Located just outside of Los Angeles, CA, the City of Long Beach turned to technology to cut costs—and create innovative ways to improve citizen service delivery. In fact, Long Beach has been so successful at leveraging technology that it has just been named one of the top ten digital cities in the U.S. with a population of 250,000 or more by the Center for Digital Government.

“The City of Long Beach takes great pride in our use of technology to be more efficient and make City Hall more accessible and responsive to the community,” says Mayor Bob Foster.

According to Curtis Tani, Director of Technology Services, the effort to reduce costs without compromising service delivery has been three-pronged:

• Consolidate information and communication technology (ICT) services.
• Increase transparency and collaboration across the enterprise.
• Digitize processes, forms and workflow.

“The Mayor, the City Council and City staff understood the value that technology could bring the city and were open to change at the foundational level to allow Long Beach to become a technology leader,” says Tani. “They understood that the shortfalls in our budget challenged operational efficiencies and gave the Technology Services Department the freedom to lead initiatives to make Long Beach a digital community.”

IT’s Strategy: Consolidate and Standardize

Long Beach has worked hard to consolidate technology functions to create budget efficiencies while still providing enough flexibility for each department to run efficiently. “By bringing our IT staff into one office and centralizing IT oversight, we’ve been able to decrease overall staffing costs as well as the number of overlapping technology investments,” Tani explains.

For example, in 2009, Long Beach chose to replace its existing IBM FileNet system in various departments with a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system that could be used across the city. “We selected Laserfiche to create more consistency, efficiency and transparency, while saving the city many thousands of dollars in equipment and maintenance fees,” Tani says.

In fact, by implementing a single Laserfiche system, the city cut its annual ECM support costs by 50%. “Our strategy is to implement shared services to capitalize on existing funding and consolidate services,” explains Tani. “Our ECM system is just one example of this.”

Other cost-saving IT consolidation efforts include:

• A new, enterprise-wide Internet-based phone system expected to generate $165,000 in annual savings.
• Virtual servers and workstations expected to generate $100,000 in energy and hardware savings over three years.
• Cluster databases that have reduced licensing and hardware fees.

ECM and Open Government

In April 2011, the Long Beach City Council adopted an open government policy identifying transparency as a core function of local government. To that end, making information more accessible by staff and citizens alike has been a top priority.

“Long Beach is dedicated to fostering and promoting open and transparent government where everyone in our community can easily participate and be engaged,” explains Long Beach City Clerk Larry Herrera. “As one of the largest cities in California, we are committed to exploring best practices, adopting new technologies that simplify and speed up all work processes and providing a level of customer service that is unmatched.”

Herrera notes that the City Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to streamline paperwork and processes, helping the city deliver higher service at a lower cost. “In 2002, we needed 28 people to provide the public with quick, accurate and effective answers to their questions about our community. Today, with a staff of 17, our level of customer service is better than ever before.”

Over the past year and a half, the city has spent approximately $120,000 for offsite record storage. Staff had to manually retrieve paper records to answer requests, leading to delays in service and extra costs. As more and more records are added to Laserfiche, information access is improved and storage costs are expected to decrease.

On a daily basis, the City Clerk’s office scans thousands of records into Laserfiche. Just a few of the document types available in Laserfiche include:

• City contracts.
• Campaign finance reports.
• Statements of economic interest.
• Council agendas and staff reports.
• Election ballots.
• Sample ballots.
• Voted returns.

Last spring, the city made all city contracts executed as of the first of the year available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a read-only public portal. With 24/7 online viewing access, city residents, contractors and employees no longer have to submit public records act (PRA) requests for these items, simplifying access and saving time for both requestors and the City Clerk’s staff.

ECM across the Enterprise

In addition to the City Clerk’s office, the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) relies heavily on Laserfiche, using the ECM system to make information such as gang injunctions, citations, restraining orders, field interview cards and accident reports available to officers in their patrol cars.

LBPD Police Chief Jim McDonnell notes that since implementing an improved gang injunction system using Laserfiche, gang violence in Long Beach has decreased. In 2010, the first year of using the new gang injunction system, gang-related murders dropped by 53.8%. “By pairing technology with optimized policies and procedures, we’ve been able to reduce violent crime in the face of severe budget constraints. Our officers were able to spend less time on administrative tasks and reinvest this time to keeping the streets safe.”

According to Jonathan Stafford, Administrator of LBPD’s Records and Technology Division, “We were delighted when the city decided to standardize on Laserfiche. We were confident that the simplicity and flexibility of the system would enable us to be more efficient by streamlining our processes.”

Other departments that have undergone concerted efforts to digitize paper processes include:

• Financial Management.
• Human Resources.
• Development Services.

For example, in 2011 the city expanded the types of permits and licenses that can be obtained online via the Website to include garage sale permits, temporary preferential parking permits, oversized vehicle parking permits and pet licenses. Technology Services also developed an interactive Fees and Charges Web application that allows the public to easily search for fees based on department, activity or keyword.

Long Beach began streamlining its accounting processes by integrating Laserfiche with its business intelligence (BI) system. Through the integration, images of the accounts payable invoices managed in Laserfiche are available to authorized users through the BI interface. This streamlines the process of researching expenditures by eliminating the need to manually pull the physical copies of the invoices.

Long Beach City Manager Pat West explains, “Our goal is to virtualize and streamline the access and flow of records and information within the city, while ensuring security. We have been pleased with the Laserfiche system, because it easily expands and adapts to the technological and human factor needs of various departments while providing central control that is needed to ensure accountability.”

Elements of Success

According to Tani, “All the right elements were aligned for the success of our technology initiatives. City leadership, staff and citizens were onboard with the transition and willing to go above and beyond to make our efforts to centralize and standardize Long Beach’s approach to technology successful.”

In addition to the Laserfiche projects outlined above, a few of the innovative ways the citizens of Long Beach can now use technology include:

• Submitting service requests for sidewalk, graffiti and pothole repair through Long Beach’s Website or via the city’s iPhone and Android apps.
• Watching live and archived City Council meetings on the Internet, iPhone or iPad.
• Obtaining time-sensitive information such as road closures or missing persons from the police via Web, social media, live text and/or e-mail alerts.
• Using social media to access enhanced content including traffic and construction alerts, videos, news, pictures and other information.

Tani also notes that having buy-in from the community was essential to the city’s IT transformation. “We had overwhelmingly positive responses to different application launches—both from the media and end users.” He explains that the media provided ample coverage of different applications and technology tools for both public safety and general city services, and that the community was willing to try the new applications and processes and provide their feedback.

“Ultimately, increasing the dialogue between city officials and the community is what has given the city’s technology initiatives energy and poised them for success and sustainability,” he says.

As a result of the collaboration between city leadership, staff and citizens, Long Beach has used technology to position itself as a leader for the future.

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT Department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT Department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:

- “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
- “Within Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
- “Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a Web browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the Police Department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the Police Department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with New World, the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

The integration works as follows:

- Officers access an incident report in New World.
- By right-clicking on the New World screen, a box with a “Search Laserfiche” button pops up.
- Clicking the button launches Laserfiche and automatically takes the user directly to the right case folder, where he can view the evidence photos.

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

She also notes that Laserfiche allows officers to access photos in the field from their squad cars, which is something they couldn’t do in the past. “It’s an officer safety issue,” she says. “For example, if the officers come across a tagger with a known gang affiliation, they can treat that individual with more caution.”

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the Police Department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the Finance Department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the Police Department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the New World integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:

• The Police Department, which will use it for crime mapping.
• The Fire Department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
• The Public Works Department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the Finance, Building and Police Departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our e-mail client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

“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.”

Making Public Information Public

O’Fallon has been using Laserfiche since 2002, and they implemented their WebLink public portal as a part of their initial system. Working with Laserfiche reseller EDCO Group, the WebLink public portal opened all but select parts of the city’s Laserfiche content server.

Laserfiche was customized with a file tree structure broken down into nine main entries covering different departments in City Hall. Each of those was then broken down again into folders that reflected the range of documents each department was responsible for. According to IT Director John Presley, this file structure was selected to make information easier to find for casual searchers, as curious residents searching city documents account for a lot of the traffic on the site.

After a brief promotional effort around the community, City Hall started fielding calls seeking information on the WebLink public portal. It appears now that all the customization paid off as document inquiries have dropped off dramatically, according to City Clerk Phil Goodwin.

“Basic research questions have gone down by as much as two-thirds because people are already finding the info they need on their own,” he adds.

Freedom from FOIA Requests

Freedom of Information Act requests used to be an unpleasant subject around the offices of O’Fallon City Hall. It wasn’t the public’s right to access government records that bothered staff so much as the work involved in providing that access. FOIA requests, as they are better known, can be vexing for city clerks that must respond to them. When submitted by laypersons in the community, they can be poorly worded and difficult to understand and respond to. When professionals file FOIA requests, they can be tedious and complex tasks requiring dozens—even hundreds—of hours to fulfill.

So, when a couple of attorneys filed a FOIA request for documents related to an O’Fallon construction project last year, the request looked like it would take two staffers a month each to fulfill. Then one of those staffers suggested sending the attorneys to the city’s WebLink public portal.

That was the last staff heard of that FOIA request.

“We sent them an e-mail about WebLink and they did the rest,” Presley says. “They found everything they needed right there. It turned out to be a tremendous time saver for us—and for them.”

Presley points out the cost-effectiveness of having documents available through the WebLink public portal. “That FOIA request would have taken two staffers a full month to fill without WebLink,” he says. “With WebLink, the attorneys could search our documents themselves, which saved us thousands of dollars for just that one request.”

FOIA requests have dropped by at least 50 percent since the WebLink portal has been available, and a lot of the traffic comes from contractors doing business with the city, Presley says. They can submit RFPs much more quickly using WebLink because they can call up old contracts and cut and paste much of the perquisite text.

An Eye to the Future

Last year six gigabytes of O’Fallon forms and files were downloaded through O’Fallon’s Website—that’s tens of thousands of pages of documents that were not copied and distributed by city hall staff.

“People are really accessing and downloading this information,” Presley says. “When you consider these PDF documents are just a couple of kilobytes each in size, you realize that community acclimation to WebLink has really taken place.”

The site’s popularity has prompted O’Fallon to start planning to integrate the city’s GIS application with Laserfiche, opening public access to a vast store of government maps.
The public is clearly responding to the increased access to government records. City Hall staffers are getting emails from potential FOIA filers saying they found what they needed instead on WebLink, Presley says.

It’s not just O’Fallon residents and businesses benefitting. WebLink is also adding hours to every work day not devoted to pulling government files that can be found for free on WebLink, Presley says.

“With the volume of usage we’re seeing, WebLink has paid for itself tenfold in staff time savings,” he says. “Now staff can concentrate on their primary role of running the city instead of running around and pulling documents for FOIA requests. FOIA used to be a real unpleasant word around City Hall. Now the subject doesn’t even come up.”

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing in the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the Finance Department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments used Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element since Lakewood began using Laserfiche in 2001 “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component in solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was utilizing the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and the Planning and Public Works Department’s new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, they click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows them the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If they need to e-mail those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the City maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s Web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our Web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of Web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated Web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

When it came time to upgrade to Laserfiche 8, Hummel saw that a consolidation to an enterprise solution made sense to streamline administration, and would allow him to better leverage his own staff to handle future integrations and deployments. Eugene’s long-time reseller VPCI, of course, had an app for that: Laserfiche Rio enterprise content management.

