City of Carmel, IN, to the Laserfiche Conference in Los Angeles last January, she was supposed to be on vacation. But as the Administrative Assistant for the Town of Brownsburg’s Planning and Building Department, Smith started to get her own ideas about the kinds of cost-savings and operational efficiencies Laserfiche could bring to the modest but progressive Brownsburg, a town of just 20,000 that Money Magazine named the 33rd “Best Place to Live in America.”
Full story »

The City of Sun Prairie, WI, is the fastest growing city in Wisconsin with 26,000 residents and counting. But serving this rapidly expanding community has meant its municipal offices are spread out between its City Hall and satellite facilities that house various departments, its wastewater treatment and even a public access cable station. The main fire and EMS stations are housed in yet a third location.

So when City Clerk Diane Hermann-Brown says staying on top of Sun Prairie’s mounting paperwork was a city-wide problem, she literally means city-wide. “With all of our various departments that are off-site, it wasn’t just an issue of the time involved to retrieve the documents, but the time and resources involved in sending a clear, clean copy to the requesting party,” she says. “From the start our vision was to have a records management system where people could search, retrieve and print their own copies without ever leaving their work station.”
Full story »