In April 2009, Hummel submitted a memorandum to Eugene’s Central Services Advisory Board outlining a plan to consolidate Eugene’s four Laserfiche systems by moving to Rio. Besides recapping the “high return on investment” Eugene had already enjoyed in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and “new capabilities”—GIS and SharePoint integration among them—as well as asset protection over the last ten years, he outlined the potential benefits of moving to Rio:

• Unlimited Servers and Repositories: With the unlimited servers included in the Rio system, Hummel’s team could easily establish environments for testing and pilot projects.
• Named User Licenses: Instead of limiting mission-critical users like judges and 911 operators with first-come, first-serve concurrent licensing, licenses assigned to individual users would provide constant access.
• Enterprise-Wide Features: Because Rio licenses come fully loaded with a complete suite of applications, features currently used by certain departments—including Workflow, Records Management and the Laserfiche SharePoint integration—would now be available city-wide.
• Unlimited Read-Only Public Connections: Rio’s Public Portal provides unlimited read-only connections through Laserfiche WebLink 8, which would enable the city to meet surges in public demand for information.

Hummel points out that a 100% credit offered by Laserfiche, as well as pooling support costs, not only made the Rio upgrade affordable—only about 10% more of what the four contracts totaled—but it also allowed the city to centralize administration and IT staffing for further deployment and customization.

Leveraging a city-wide telecom tax set up to support three-year IT projects, Hummel was able to secure a funding boost to launch the project, while giving departments a temporary break from their own support costs until 2013. The Board agreed with the plan and the project was funded in summer 2009.

The Rio Reality

“We didn’t really start our Rio deployment until after the 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles,” Hummel explains. “We have a large enough IT staff to do a lot of work in-house, so we wanted to learn as much as we could before we got started.”

His strategy’s working; the Rio upgrade will be complete this month. “Rio not only solves our licensing problem, but it also lays the framework for Laserfiche as a common content management platform for everyone across the enterprise,” Hummel adds. “Beyond that, it has the potential to become a real information sharing and collaboration tool.”

The biggest improvement, Hummel says, is centralizing Laserfiche administration and service. “I think we’ve made a more professional IT environment for Laserfiche—which is part of laying the groundwork for future deployment,” he says. “We’re proactive in that we’re able to apply patches and fixes all at once. Where we had functions within departments before, we’re able to cultivate expertise in the right place as far as re-aligning departmental staff into central server administration.”

At the same time, he adds, the Rio centralization has afforded Eugene greater control and oversight of its information assets. “A big benefit is that the whole system is auditable. Because Laserfiche authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs,” Hummel says. “Now, we’re treating Laserfiche like one of our larger information systems such as ERP and database servers that also encompass risk management and compliance.”

And, he says, having a single, standardized ECM system allows staff to be more self-sufficient. “We have a lot of applications with embedded Laserfiche components, so we use the Laserfiche SDK a lot. We’re a .NET shop, so that’s the kind of flexibility that’s important to us,” Hummel says. “Laserfiche offers flexibility and programmability in terms of .NET integration that allows a full-featured IT shop like ours to use the tools we already have to fully customize it for our own applications.”

He points to a recent example. “We built an ASP.net web application for our Planning and Development department for building inspectors that has GIS maps, their routes, etc. All supporting documents are stored in Laserfiche, but the inspectors use the application in their car, and click on a button and the supporting documents come up in WebLink—without them knowing where it came from. All the searching and metadata is behind the scenes. We basically wrote our own client.”

Standardizing Enterprise-Wide

For Hummel, standardization is its own combination of reality and potential. “In government, everything seems to grow in silos, by workgroup and department,” Hummel says. “The ability to easily and seamlessly automate information across organizational boundaries—it’s kind of the holy grail of IT.

“Just having Laserfiche isn’t going to get us there, but our Rio-based architecture—and by that I mean both the placement of servers on our network as well as the way we positioned our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes—gives us the technical framework that will allow departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start,” he adds.

He also points to the promise of Workflow, which will enable his department to easily develop and implement standardized, repeatable processes. “For city-wide applications, we’ll write our own custom user interfaces. We want to use the workflow engine, but we’ll build in interactivity using the ToolKit API and .NET,” he says.

One of these new business processes is city-wide contract management. “Right now, every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the City Recorder’s archives. They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them,” Hummel says. “One of the things that attracted us to Rio was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”

Hummel points to this efficiency in the evolution—and simplification—of how the Eugene Police Department (EPD) shares reports with the Eugene Municipal Court (MuniCourt). The EPD first used shortcuts to a special distribution folder in Laserfiche, then a custom integration that briefcased police reports to move it into the MuniCourt repository—which still created multiple copies. Now with Rio, EPD staff use a simple “yes/no” MuniCourt template field to give the court read-only access to designated reports in the EPD folder, which are searchable by case number. “We actually had a customization written for the prosecutor [to briefcase reports for MuniCourt]. But since going to Rio, now that they’re sharing common services, we’ve eliminated a ton of custom code and complexity,” Hummel says.

Reaching ROI

Hummel is confident this self-sufficiency will translate into enterprise efficiency, especially staffing-wise. “We’re not talking about using automation to eliminate positions, but we’re looking at using technology to cope with positions we have already lost during the economic downturn, as well as any future staff reductions,” Hummel says. “We want to make sure the level of service doesn’t denigrate. We want to cope with the reduced footprint using automation tools. Laserfiche is one way to do that.”

Besides efficiency, he says, Rio has allowed his staff the freedom and focus to excel as well. “The Information Services Department is 40-plus people, where all six city departments have two to three analysts to determine their application needs,” Hummel explains. “Every department is really its own business. One of the challenges is to serve very specialized departmental needs with a fairly modest staff. Each of member of my team is assigned directly to a department for application support, so professional collaboration among IT staff has always been a challenge.

“Laserfiche has been a unifier,” he adds. “We have a team of Laserfiche IT folks where we can make the most of where the expertise lies to serve all the different departments. It’s made the upgrade possible. We have this collaborative environment that’s made the lines between assignments more fuzzy so hopefully that will be a catalyst for other [IT-driven] endeavors.”

Hummel notes functionality his staff once had to develop themselves is now out-of-the-box. “The last version of WebLink, we basically re-wrote it to be our own version. But WebLink 8 is essentially like the Adobe reader interface, so now we’re ripping out custom code.” That, and the collaborative, catalyzing environment standardizing on the Rio ECM system inspires, is encouraging, he says, both for the success of the Laserfiche consolidation, but in terms of the reality and potential of his own department.

“If you look at companies like Microsoft or Apple, they owe a lot of their success to the way developers are able to build innovative solutions in it,” Hummel says. “It’s not locked down. Like Laserfiche, it’s a broader base of development that encourages more innovation, because users are not just customers, they’re partners.”

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.

Finding an ECM System and Standardizing for the Future

One of the first things Neumann did when he came to Oshkosh a decade ago was to implement a proper ECM solution in the City Clerk’s Office. Paper storage in the already packed offices, he remembers, “was like trying to stuff ten pounds into a five-pound bag.” What’s more, the legacy document indexing system, MuniMetrix, was proprietary, “which to me was just scary,” he adds.

On September 11, 2001, Gary Eide of Laserfiche reseller Computer Technologies Access showed Neumann how a Laserfiche system could help not just the Clerk’s Office, but also just about every other city department. “I liked the fact that [Laserfiche] was non-proprietary and SQL-based. Plus, the way the system extracted text from documents [via OCR] seemed very forward-thinking, and we like to think of Oshkosh as a forward-thinking city,” Neumann says.

Neumann had cut his teeth on mainframe systems in the military, so Laserfiche appealed to his service-oriented architecture (SOA) sensibilities. “When I look at a product, I look at any use different business units have even remotely in common,” he says. “Laserfiche is an application that crosses many boundaries—it’s one product that literally touches every department.”

Neumann seized the opportunity to adopt a single, unified standard for the city’s metadata. “Standardization was one of the initial core changes that would move Oshkosh forward,” he says. And it would do so by providing a common model for content storage, making it easier to find, link and retrieve: “We saw the potential for the cross-utilization and system interoperability that would allow for distribution and cross-interaction. Plus we’d minimize compatibility issues and allow for future expansion and technology migration over time.”

In February 2002, Computer Technologies Access installed and configured the new Laserfiche system in less than a week, and the impact on the Clerk’s Office and the Inspections Division was immediate:

• Storage space was converted back to office space.
• Internally, staff no longer needed to print documents to image them; they could be imported directly using Laserfiche Snapshot.
• Departmental employees were given their own access to the Laserfiche repository.

Implementing Laserfiche WebLink, Neumann says, sparked what he calls “an evolution” of Oshkosh’s e-Government strategy. Procedurally, because departmental staff could now make public information available themselves, Neumann’s department was no longer inundated with requests to publish cumbersome PDFs or send out mass e-mails to citizens. “Wisconsin has a pretty comprehensive open records law, so pretty much everything had to be made available,” Neumann explains. “WebLink basically extended public information services right to people’s living rooms.

“Customer satisfaction went through the roof—we started getting complimentary phone calls instead of derogatory ones,” he laughs.

Evolving a Successful e-Government Strategy

Establishing formal ROI statistics when your IT department is spending 33% less than it did ten years ago seems redundant, but Neumann happily details the self-sufficiency of Oshkosh’s IT department. “I like to brag that we don’t contract anything out —not even wiring. Everything is done in-house, including our network architecture, design and management,” he explains. “In that sense, I’d say Laserfiche fits us because it’s very self-driven and intuitive to get around. The biggest thing I’ve enjoyed is the ease of upgrades. We do them all ourselves, without a single hitch.”

He adds, “The Knowledge Base on the [Laserfiche Support Site] is also very beneficial —we really haven’t had to contact our reseller for support issues.”

At the same time, he says, using Laserfiche has gone a long way in supporting the evolution of Oshkosh’s e-Government strategy, which now includes 12 departments using WebLink to push out information through seven municipal Websites. “Every electronic document we create can be managed departmentally,” Neumann explains. “We just have to set up security within Laserfiche, and as soon as a document is in the system, it can be made available for public view.”

In Neumann’s view, making information more available isn’t just about transparency, but also the government’s responsibility for the decisions it makes. “When we talk about WebLink we’re really talking about transparency and accountability—they go hand in hand,” he says. “We have our resolutions and ordinances posted online dating back to 1990, and residents love that they can research an issue or an address going back 20 years.” Online inspection reports, for instance, are used by both potential homebuyers and realtors, while contractors can see a virtual history of work done on a property.

And insurance companies and attorneys access accident reports through WebLink—a process that accounts for 350 visits to Oshkosh’s Website each day. “Because accident reports are public records, they are uploaded when the patrol car gets back to the station, so they’re available online in real time,” Neumann explains.

It isn’t just citizens who benefit from the efficiency, as Oshkosh administrators also recognize the value of Laserfiche. “Our municipality is driven by our city manager and city council, and using Laserfiche to automatically publish the agendas and minutes from our boards and commissions really illustrates how effective it is,” Neumann says.

According to Neumann, the recently re-launched city Website was the culmination of five years of adding interaction based on citizens’ input, plus some inspiration, he says, from the best practices of the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology’s Best of the Web winners (“They won those awards for a reason,” Neumann comments). But final buy-in and approval came as a result of an internal assessment by the Oshkosh City Manager and Media Services Department. “We sat down with them and went over their likes and dislikes,” Neumann explains.

Next, Neumann’s looking at integrating Laserfiche with the city’s internal Munis systems. “If you’ve got the framework, you want to utilize it the best you can. I’d like to get to a full ERP integration where we’re bringing a number of departments through a single, shared application. If we can do it ourselves, and I think we can, we’ll do it,” he says.”I take it as a challenge to use little or no capital, because with Laserfiche, we’ve been able to do that the whole time. We’ve achieved all our goals annually.”

“Choosing Laserfiche as our ECM system was definitely an investment, not a purchase,” he adds. “It’s gone a long way toward keeping my budget the way it is and it’s allowed our departments to be a lot more self-sufficient in terms of managing their own content and making it available to the public.”

When Diane Ward became City Clerk in 2000, she found the city’s Administration office had a legacy ECM system in place that wasn’t being used to manage much. “I found the application cumbersome and not user-friendly,” she says. From an IT perspective, the legacy system was even less friendly. “The company was purchased by other document imaging companies twice. The second time would have required us to migrate to a different system and the maintenance agreement was already pretty high,” remembers Rose Holman, MIS Director. “Since we needed to convert existing data anyway, we were able to make the case to our city council that we needed to find something that fit our needs better.”

Ward and Holman contacted Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital. “The Laserfiche system seemed easier for the end user, which is really important, and the administration of the system seemed easier to understand,” Ward says. Implementation began in Stillwater’s Administration Department in 2005. “That allowed me to familiarize myself with the program and set up the folder structures, templates, and administration console, so we had that foundation in place for future deployment,” Ward says.

Ward began by making agenda packets, minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions, as well as resolutions and ordinances, available to staff through the Laserfiche repository, and the impact was immediate. “I knew the system was successful because it was easy to use and manage. Requests that would have taken me days to complete, sometimes weeks, were able to be completed almost immediately,” Ward says.

Leveraging the Value of ECM Agility through Standardization and Integration

A year later, backlog conversion began in the Finance Department – at times duplicating scanning done into the department’s Springbrook financial management software. Staff soon discovered that finding content using Laserfiche was easier, so Holman contacted Cities Digital to integrate the two applications. “It’s a daily timesaver that enables staff to put information into Laserfiche more quickly and locate it more easily.”

In 2009, Laserfiche deployment extended to the Planning and Building Inspection Department, turning into another chance to explore the value of Laserfiche as integrative middleware, which makes existing data easier to find and use. “As we started putting planning documents into Laserfiche, we realized we could create better searches of, say, address files if we integrated some of the information with the PermitWorks applications we used to do building permits,” so Holman again contacted Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with PermitWorks. Key to the integration’s success was standardizing the metadata of the property file folders when it was migrated from the city’s legacy ECM system. These folders constituted the bulk of the city’s information requests, so adding the parcel identification numbers (PINs) used by other departments and applications to the Laserfiche folders made information even easier to find.

“The benefit is again the ease and scope of research now that the Planning and Building Departments are also using Laserfiche,” Ward explains. “We can see what planning cases involved a specific property, which building permits were issued and the actions of any board or commission or the City Council on that property.”

It’s this ability to align Stillwater’s information assets with ways it can be more useful and therefore more valuable to the community that are at the core of Ward’s ECM strategy. In 2008, for instance, Ward lobbied for and received funding for Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) to mitigate compliance risks. “If I could do it all over again, I would have purchased Records Management Edition when we initially purchased Laserfiche,” she sighs. “Because I didn’t, there was some extra work involved in setting up RME.” But once set up, she says, RME’s automated retention schedules by document type give Ward the ability to easily comply with State policies that the city had been manually following for over 20 years.

Implementing a Popular Public Portal Strategy

The City of Stillwater's WebLink 8 Public Portal, where searchers can access council meeting minutes from as far back as 1888.

This potent combination of automation and transparency has also guided the city’s Web portal strategy. When the city implemented Laserfiche, Ward made resolutions, ordinances, agenda packets, and minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions (some dating back as far as 1888) available to the public using Laserfiche WebLink. The public portal proved so popular that Stillwater recently upgraded to WebLink 8 to take advantage of new features including customized searches, new customization and layout tools, and support for the iPhone and Android mobile devices.

“Our Planning Department developed an On-Line Property Information Lookup Application through our Website which links any planning cases related to a particular address and can be viewed through that application and opened through WebLink,” says Ward. “We hope to make easements and building permits available as well.”

The next step, Ward says, is making WebLink a one-stop shop for Stillwater’s public information. “Presently we post PDF minutes of our City Council and Boards and Commissions meetings on our site,” she says. “We hope to eliminate some staff time by placing them only in Laserfiche. Right now we get 250 hits a month, but that will increase immensely once we direct people to WebLink.”

Holman, for her part, has been impressed by the utility and versatility of Laserfiche. “As we move into other departments such as the police and fire departments, we’ll find ways to make life easier there, too,” she says. “Laserfiche is becoming the backbone for many of our departmental programs, which makes it even more valuable as the central repository for all our content.”

Ward, understandably, sees the value of Laserfiche agile ECM a little differently. “Our City Administrator, who is not real computer savvy, is just amazed at how fast we can find information,” she says. “I have been in municipal government since 1981 and, next to replacing a typewriter with a word processor, Laserfiche makes my job responsibilities easier to complete and manage.”

“Essentially, Laserfiche has become integral to our way of managing information,” she concludes.

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

Adopting Records Management

A decade ago, however, the Clerk’s Office just needed a better way to respond to records requests. “It was a very political time and we had more public records requests than we were used to,” Garcia remembers. “Our office would sometimes spend weeks going through ten years of minutes and resolutions by hand, reading each page, just to fill a single public records request.”

Garcia researched document management solutions and selected Laserfiche for its ability to organize scanned documents into a secure, easily searchable repository. The Clerk’s Office was soon answering requests that used to take days—sometimes weeks—almost immediately. Laserfiche became the go-to application for backing up, storing and retrieving copies of the town’s hard records.

In 2007, Garcia noticed an Arizona newspaper was investigating the municipal e-mail accounts of several counties and cities, exposing security and compliance breaches along the way. “We started seeing cases across the state where old e-mails had become a liability,” Garcia explains. She had reason to be concerned: All ten of Florence’s departments kept their correspondence and records in Outlook as e-mails.

Garcia saw the value of adopting a formal records management policy for e-mail correspondence and spurred a town-wide “E-mail Project” to initiate the purchase of the Laserfiche Records Management module. Garcia and her team worked with Linda Russell and Susan Mosby from reseller Doc United to set up records management in the town’s existing Laserfiche system, as well as create retention schedules to fit the town’s needs.

Data Governance: Making Information Useful

With data governance, data stewards like Garcia ensure that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t just ensure that the enterprise can become more efficient, but relates to an entirely new way of thinking about information. Technology can help in the process, but isn’t the entirety of the process, as data governance consists of four components: people, process, technology and risk management. But what’s clear, says Garcia, is that “Laserfiche is the foundation of all of it.”

To get the process underway, Garcia and the Clerk’s Office team began by setting up an E-mail Project Records Committee of stakeholders, including departmental managers, to ensure that the town’s Laserfiche records management system met enterprise needs. “We knew that the information in Laserfiche had to be useful to everyone,” she says, “so we made sure that everyone was involved from the beginning. That way we could make sure everyone’s needs were met.”

Ironically, that meant that Garcia herself had to look at what would make everyone as comfortable using Laserfiche as she was. “It took a lot of trial and error to craft a records management plan that was flexible,” she admits. “As the Town Clerk, I knew the code pursuant to the state’s record series and schedule. But Laurie Capek, our administrative assistant, actually pointed out that when she would look things up, she would go beyond the code and find a keyword,” Garcia explains. Accordingly, the town came up with its own system—“PW” for Public Works, “FIN” for Finance, etc. —that everyone could recognize and use. In fact, notes Capek, “This system sets up a level of transparency, even amongst ourselves.”

Under the town’s new records management plan, e-mails would only be kept for 90 days. Town staff then makes a determination based on training by the Clerk’s Office and the State Records Retention Manual if the document is required to be saved. Then, it’s simply moved into Laserfiche, where state-mandated retention schedules are applied.

The integration between Laserfiche and Outlook, where e-mails can be sent directly to the Laserfiche repository from Outlook and metadata can be auto-populated for imported Outlook e-mails, has been instrumental to the system’s effectiveness as a data governance and risk management tool. “My favorite thing about Laserfiche is its integration with Microsoft Outlook,” says IT Technician David Blincoe. “The attributes are easy to setup on an enterprise basis and the e-mail template can be used to easily save the metadata from each e-mail.”

Garcia says users like that this personalization means that they don’t have to change the way they’re used to working in Outlook. “The best thing about this is that, even from within Laserfiche, the document opens as an Outlook document; people can even send e-mails and they’re automatically saved in Laserfiche,” Garcia says. “The e-mail is now filed and stored with all the accessibility, functionality and ease of use that Laserfiche provides.”

The system has also proven itself easy to use, for users and IT alike. When a user deletes a document, it goes to the Recycle Bin, where Blincoe and Garcia can review it before deleting it permanently. If there are any questions or missing documents, Blincoe uses Audit Trail to track them down.

Ultimately, Blincoe is impressed with how easy Laserfiche is to administer. “Lisa and her staff really haven’t needed too much technical assistance,” he says.

The Avante Advantage

This year, Florence is implementing a Laserfiche Avante ECM/BPM solution, which will eventually equip each user with their own Laserfiche account, just as they already have their own Outlook e-mail account.

Garcia says she is looking forward to deploying Workflow business process management—included in the town’s new Avante system—to further automate contract management. “We’re already using Laserfiche to run reports to tell us when a contract is up for renewal,” she explains. “Now we’ll be able to have automatic e-mail notification when a contract is available.”

But even now, the benefits of using Laserfiche are many: Town-wide adoption of Laserfiche for records management ensures both compliance and transparency while it saves the Clerk’s Office staff time and resources. Across departments, paperwork has been reduced while continuity of operations is ensured. But really, Garcia, says, the lasting impact of Laserfiche is that the town has found a new and better way to work. The Planning Department, for instance, has already moved its files to Laserfiche. This saves storage costs, but also gives staff the ability to do their own research. “It’s a big deal to be able to just click on a contract from your desktop to see it, as opposed to how it used to be – submitting an internal request to us and having a five-day turnaround time while you waited for the hard copy,” Garcia says.

“Knowledge is power and we provide everyone with the same power. Better still, says Garcia, “We’re truly doing more with less. The Clerk’s Office has not had to hire more staff, and we’re providing tools so people can do their jobs better.”

Garcia says other smaller municipalities can learn from Florence’s example. “We would have loved to be the community that could go out and buy everything in one shot, but we started slow and showed the users what benefits they would receive through using Laserfiche and built on that foundation. Now both administration and elected officials feel confident investing in Laserfiche because our Clerk’s Office has such a proven track record,” she offers.

And Garcia and staff in Florence are always looking for new things to do with Laserfiche, even without a formal monitoring and evaluation plan. “We know what we’ve done so far, but we’re always looking at what else we can do, especially now that we have Workflow and we can begin automating more and more business processes,” Garcia says.

“Our motto is ‘Love Laserfiche.’ We want to make it so easy and convenient that people are so enthusiastic that they come to us with their ideas for how they can use it. That’s what our long term goal is—to have everyone as in love with Laserfiche as we are.”

For example, it was nearly impossible for employees to append pages to scanned documents that were stored in Alchemy; typically, in order to add pages, the whole document needed to be rescanned and resaved.

Jacquez-Nares urged the city to find a more sophisticated, user-friendly solution. It was at this point that a collaborative, inter-departmental team was formed with Jacquez-Nares as the project manager.

All of the City’s departments—City Clerk, City Manager, Community Development, Community Services, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Police and Public Works—came together to define their requirements for the RFP. The selection came down to two choices: Laserfiche and LibertyNET. In the end, the balance tipped in favor of Laserfiche for two reasons:

• Its comprehensive search functionality and easy-to-use Web interface made Laserfiche the most user-friendly choice.
• A formal needs assessment showed that implementing Laserfiche would ultimately save the city $273,200 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations for essential city services such as traffic management.

Westminster purchased the software from Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging in June 2008. Because Laserfiche is easy to use and Jacquez-Nares already had a lot of experience with it, virtually no formal training was required. By August, the solution had been installed, the City had begun back scanning the Planning Department’s records and by November, all Alchemy files had been migrated into the new system.

Making City Content Accessible in Seconds

As a part of its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Westminster deployed Laserfiche WebLink, a secure Web content portal, to make content immediately accessible to all 402 city employees.

“In the old days, people in our Community Development department had to visit our offsite storage facility three or four times a week in order to locate planning documents,” says Jacquez-Nares. “When you add up the 15-30 minutes it took to drive there, the time spent looking for relevant documents and then the time it took to drive back to City Hall, you’re talking about 4-5 hours a week. With Laserfiche, it only takes a few seconds to call up all necessary documentation.”

The impact of Laserfiche on the City Clerk’s Office has also been great. “As the lead office for Public Records Act Requests, we receive all records requests and hear directly from the public about their concerns,” says Jacquez-Nares. “With Laserfiche, citizens no longer have concerns about transparency or document integrity because digital records don’t get lost or damaged, and they’re available much faster than their paper-based counterparts.”

All the City’s departmental records are currently scanned into Laserfiche on a day-forward basis by Kelly Lore, the centralized scanning records clerk. Just a few of the different types of content stored in Westminster’s Laserfiche repository include:

• Agendas
• Agreements
• Bids
• Building permits and plans, including large format plans
• Deeds
• Planning Department records
• Staff reports

“All of our departments have access to Laserfiche, and people are always coming up with new ideas for how to use it,” says Jacquez-Nares. “It’s much more useful than Alchemy—and much easier to use!”

IT Support Is a Snap

For a city like Westminster, with an IT department of only five employees, software applications must not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain and administer. In fact, Laserfiche is so easy to support that Jacquez-Nares serves as system administrator, working with users across the City’s departments to structure the City’s content repository, create index fields for various City forms, and set up Quick Fields sessions to automate information capture.

“IT staff members create a backup when they’re updating the server,” says Jacquez-Nares. “Other than that, they pretty much leave everything to do with Laserfiche up to me.”

Future-Forward

Westminster has exciting plans for Laserfiche moving forward. Incoming City Clerk Robin Roberts recognizes the efficiency that Laserfiche ECM brings to Westminster and seeks to build on the project’s success by promoting city-wide use of Laserfiche through added integrations and training sessions.

With the help of ECS, the team is currently in the process of integrating Laserfiche with the City’s GIS system so that all building plans associated with any given address are accessible from within Westminster’s GIS application, CityGIS. Similarly, the City is also working on integrating its electronic permitting application with both Laserfiche and CityGIS. These integrations will save staff from performing time-consuming research to locate information about various addresses or land parcels.

The City also has plans to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which will bring Workflow functionality into Westminster’s arsenal, enabling it to automate standard business processes such as approvals and document routing. According to Jacquez-Nares, Westminster is also contemplating integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, which the City owns but has not yet rolled out. Using SharePoint as a collaborative portal would, for one, help the City Clerk’s Office generate agenda Council packets in a paperless manner. Combining Laserfiche with SharePoint would bring imaging capabilities to SharePoint and enhance the SharePoint repository.

Even without these system expansions, the City is extremely pleased with the Laserfiche implementation. “Many people had to work together to make this project a success, and it’s wonderful to see just how effective a collaborative management team can be,” concludes Jacquez-Nares. “People are using Laserfiche, and the positive results have been staggering so far.”

As these seasonal influxes fueled Vail’s local economy and luxury real estate market, they also highlighted a need for the town to address the resulting challenges to its infrastructure. By 2007, town administrators looked for ways to lessen municipal government’s footprint on the mountain community. An idea from years prior had by now developed into a need: conducting government with less paper. “We were at the point where we had so much paper, it was either build a warehouse or go electronic,” Wolfe explains. “Vail real estate is so expensive; you really can’t build a warehouse in the valley.”

When Wolfe joined the town in April 2007, he was encouraged that its records manager position was an IT one. “Business technology and information management are enough of a priority that the Content Manager is part of the IT group. It seemed logical given our overall goals for greater reliance on automated tools and the establishment of an electronic records management system,” he explains. “So often, when IT takes on the task without adequate content management, the result is an electronic black hole that corresponds to the former paper black hole.”

With technical support for the idea, Wolfe began to develop staff support as well. “Each department had one or two people who dealt with records and were interested in making some changes. I worked with them to look at applications.” After a needs assessment and departmental demonstrations by Laserfiche reseller Jen Harris of Peak Performance Imaging Solutions, Wolfe and the record custodians chose Laserfiche.

In addition to the great support from Peak Performance, he cites both ease of use and flexibility of administration as deciding factors.

“Laserfiche is an application easily managed by someone in a non-IT position. The security and other administrative elements of the application are easy to administer,” Wolfe explains. “We could provide tight security to anything we didn’t want disclosed, such as social security numbers and other PII, as well as broad access to other town departments and eventually, to the public.”

In July 2007, implementation began with the scanning of clerk’s records and the conversion of Human Resources PDF images from a legacy imaging system to TIFF files, which Wolfe notes “made it a lot easier to search and a lot easier to add pages to later.”

With his strong background in nuclear and legal records management, Wolfe made it a point to establish quality guidelines and procedures for storing content in the new system. “In Colorado you can replace paper with electronic records if you follow certain guidelines. The Colorado Municipal Retention Schedules were developed for the paper environment, but they apply regardless of media. Vail had actually done a pretty good job of managing paper records in accordance with municipal retention schedules, so our job was really just taking the right next steps to better management in an electronic environment.”

Wolfe set up the Laserfiche Records Management Module using retention schedule numbers mirrored in the e-folder structure. “The records management structure reflects the retention requirements, while the document management side mirrors the Town’s organizational structure and the paper world,” he says. “So it’s easy to check the records management folders, click on the Record Series Properties and update retention information as the State schedules are updated.”

By April 2008, several other departments began their respective pushes to reduce paper volumes. The progress was steady and growing. “We have 105 users in about a dozen departments,” he says. Now, Human Resources and Risk Management are completely paperless, the Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to publish municipal agendas and town council minutes, while Community Development, Legal, Public Works, Fleet Management, the Fire Department and Finance staff have all been accessing the system in various capacities.

The holiday season in Vail

“One of the future challenges is to change work processes, creating efficiencies with an increase in document sharing,” Wolfe says. “We’re doing a lot with paper we could be doing in Laserfiche. But we also know how important it is to build a comfort level with people and their ability to access records in Laserfiche. When they see how much time they can save, it builds confidence and they’re ready to make the next step.”

For their next step, departments are eyeing various ways to automate how information is gathered, updated and, most importantly, used. “We want to do more to save user time in Community Development. We use Accela’s Permits Plus, and we’d like to populate selected data into our Laserfiche ‘Building Activities’ template,” Wolfe says.

Other integrations in the planning stages include a link between Laserfiche and the Public Works fleet management application. “We are just beginning to examine the fleet management application and, if possible, would like to send reports directly to Laserfiche,” says Wolfe.

And, inspired by nearby Aspen, Community Development is also eyeing a GIS integration to, as Wolfe puts it, “drill down further” into their records. “Our GIS operator liked what Aspen is doing and would like to able to access Laserfiche documents in Community Development, the Town Clerk’s office, Public Works and other departments using GIS and parcel numbers,” he adds.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some very real tangible progress already. “We’ve been trying to build up our volume of records to make the system more powerful and useful – like it is to HR already,” Wolfe says. “We have over 42,000 documents, which consist of 1.7 million TIFF files weighing in at 189 GB and 12,300 electronic documents which include PDFs and Microsoft Office documents totaling 114 GB in Laserfiche at this time,” he adds.

“From a paper management perspective, we’ve been able to destroy 664 boxes of records. We scanned 364 boxes of backfiles and got rid of 300 boxes of duplicates and records beyond retention. We even built out a couple of offices from the saved space,” he adds.

The real benefits of Laserfiche, he’s found, are the ongoing ones. “The most savings come from recovering staff time. For example, Open Records Requests that used to take two weeks and many photocopies to fill can now be addressed in minutes by looking up the information in Laserfiche and posting the response via WebLink or sending an e-mail.”

Scenic view of the Gore Range from Blue Sky Basin at dawn.

This has done more than make existing staff more efficient, Wolfe says, it’s actually lessened government’s footprint in the townspeople’s eyes.

“Laserfiche helps us create a situation where we’re not growing staff and, over time, the existing staff will be able to do more because they have better tools. You’re touching on goals the community has – even finding parking for municipal employees can become an issue.

“The broader community is very diversified with second home owners from all over the world, so that’s the next step. The longer term goal is to get information out there and available on the Town website for residents,” he adds.

But even now, the system serves the informational needs for life safety officers regarding locations and traffic re-direction during seasonal celebrations. “Our Special Events Coordinator can post event permits which include street closures and barricades on WebLink,” Wolfe explains. “Officers used to have to paw through files to get the right wad of paper. Now our naming convention is by day and event, so officers can just call up the information via the Town’s Wi-Fi network and review the actual permit right in their vehicle.”

Usefulness to law enforcement is also driving Vail’s next project: bringing the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office onboard to store case photos in Laserfiche with an integration into its Intergraph public safety system. “We just purchased an additional repository and the Laserfiche Software Development Kit (SDK),” Vail IT Director Ron Braden says. “Once we beta the Sheriff’s Office, we will bring all our law enforcement agencies on board.”

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.

“After our initial meeting near Richmond, there were a few of us on the same page—like Bev Rosato [from Frederick County] and Amy Johnson [from Hanover],” McClees says. “It’s like that line in ‘Robots’: ‘See a need, fill a need’: ‘You’re using Laserfiche? We are too! Let’s try to get together,’” he recalls.

Laserfiche reseller Unity Business Systems (UBS) saw the value of establishing user groups throughout its service areas, and was soon helping with invite lists, as well as hosting quarterly conference calls between the user group leaders. “The calls let us provide updates on the happenings in our own user groups as well as feedback to UBS on what current and potential users of Laserfiche think about the product and its modules,” says McClees. “The user groups themselves give our reseller the opportunity to ask candid questions and get honest feedback from users who use the product in an everyday, real-world setting. We’ve been able to give immediate and direct feedback to both Laserfiche and UBS about proposed ideas, events and the software itself. This is something that any organization would be hard-pressed to acquire through an e-mail or phone call. It’s just a great platform to share ideas.”

Sharing great ideas, of course, is ultimately what user groups are all about—which has proven even more valuable to the Laserfiche-curious. “We’ve been able to include offices that are not using Laserfiche, but wanted to know more about its true impact in a real-world setting,” says McClees. “We get people asking for references because they hear about the user group.” He remembers a recent call from the Virginia Port Authority. “They asked us a lot about Laserfiche and how we’d been using it,” McClees remembers. He must have left a good impression; the Virginia Port Authority just last week announced its decision to choose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management system over 27 other vendors.

“What started out as a user group for a small niche of Virginia municipalities has grown to include every industry: medical, financial, legal, clerical, religious and others,” he says. “We’re not only seeing attendance from people who already have Laserfiche, but also from people who are curious about the software or who are getting ready to implement it and want to know what to expect.”

Norfolk itself, ironically enough, finds itself among the latter as it prepares to upgrade to Records Management Edition (RME) and version 8.1 this month.

“Seeing other folks using RME has helped us figure out what we need to do before it even gets here,” McClees says. “One thing we learned is that we don’t have to redo our folder structure—we can use shortcuts and still have people find documents. So it’s the best of both worlds: business as usual, but with that solid, secure records management.”

“Every time we see a demo, everything seems that much more accessible—it takes the fear out of it, because it’s not that different from what we’re already doing,” he adds.

But the value to the Laserfiche community as a whole, McClees says, is unique and beyond compare. “Users and organizations face two challenges when budgets are tight and people don’t have a lot of time to research new products,” he observes. “First, they’re jaded by bad experiences with other software, so they might miss out on the message of a product that could truly fit their needs. Secondly, there’s usually a poor network of support within and between organizations that are using similar products.”

With revenues falling short, conferences and training can be cut from a budget. Set against this backdrop, McClees notes, the Virginia user group phenomena becomes even more necessary and relevant to success stories, beginning with individuals, spreading to the group and then back to the organizations they serve.

“I can’t think of another software product that has a community attached to it. There are many enterprise-level products that have user groups, but they don’t seem to have a community,” McClees says. “When I talk to people at a Laserfiche user group, I’m talking to my friends. We all care about how each other’s organizations are succeeding. It’s more than people getting together talking about software. When people see what we are doing, they want to be a part of it.”

And perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the Virginia user groups and Hampton Roads in particular, is how much the user groups have become part of the greater Laserfiche culture. “We continue to share ideas such as partnering with Laserfiche to help create user group logos, acquire space on the Laserfiche forums area of the Support site, and update the entire Laserfiche community on our progress through the use of Luminary blog posts,” McClees says. “We also have a Hampton Roads User Group Google Site for the purpose of disseminating documents, updating our users on our upcoming events and activities, and to advertise what we do—without clogging e-mail boxes.”

But for McClees, Laserfiche’s true value comes not just from its community, but from its ease of support: “We’re in an industry with a steadily decreasing workforce. Government IT people are retiring and they’re not immediately being replaced due to budgetary constraints. So it’s really important that we don’t have to spend 50% of our time looking over our shoulders at an application. Being able to quickly go into the administration console to do auditing is a Laserfiche tool I really appreciate. The security is robust and important—for example, I lock down people’s ability to e-mail records that are restricted by Virginia code.

“I look at Laserfiche like it’s just one less thing I have to worry about, and that’s critical to me.”

Meanwhile, Town Council member Bill Sibbing had the idea to do something about the amount of paper Council members received each week, as well as the storage and staff costs to file it and then decipher just which paperwork needed to be schlepped back and forth between meetings. Sibbing contacted Christine Curtis, Assistant Town Manager, about adopting a paperless system that could archive files, interconnect information between departments and manage each department’s information. Curtis created a committee to move the plan forward.

Curtis learned the Town actually already had an underused Laserfiche installation, now a decade old, that could do just that. Curtis discussed the idea of reinvigorating it with Smith who, remembering her time at the Laserfiche Conference, contacted Indiana reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite. Mathes had worked with Smith’s friend in Carmel, and over the next month or so, Smith gathered information to assist with moving forward with a like-minded program in Brownsburg. “I kind of beat up Nancy for information,” she jokes.

A month later the Committee’s research had inspired a town-wide “Go Green” initiative centered around an enterprise Laserfiche deployment. “We are so busy with such a small staff that we’re looking for ways to do more with less,” Curtis says. “We thought Laserfiche could be one of the tools.”

A Laserfiche Committee was formed, consisting of Smith, Curtis and Sibbing, as well as Planning Technician Jon Blake and IT Director Pete Palanca. Its first task was to make Council meetings paperless. As Curtis notes, “Those packets literally represented hundreds and hundreds of hours of staff time and effort.”

Blake redesigned the Council Room desk to accommodate an additional 12 monitors and additional hardware for each member to access their computer during the Boards and Commissions meeting, an engineering feat, notes Smith, that had the bonus effect of making members more visible to the public because the original monitors were lowered. Score one for transparent government.

For her part, Mathes presented her paperless solution in a way that was likewise transparent—one that didn’t demand that council members change their way of working. “They didn’t want a link to an agenda, they wanted their own copies of the agenda delivered to them that they could mark up and use at the meeting just like they were used to doing with the paper packets,” Mathes explains. Using Laserfiche Workflow, she showed Brownsburg council staff how to prepare and route individual files containing the agenda packet. And with that, Brownsburg’s “Go Green” initiative had its engine. “That council meeting really was the first driving force to the whole Town using Laserfiche,” says Curtis.

The Laserfiche Committee mapped out a three-phase implementation, first training department administrators in how to use Laserfiche, then training staff, with the idea to eventually push it out to the public and workers in the field via Web Access.

Installation began in July with Jessica Mathes of Paper-Lite holding week-long training sessions for Town staff in virtually every department, from Accounting and HR to Department of Public Works, regardless of their computer experience. Mathes also sat down with HR department staff to create templates and a folder structure. Plans are in place to automate the HR onboarding process with a custom workflow where individuals will fill out a form online to be sent to the Human Resources Coordinator, who then sends it to a department head for viewing – all while Audit Trail ensures that the documents remain confidential to manage liability and compliance risks.

But for the first real-time use of Laserfiche, just not having to make those 14 two-inch thick paper packets for the town’s August council meeting was enough. “Workflow was up and running,” Curtis says, “and we went live.” Now with all systems up and running, and the Council members comfortable with the transition, Council meetings will be completely paperless by October 22, 2009.

It is significant that the Town of Brownsburg’s success so far, as well as its future plans, owes as much to having active, enthusiastic internal champions – Smith, Curtis and Sibbing among them – as it does to having targeted improvable business processes where using Laserfiche can really shine. Like producing the Town’s newsletter, Curtis says. “Each department writes its own articles and adds its own pictures, even though they’re all in different buildings,” she explains. “That saves a lot of time and effort.”

Curtis admits Brownsburg’s use of Workflow is rudimentary so far, “because we had to move quickly on this,” she says. But she can already point to enterprise efficiencies – and savings – based on the Town’s investment in Laserfiche. Though the Town’s Boards and Commissions use just a single workflow, the Committee has already produced ROI figures that calculate Laserfiche will pay for itself in just 2 ½ years. “The ROI that was calculated was just for use with the Boards and Commissions going paperless, including what we’re spending now in staff time and supplies,” Curtis explains. “When we start adding additional licenses and using it more, we’re getting above and beyond what we originally expected in our ROI.”

At the same time, certain processes are quietly reaping the benefits of automation while fostering collaboration. “When we walk through our budget process, we’re working with all our charts and our documents. The budget committee can log in from home and see the latest budget being utilized,” offers Curtis. “It’s true interdepartmental sharing of information.”

Future projects include the Planning and Building department integrating Laserfiche with Laserfiche PDP partner Energov to link documentation from permits and blueprints and also create a custom Workflow that will allow builders and residents to submit permit applications and documents online, using Laserfiche not just to push information out to residents, but to pull it in as well —saving time and even generating revenue in the process.

Police Captain Jeff Gray is also looking into utilizing Laserfiche to move court-bound information to the Hendricks County Prosecutor’s Office via Workflow so that multiple drives across the county will no longer be necessary to deliver documents.

The possibilities are as endless as the cost savings are real. Now the challenge is keeping up with evolving scale of Laserfiche use, which now includes all town departments and a growing number of workstations. Until now, Smith, Curtis and Blake have administered the system internally. “Really it’s been a discussion of who can dedicate the time and interest,” Curtis explains. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without the help of Nancy and Jessica and Paper-Lite. We were lucky Wendi had a solid computer background and could take time to wear an additional hat.”

Now, to keep up with the town’s growing overall IT needs, including supporting Laserfiche, a new IT Technician, Adam Kirby, has been brought on board. Curtis adds that, just like Smith did last year, Kirby will be attending the Laserfiche Conference this January, although this time he’ll be going for work and not vacation—to get his own idea of just what Brownsburg can do with Laserfiche.

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.”

Hermann-Brown was inspired by a trip to an International Institute of Municipal Clerks conference—“that triggered the spark,” she says—to start investigating digital records management systems. After three years of requests, funding was approved in 2005. In early 2006, Laserfiche was chosen after reseller Cities Digital, Inc., outlined a three-phase implementation that first addressed simple search and retrieval needs.

The immediate goal, says Cities Digital’s Jessica Welsch, was to get the City Clerk’s, City Administrator’s and City Attorney’s offices, as well as the Planning and Finance departments, up and running with Laserfiche. At the same time, Cities Digital worked with city staff to implement best practices and efficiency-building techniques into their Laserfiche use. “We knew we were asking people to let go of their paper and work a little differently than they were used to,” says Welsch. “It’s easy for us to tell them their jobs were going to get easier, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t creating any new work for them by asking them to learn the software.”

From Hermann-Brown’s vantage point, the city’s new Laserfiche system had to meet three main goals:

1. Automate document management while maintaining a system of records management.
2. Meet compliance requirements regarding retention schedules with state auditors and regulators.
3. Scale to meet both the city’s growing number of users and extended uses of Laserfiche’s capabilities.

The first point presented an initial challenge: How to standardize the file folder structure and naming convention that would satisfy all the records requests that would come in through the Clerk’s Office? Hermann-Brown spent a lot of time meeting with department heads, then talking to staff that would be using the system. Next, a test group of users reviewed the various naming conventions that were used by the departments. “We had a lot of boxes,” Hermann-Brown laughs.

A consensus was going to be hard to come by, so Hermann-Brown says she put her foot down and a small group of Department Heads made the final decision on the naming conventions. The naming conventions would not only standardize records, but word processing documents as well, which, with so many different departments used to doing things their own way for so long, created resistance. “Sometimes you have to just make a decision which is in the best interest of all departments,” she says. “People had to change, but it wound up making things easier for them. Now that they’re using it, they see how it makes sense, because they can find things on their own—they don’t have to call up people in other departments when they’re searching for documents. In the end, it saves them a lot of time.” Establishing central control went a long way to enabling more productive departmental flexibility, she adds.

This was especially beneficial to the Finance Department. In fact, owing to the range of documents the department scanned (receipts, bills, check stubs), the standardized naming convention and document types enabled the advanced capture capabilities of Quick Fields to automate much of the hand-keying and filing that staff used to labor over. Now, finance staff prints all of its reports from its General Ledger to Laserfiche and scans all of their Accounts Payable documents, while staff from other departments can retrieve their own past invoices, payment checks and other documents, instead of requesting them from Finance staff.

Just in the Finance Department alone, six three-drawer filling cabinets were sent packing, which freed up office space for additional personnel, which the department was able to hire, thanks to the savings from more efficient use of work hours. Now, finance staff can access vendor invoices immediately. It’s a vast improvement over a process that used to involve manual retrieval of records kept in a dark, disorganized basement.

City Auditors likewise have seen the added value of immediate and searchable access to documents and supporting paperwork. Auditors had to be sure the new software would integrate securely with their growing applications (they are currently in the middle of a MUNIS deployment). “Before any implementation of software in the Finance Department, we had to get it approved by our Auditors,” explains Jan Thomas, Deputy City Treasurer. Cities Digital had extensive experience with successful Laserfiche integrations, and after deployment, a backlog conversion added Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivables documents, banking statements, and financial records dating back to 2005 into Laserfiche.

The City’s 2007 audit was the first to use Laserfiche. “Oh did the auditors love it! Because we’d been scanning in our information from day one, we were able to audit our AP, AR, banking statements and financial records right from Laserfiche,” says Thomas.

The second phase of the city-wide deployment was to implement Agenda Manager in the Clerk’s, Planning and Finance departments to automate and simplify the multi-departmental, often multi-headache-inducing management of weekly and monthly meetings. Welsch and her Cities Digital team worked with the City to create role-based training documents that made it easy to get users performing their functions in Agenda Manager’s powerful interdepartmental workflow and agenda preparation and publishing tools.

“Agendas are very time-consuming, especially when you have four levels of approval like we do,” Hermann-Brown says. “We have ‘Agenda Fridays’ and we used to have to try to track people down on Friday afternoon to approve items and make changes. Now an administrator can be in a meeting, get an e-mail notification and send comments via e-mail to the individual preparing the agenda. Especially in a municipality our size, with so many layers of approval, it really saves a lot of time and effort not having to walk these big packets of paper around trying to find people.”

Hermann-Brown had a chance to preview the upcoming release of Agenda Manager 8 at this year’s IIMC conference. “It’s more user friendly and has more helpful features and processing options, which will make it a lot more advantageous and efficient for our users,” she says, referring to, among other new features, Agenda Manager 8’s new in-place document editing and enhanced notification capabilities. “It’s good to see that Laserfiche is still evolving Agenda Manager to meet the changing job and changing job requirements of our users.”

Hermann-Brown is cautious but optimistic about the coming year. “How are we going to respond to the needs of staff and public when it’s hard to convince the city council to spend money on technology when budget funding will be very challenging—even when what’s needed to improve service might cost the taxpayers some money?” she asks. “Residents have higher expectations for a responsive government then they did 10 years ago, but they also do not want to see spending increased.”

With Laserfiche, she feels her local government is responding to the residents needs efficiently, as well as being financially accountable. And thanks to Laserfiche, everyone’s needs are being met.

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.

“Our objective is ‘Online, not in-line,’” says Michaud. “We had a vision of public documents available 24/7 without ever having to wait in line again.” Now all they needed was a way to implement it.

In 2006, General Code Solutions Consultant Herb Myers demonstrated Laserfiche for city staff, prompting Saco’s IT Department to choose Laserfiche. Ease of use, scalability, “going green,” and establishing a portal for improved public service all factored into the decision. Myers, for one, was impressed. “I was amazed at how forward-thinking they were,” he says. “They wound up teaching me as much as I taught them.”

With the foresight and commitment of both IT and Michaud that, as Myers puts it, “’green’ starts with technology,” Myers and IT mapped out an implementation strategy in meticulously planned phases (see sidebar).

Saco’s initial roll-out called for multi-departmental implementation almost immediately, which prompted the appointment of Laserfiche Luminary Fran Beaulieu as the in-house Laserfiche Administrator. Beaulieu underwent what Myers and the City refer to as “’train the trainer’ training.”

Beaulieu admits progress was slow, owing to the need to assess each department’s willingness, as she puts it, “to let go of the paper.” Key to ensuring user buy-in, she says, was not so much dictating a way of doing things, but establishing a standard by “planning with each department’s staff, hearing their needs and wants, and helping lead the way.” This included weekly meetings, discussions of how to avoid duplicating files and coming up with a consensus of what would be the “logical place” to centralize information. “Some visualized immediate benefits, others required a bit more help in the vision,” she says.

This help began with all Administrative Assistants—Beaulieu dubbed them “power users”—training on the Laserfiche client for importing and scanning documents. Department Heads learned how to use the system via Web Access. “I sat down with them one-on-one and made sure they felt comfortable with what I was showing them before I left.”

Beaulieu also worked with the Assessing Department, one of the City’s biggest paper users, to import deeds into Laserfiche. “Once they were able to see the speed of a search and ease of use, they became my highest achievers,” she adds. “The Assessor’s Department has almost completely added a deed for every parcel within the city for constituents to view and access.”

Beaulieu used this experience to identify and standardize procedures and file structure in creating the City’s all-important Document Management Manual (DMM). Beaulieu’s committee determined that the addition of folders, renaming of documents and deletion of documents would be done only by Laserfiche Administrators.

Trainings were limited to certain shift times, so, inspired by General Code’s own training Webinars, staff created a short “how-to” video for Web Access users along with a simple guide—customized using the file structure created by the City—available internally.

By April 2008, expanded training and more departmental buy-in paved the way for enterprise adoption and Phase 3 public access. Saco’s Department of Public Works and Wastewater were by now online via Web Access. And implementing Quick Fields enabled the Assessor’s Department to automatically scan and index Property Tax Cards where OCR had been formerly problematic and manually typing the information was, as Beaulieu puts it, “not an option.”

How effectively? “The process used to require approximately 2 to 2 1/2 days of printing time for one person to accomplish and used about a whole toner cartridge and 20 reams of copy paper,” Beaulieu says. “Now the cards will be downloaded into Laserfiche in a matter of minutes. This process will save time and money.”

The final frontier was to break down the fourth wall of government and push it out to the community. WebLink would allow public access to city documents through the “Find-A-Doc” interface, with a how-to video and on-line instructions leading the way. Roll-out took some time due to customization, but General Code’s Brian Hoody set-up quick search links to bring users directly to a specified folder, even getting audio files to work for the City’s Planning Department via the “Find-A-Doc” portal.

Saco's "Find-a-Doc" Public Web Portal

Though just a few months old, “Find-A-Doc” is already resonating with staff and citizens alike. Maggie Edwards, an Administrative Assistant in the Planning Department, admits to being “a little intimidated at first” by the Laserfiche system, but now shares in Saco’s vision of a successful portal strategy. “If there’s a subdivision or site plan you want to know about, you can view the entire files online. If you wish to hear an audio of the minutes from the Planning Board meetings, you may do so,” she says. “Laserfiche has made it very easy to maneuver.”

Saco’s savings so far total over $10,000 a year, but as Beaulieu points out, “We also look at the value of the system for not departments, but individual value to users. Service to constituents is a big factor.”

• Planning and Engineering saves $7,580 a year by scanning large format maps.
• Inspection Reports saves $1,780 and 1,335 sheets of paper a year.
• The Assessor’s Office saves over $1,600 a year.

And now with the economy forcing municipalities to do more with less, neighboring Scarborough has requested a look at Saco’s Document Management Manual while other budget-strapped cities are investigating sharing services to access various documents and parcel information. Saco is also looking into integrating Laserfiche with its GIS application. “We’re already sharing some personnel so the idea of shared services and ‘umbrella IT’ makes sense,” Beaulieu says.

“The lines are so blurred in areas like road repair that regional administration makes the most sense,” she adds. “When you can see what documents are attached to parcels, that saves you phone calls and extra trips and that makes their life easier as well as ours.”

“The answer in our case is absolutely not,” says Renee Geyer, City Clerk of this farming community in Western Kansas with a population of 1,700. “These tools enable us to serve our constituents much more effectively.”

“In our view, smaller cities and towns should all be looking to bring in these capabilities. They’re needed now and are only going to become more necessary in the future.”

Leoti is investing a portion of a $2.1 million USDA Rural Development grant and loan into an information management system featuring ESRI GIS and a Laserfiche document management system.

“The grant is specifically for waterworks improvements,” Ms. Geyer says. “As a byproduct of that project, however, the grant will also enable us to improve our ability to deliver every municipal service.”

“We need ESRI for our waterworks, for example, so that we can pinpoint the location of water mains, hydrants and valves when we need to get at them for repairs and upgrades. At the same time, we see that other services, including telephone, cable, gas and electricity, are going underground. You can’t deal with these things visually any more and have to recognize that GIS is the wave of the future for taking care of them, too.”

As the ESRI maps are built and populated, Leoti is also implementing a Laserfiche document management system to create a searchable digital archive of all city records. City officials have three distinct goals in mind:

• To make it possible for ESRI users to retrieve supporting information, such as maintenance reports on a particular water hydrant, with the click of a mouse.
• To create a central, instantly searchable records library accessible to all authorized city employees.
• To serve as the link between ESRI and the city’s Summit finance and accounting system.

“Most importantly, the integration of Laserfiche with the other programs will enable us to automate the transfer of information from one system to the other,” Ms Geyer says. “In addition, Laserfiche is a user friendly application. Having it as the integration point will enable city employees who are not experts at ESRI or Summit to retrieve information needed, especially when responding to requests from citizens.”

Ms. Geyer recognizes that cost is the biggest obstacle facing other small municipalities thinking of following Leoti’s lead. “We could not have made the budgetary commitment without the grant, even though I believe that the two systems will more than pay for themselves,” she says.

“In addition to seeking their own grants, small cities and towns could look into joining forces with other agencies such as the schools and county government or putting together a group of small municipalities to share the costs. In my opinion, they will come to agree that the benefits far outweigh any possible drawbacks.”

The county seat of Wichita County, Leoti consistently ranks high in state surveys of per capita income and education levels. In addition to its many farms, employers include one of the largest cattle feedlots in the US, a feed mill and a corn-to-alcohol conversion plant.

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.

“That same year, we got a new Finance Director. We’ll call her Brenda (not her real name),” Pilgrim explains. “We were having our second weekly meeting with her and she blurted out ‘We’re getting rid of Laserfiche.’ We were all shocked.”

Pilgrim took it upon himself to prove the system’s worth. He went into what he calls “stealth mode,” personally approaching other departments about stepping up their use of Laserfiche, tactfully earning their trust and answering their concerns along the way. Simply put, Laserfiche had its internal champion, but the software ultimately sold itself, user by user, process by process, department by department.

Albany, OR, Network Administrator Allen Pilgrim

“Most people were fearful of losing their precious paper. I sat down in meetings with people and just one on one made it clear that I was committed to ensuring the safety of their data,” Pilgrim explains. “As we progressed, people saw the evidence that I was serious.”

The Building division in Community Development was interested, for instance, but thought Laserfiche was limited to just the Finance Department. Pilgrim pointed out the annual maintenance had been moved to the IT budget, leaving Laserfiche open for intra-office adoption.

“What happened next was nothing short of amazing,” Pilgrim says. “The Building division latched onto Laserfiche as if it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.” Building’s Allison Liesse began scanning all day, every day, eventually working with Pilgrim to purchase a wide-format scanner. IT Staff even came up with interface integration with the city’s Accela PermPlus permitting software so that building inspectors could retrieve Laserfiche documents through the application. Within a year, storage jumped from 10 to 42 4.6GB volumes. Now, inspired both by Building’s success and Pilgrim’s handling of the implementation, Albany’s Planning division has come on board just this year.

Around the same time, Paul Jacobson in the Public Works Engineering division was interested in Laserfiche. Pilgrim was able to, as he puts it, “give him an area in Laserfiche to play with.” Jacobson’s experience inspired his whole department to convert to using Laserfiche. “There was no longer any talk of getting rid of Laserfiche because it had become too valuable to the City and more people were using it all the time.”

By 2006, Pilgrim convinced Albany’s IT Director to add Laserfiche as a standard install on every computer in the city. Pilgrim notes that by then, IT was independent from the Finance Department – and that “Brenda” had since moved on.

In 2008, the police department requested a demo. “They fell in love with the product,” Pilgrim says – and he was soon requesting two high-end scanners and training several PD employees. Concurrently, Pilgrim implemented Quick Fields. Police reports are now completely automated with Quick Fields. “They just drop them into the scanner and they’re done,” explains Pilgrim. Planning has since come on board; by now Public Works was now doing all of their projects in Laserfiche. Ambulance Billing has become, as Pilgrim puts it “another Quick Fields success story.” Operations also started doing more with Laserfiche.

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

Pilgrim worked with Albany’s new (post-“Brenda”) Finance Director to approve the purchase and implementation of Quick Fields following a demo last year by reseller Michael Dane of VPCI. “We determined it would be perfect for four departments and the benefits have been spectacular,” Pilgrim says.

1. Allison Liesse in Building says it has saved her literally hundreds of hours of work – it saves her four hours a month processing timesheets alone.
2. Ambulance Billing reports are automatically processed by Quick Fields, which saves “dozens upon dozens” of hours.
3. For the Police Department, automatically processing thousands and thousands of police reports has been the biggest benefit of the city’s Quick Fields implementation. The failure rate is less than 1%. “Changing the slashes in the dates to dashes made all the difference,” Pilgrim notes. “Basically they just drop a stack of reports in the scanner and their job is done.”

The Future

Already in 2009, Pilgrim has done demos for staff of the Municipal Court, which has since started using the system, as well as to Albany’s Fire Department. The City Manager’s office and the HR Department are the latest additions, while the Parks & Recreation Department is slowly but surely adopting their own system. And all of Purchasing’s paperwork is stored in Laserfiche. “Most recently our GIS division had me set it up so they could move all of their As-Builts into Laserfiche,” adds Pilgrim.

Besides efficient (and satisfied) city employees in virtually every department, 2009 marks another Laserfiche milestone: the City of Albany will be only the third city in Oregon to launch “Digital Image as Original” (DIO). This will allow the city to maintain digital copies for many of our records,” explains Pilgrim. “This will allow us to lead the way on being more green, because it’s fun being green.” And as Albany has proved, Brendas of the world be darned, it’s fun being efficient, too.

Register for the “Laserfiche for Local Government = ECM + BPM” Webinar and learn more.

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.

The Situation

The legacy DIPS was causing more problems than it solved for the department’s 20 employees. Slow inputting, incorrect indexing and inefficient searching meant that department staff were spending significantly more time looking for information than actually acting on it. Their most urgent needs were to first replace the dying system that was slowing their workflow down and, second, to increase operational efficiency.

Thanks to Laserfiche, the department found a solution that met both these needs.

The Solution

“Our system was very basic, and had been on its last legs for years now,” comments Cox. “We needed not only something quicker and more sophisticated, but we also needed a platform for workflow later on. Ultimately, we needed to migrate our legacy data to the new system. So we had to find something that would meet all those needs.”

The department put the project out to tender, and, with the help of their IT Manager, Andrew Walmsley, began reviewing different systems. Specifically, the department needed a system that would enable them to file documents securely. They were also looking for a system that would support a single, centralised electronic repository, replacing their current system that consisted of a repository spread across a number of optical drives. Their system also had to support efficient, quick search and retrieval functions.

Ultimately, they chose Laserfiche not only because it is easy to use, but also because its data and structure would make it simple to move existing information into the new CRM system when it became available. “Although the council is trying to introduce a CRM system across the whole of the authority, we needed to integrate whatever platform came along with our DIPS workflow,” Cox says. “However, the project wasn’t moving forward quickly enough—our old system would have been obsolete far before the CRM system could go live. So whatever solution we chose had to ultimately tie into the CRM system when it was up and working.”

Steve Livermore, Director of Laserfiche authorised reseller Crusader Technologies, helped the revenue and benefits department implement their solution. The initial installation took place over two days, with additional integration and customisation tasks taking about four weeks. “We had around 160 optical drives to convert to Laserfiche from the legacy system,” Livermore says. “These optical drives were over ten years old and worked on a DOS-based system, which made it time-consuming to copy data into a format that Laserfiche could identify—it was possible, however.”

Once the drives were converted, Livermore worked with the department to develop a program that auto-populated the Laserfiche template with data from the current revenue and benefits database. Users can easily identify documents populated with template data and move them to the correct system sub-folder. “The training went smoothly, due to the fact that we built a system that requires minimal operator intervention,” Livermore comments. “We made sure that the user profiles were set up correctly so that users could retrieve information within seconds when on the phone to their clients.”

Currently, the revenue side of the revenue and benefits department is using Laserfiche to store community charge documents, council documents and non-domestic rates documents—all documents supporting the council’s local taxation activities. They have one employee who scans and indexes documents manually. Documents are kept for three months to assure they’ve been indexed correctly and then are shredded—a holdover from the legacy system, which frequently indexed documents incorrectly and required re-scanning and re-indexing. “We haven’t had that problem with Laserfiche at all,” Cox says. “We’re scanning documents in quite happily.

“Compared to our old system, the new Laserfiche system is so much quicker,” she adds. “The problem was, the old DIPS didn’t work. We couldn’t access documents, and our prime concern was to have a replacement. We had to have access to our existing documents and we had to scan and retrieve the documents we receive on a daily basis.”

Because the revenue and benefits department is currently using their Laserfiche system for document imaging, finding information quickly is of paramount importance. Staff usually search under their account reference order, as documents are only scanned in after staff have finished working with them and have placed the appropriate reference numbers on the documents. This makes it simple to track multiple accounts. “It’s a lot easier for staff to access and to interrogate to find things,” Cox says. “Scanning is quicker and simpler—our old system used to be very laborious and would take several minutes. If the information was on an optical drive that wasn’t in the jukebox at the time, you had to go through, find it, put it in the jukebox, install it, reset the jukebox and rerun your search. With Laserfiche, there’s no messing around. You just go in, look for your document and it will search across the entire database in seconds. You don’t have to muck around changing drives in the jukebox.”

In the future, the revenue and benefits department would like to expand their Laserfiche system to include the benefits side of the department, as staff there still use paper documents and manual filing systems to store and index information. In fact, the Department believes that other council departments could implement Laserfiche, and that ultimately, the solution could serve as the backbone of an archival system for the entire council. With its open architecture, Laserfiche is the perfect tool to connect mission-critical front-end applications with a repository full of information.

“We view Laserfiche as our platform for moving on to bigger and better things,” Cox says. “It has a lot more potential for us.”

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.”

In a world where government bureaucracy is the norm, the Marshall collaboration’s streamlined operations are a remarkable accomplishment which is earning national acclaim—and in an arguably unexpected part of the world.

Marshall, a quiet prairie town, is 40 miles from the nearest interstate and 200 miles from Minneapolis. Yet in the late 1990s, a forward thinking group of residents and elected officials calling themselves “Prairie Net” vowed the information superhighway was going pass a lot closer than Interstate 29 in South Dakota. Monthly meetings were held, resolutions were passed, grants were received and bonds were issued. And with official commitment clear and money in hand, Marshall soon had ISP providers waiting to wire up the community. It took a few years but eventually a brand new fiber optic cable stretched some 75 miles from Sioux Falls, SD, down every street in Marshall.

Next step was deciding what to do with that cable. Prairie Net knew it was crucial to provide Web access to serve the whole community, including residents, government and businesses alike. And they knew Laserfiche was going to play a large part in it, they just weren’t sure how to go about it. That’s where planning came in.

“It’s all about planning and having the group meetings where we all talk about our road map for this system and how to plan on using Laserfiche down the road,” Pickthorn says. “We knew that having that new fiber optic cable in place opened a lot of opportunities to us.”

It was in those meetings that the idea surfaced to have a shared document management system connected by the new cable. Prairie Net recognized that different government agencies were responsible for similar tasks in their respective offices—and that duplication of effort would be eliminated by having all their records maintained in a single location.

Bringing four distinct government operations together under one IT roof was no small task. City Hall and the city’s utilities already shared a Laserfiche system, while the school district and county had their own systems. The district decided to merge their system with the city’s, and the county followed suit soon after. With an enterprise Laserfiche system encompassing the four different agencies, staff were able to share ideas on its construction, upkeep and expansion.

“Each entity had its own unique challenges on how they wanted to organize and store their data,” Pickthorn says. “We were able to take the efficiencies we learned through working with multiple schools and apply them to city government and municipal utility operations. We’ve been able to take things we’ve learned through experience, such as file naming conventions and standardization, and apply them throughout the system.”

“In a big city it would be very difficult to get something like this done, simply due to the politics involved,” says Clayton Baer, software designer for Marshall’s Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Not to say that there hasn’t been opposition, including intervention by the courts when one judge questioned the legality of the collaboration, says Marshall’s City Director Harry Weilage. However, the system’s success has won over most of the skeptics.

“The last departments in the various agencies that wanted to get into this technology were the financial departments,” Pickthorn says. “Now, it’s staff in those departments who use Laserfiche the most.”

For the four agencies, sharing a single enterprise system means that costs are managed more easily. According to Pickthorn, a single IT staff member is able to serve three of the four different agencies. And with one large system instead of four smaller ones, there is also considerable savings on costs.

“The initial investment is one-quarter of the price,” says Baer. “That was probably the biggest selling point when it came to getting grants. Why would we build four separate infrastructures when we could just build one? They all serve the same taxpayers.”

This cooperative approach is appealing to more than just grant issuers. National computer experts Daniel Pink and Daniel Tascot accepted invitations to review the Marshall system and were duly impressed, says Weilage. There has also been plenty of local attention, particularly through a program that recruited developmentally disabled residents to undertake some of the scanning needed to get the original paper documents into digital format.

All the attention has helped spread similar collaborations among government agencies in other parts of the state, Weilage adds. In Anoka County, 11 different police departments all use a county-wide enterprise Laserfiche system. Ditto for the 10 school districts in Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District.

“Where this might be too expensive in another rural school district, Northwest was able to manage it because they all worked together to create a system that serves the entire school district,” Baer says.

Right now, Marshall is in the most ambitious phase of its IT infrastructure project. The Marshall Portal, as it’s being called, is a multi-media interactive website with links to every organization and agency in town. Prairie Net now wants to upload the various Laserfiche repositories onto that portal, so town employees will be able to access their work documents from home and students and taxpayers alike will be able to research public records.

“We want to offer one-stop access to information, whether it’s local government, school district or county government records,” Weilage says. “The Marshall portal will offer quick and easy access to all the information we have in Laserfiche. Whether a resident is looking for sports schedules, meeting minutes or to sign up for little league, it will all be there.”

Marshall has more than its residents in mind with its portal plans. This community of 12,500 hosts three billion-dollar industries—Archer Daniels Midland, Schwan Foods and US Bank—and having all this information on-line is going to be helpful for them as well, according to Weilage.

But ultimately, the benefit of Laserfiche is in how the community—of residents and staff alike—has embraced it.

“You can spend as much as you want on new technology, but the key is getting the most out of it,” Weilage says. “That takes getting the community to take advantage of it, and here, they are.”

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.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

Bakersfield, CA, IS Director Bob Trammell

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

Downtown Bakersfield with City Hall and Police Headquarters at left and Hall of Records at right

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

CSU Bakersfield's Walter Stiern Library

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

A view of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, from its gardens

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

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.

“Having ‘fought the fight’ for so many years in my organization to gain acceptance for the [Laserfiche] project–to expand it, to get funding, to add processes–I was weary,” she admits. “I decided to just keep my little piece going and not worry about anyone else. Then I attended last year’s Conference in Los Angeles. It was such a positive experience, it invigorated me. I thought, ‘If I can’t help my own organization, I can help others and I can learn from others and perhaps their experiences can help me move some things forward after all.’”

Growing up in a family active in theater and music gave Collins a strong belief in the power of community. “I learned early on that one person cannot accomplish nearly on their own what a community of like-minded people can do when they’re moving in the same direction. If you have a shared vision for the future and strong leadership to keep things moving, you can do amazing things.”

Thus inspired, Collins asked the city’s reseller, Unity Business Systems, for help. “UBS put me in touch with other users who were starting similar regional groups, and in fact took the lead in ensuring every region in the state had a user group contact and then coordinating a regular phone meeting between all of us,” she says. Collins took the lead and set-up and publicized their first meeting last fall. Collins jokes that the promise of free food may have enticed people to show up, but the knowledge sharing and mutual support kept them talking long after the hour ended.

“More than half of the group’s total members were able to attend, which is great for a first time out,” she says. “We very quickly agreed on a mission statement and what we expected to get from the group and how frequently we wanted to meet. That way we were all on the same page as far as the group’s role and the value to each other that we can bring.” Several attendees, she says, came away with answers to questions and real steps to take to alleviate problems and overcome obstacles. She was one of them.

“I got some very good advice for exporting Laserfiche to other departments and it’s already paid off! I am happy to report several departments looking at coming on board in the next two years,” she says. What was that advice? “A wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work – as opposed to telling them how it could work – because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds.

The irony being, of course, that she started the group to share her enthusiasm for Laserfiche that she felt hadn’t been as effective back home, only to wind up being inspired to direct that energy back toward home. But that, she says, is what community is all about. “Ultimately we are all a community,” she observes. “It’s a question of whether you nurture that spirit and communicate a vision that moves people.”

A self-proclaimed “Laserfiche evangelist,” Collins has been a very vocal member of the Laserfiche Luminaries community. Now she’s bringing her experience and insight to this year’s Conference as a featured speaker with her presentation “City of Charlottesville – Forming and Leading a Laserfiche User Group“ (Class IS110, scheduled for Wednesday January 14 at 10:45 am). Register here to attend.

“I’ll be sharing tips on having good meetings, how to keep the community thriving, pitfalls to avoid and a simple ‘start up’ checklist,” she says. “I hope to show people how easy it is to start a user group, so they’ll be inspired like I was. It may seem like a big job, but it doesn’t have to be and it can be so very helpful. The time you spend in setting it up and nurturing the group will pay off several-fold in the experiences, ideas and information you gain from the group.”

In fact, one of the things she’s looking forward to most about the Conference is something her fellow user groups encouraged her to do: “I had a meeting with the other regional leaders in Virginia and they actually empowered me to take some specific requests to Laserfiche staff and executives about how the company can support user groups,” Collins says. “I have some very specific and concrete ideas and requests to share.”

“Upper Deerfield’s document management system is bare bones yet staffers are getting everything out of it they can,” Babb says. “For a municipality with just over 7,500 residents, there’s minimal staff in Upper Deerfield’s government offices, far fewer than other municipalities I’ve seen.”

Upper Deerfield made a very important commitment two years ago when elected officials and municipal staff determined that municipal record keeping management needed to be streamlined. At that time town administrator/clerk Roy Spoltore asked for and received permission from the Township Committee to request proposals for the purchase of a document management software system. The Township Committee eventually awarded the purchase of a Laserfiche document management system.

During the past three summers, the Township has employed Ashley Wolk to build Upper Deerfield’s new database. Wolk pulled reams of government documents from boxes and filing cabinets throughout the building and fed them into an electronic copier that converted them into digital images. At the same time those documents were scanned they were stored in the township’s growing electronic database.

Township Committee meeting minutes and resolutions dating back decades have been scanned into the new system as well as minutes and resolutions from all Local Boards, Commissions and Committees. Records from the Construction Office, Housing Office, Zoning Office and Assessor’s Office have also been scanned into the database as well as the year-end reports for Finance, Animal Control, Fire Safety and the Tax Collector departments. Soon vital statistics such as birth, death, and marriage certificates will also be scanned into the database.

Now, when a resident requests a document from any of these Upper Deerfield agencies, the name, date or other specified means to help identify the document are typed into a computer much like searching for something on the internet. An instant later, links to electronic images of documents containing that information pop up on a computer screen. Staff then click on the link they want and a legally binding, official document is ready for printing.

“For my use, it’s easy to find anything in the database,” says administration clerk/typist Linda Martin. “I have people that come in looking for ordinances and resolutions and things from years past and I can go right to the database without the time-consuming search through books or filing cabinets. It takes just seconds to go to the computer, put in the key words, and its right there.”

Planning Board secretary Vicki Vagnarelli has also grown very fond of the new system. “Before we had Laserfiche I constantly had to go through books searching for specific documents, it was extremely time consuming,” she says. “Now, Laserfiche is the first place I search when I need to gather information relating to the Planning or Zoning boards; Township Committee ordinances and resolutions, or any other area of municipal government that is pertinent to our needs at that time.”

Along with the storage and retrieval abilities of Upper Deerfield’s document management system, another software program has been added to keep track of who accesses which documents in the database and when. Another software program being installed will automatically take internal working documents that staffers produce on their own computers and index and store them in the database without having to print and scan them first.

All this software has to be custom tailored to each community’s filing system needs, Babb said. Such filing systems can date back centuries. Upper Deerfield’s system has been in full service for just 18 months, but documents reaching back to the 1920s—when Upper Deerfield was founded—have been scanned into the database. “As more documents are scanned in, staff will become more familiar with how to find them and that will enable the system and staff using it to become more productive,” Babb says.

Similar systems are working all over New Jersey, some considerably more sophisticated than what Upper Deerfield has so far installed, Babb said. Document management technology has reached levels where meeting agendas can be compiled without a shred of paper; password-secure websites can be created to remotely access town hall databases, documents can even be worked on from remote locations using some of the new software modules available.

Babb says he hopes that some day soon Upper Deerfield will have all that technology available to its staff and residents. In the meantime, the new database has helped a small town staff handle a big city work load.

“I’d love to see Upper Deerfield some day take full advantage of all the additional technology,” Babb says. “Still, I’m amazed at what Upper Deerfield Township has accomplished with the small entry level system they invested in. They really went to town on Laserfiche and maximized those features available to them.”

According to Administrative Analyst III Daniel Baker, Lynwood was looking for the technological answer to a variety of challenges. “The city environment was changing in a technological sense,” he recalls. “Community members wanted information quicker.”

Citizens weren’t the only ones with demands. Lynwood faced many of the classic challenges of working with paper documents: mounting shipping and handling costs, proliferating documents and dwindling storage space. City staff were growing tired of inefficient paper-based business processes, especially when it came to producing discovery for an influx of litigation. “We were spending a lot of our funding digging through loads of paper documents in response to discovery,” Baker remembers. “The City Attorney would assign short deadlines for finding documents for ongoing litigation, and if staff couldn’t find documents in time, the City could be penalized. That required staff to work a lot of overtime.”

These issues were overwhelming on their own, but were made even worse by Lynwood’s lack of an official records policy. “We needed to develop and maintain guidelines for an efficient records program,” According to City Manager Roger L. Haley. “Furthermore, we had no backup plan in case of fire, flood, earthquake or other disaster.”

Expanding Laserfiche proved to be more than an answer to any specific challenge; in fact, it empowered Lynwood to maximize the value of citizens’ tax dollars.

“The city has a responsibility to provide excellent customer service,” Haley continues, “including quick access to city records and improve service with today’s technology.”

Laserfiche’s tried-and-true document search, retrieval and distribution capabilities proved fit for the task—and for keeping costs down.

“Laserfiche has decreased our printing of paper documents by making it so easy to send files digitally,” Baker says. “The majority of agreements, letters, resolutions and other correspondence are now being e-mailed to vendors instead of mailing a printed copy, which reduces our dependence on the postal system and lowers costs.”

Baker also reports faster response times for records requests, such as resolutions and agendas, while finance department staff can confirm if bills were paid by looking up scanned checks. Staff members looking for copies of resolutions, agendas and agreements no longer trek to the City Clerk’s office, meaning staff productivity and efficiency have increased. “Documents are now at our fingertips instead of in a box in the basement,” Baker says.

Of course, even the most powerful software is only as useful as it is intuitive. That’s why ease of use played a major role in Lynwood’s purchasing decision—and why Laserfiche was the clear choice. “Laserfiche’s functionality is not only rich but easy to learn,” Baker says. “It gives people who aren’t very computer-savvy the confidence to use computer programs in the workplace.”

It’s no surprise that Lynwood would want to extend easy information access to the community. But while city staff quickly came to understand and appreciate Laserfiche, many citizens were hesitant to retrieve documents via Laserfiche rather than making pilgrimages to City Hall. “Many residents refused to change the way they were retrieving information, because they couldn’t understand how valuable a tool Laserfiche is,” Baker recounts.

Lynwood’s electronic document management team adroitly addressed customer concerns, taking Laserfiche’s user-friendliness to new heights with a custom WebLink interface.

“Most public document search engines come off as intimidating to the public, and as a result, few people use them,” Baker explains. “We wanted our approach to be user-friendly, with a likable theme to encourage use.”

Baker teamed with IT Technician Mike Ochoa and Graphic Technician Jamel Goodloe to create a public records portal with an emphasis on accessibility. “We wanted to people of all ages and experience levels to be able to search for documents,” Baker says. The resulting site, called My Doc Spot, features a public records mascot, Spot, who “fetches” agendas, minutes, resolutions, budgets, RFPs and agreements for Lynwood citizens.

Response to the records portal has been overwhelmingly positive, from both citizens and the city staff who formerly had to manually respond to records requests. In fact, My Doc Spot helped Lynwood fetch a coveted 2008 Laserfiche Run Smarter Award. Of course, it also helps that the city now has a codified records policy in place.

“Laserfiche has provided us with a system to cope with our records challenges while meeting ISO standards,” says Baker. “We can now easily classify, store and search for all our records, which satisfies the California Public Records Act,” he adds.

Laserfiche has also helped Lynwood overcome its increased litigation challenge, dramatically reducing the time it takes to respond to discovery requests. “With Laserfiche,” Baker notes, “we can look up what we need to find by a simple keyword search, with no added expense. And instead of giving attorneys binders of documents, we can give them their requested documents on CD.”

The most important benefit of the Laserfiche system, according to Baker, has been establishing and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, Laserfiche centralizes all of Lynwood’s vital documents—including agendas, resolutions, printed checks and invoices, agreements, minutes, budgets, city maps, and public requests—for storage and regularly scheduled backup. “Our Laserfiche system makes it very easy to copy images to a DVD-R or tape and send them to a protected location,” Baker says.

Laserfiche went five-for-five in meeting all of the city’s information management challenges. But it’s the unexpected benefits—like increased staff morale and a decreased carbon footprint—that have been especially satisfying for Lynwood staff. “Our staff have definitely taken a liking to the Laserfiche system,” Baker reports. “Most use it to store all their vital and general correspondence, with the confidence that their files will never be lost. By using Laserfiche so much, we’re also promoting a paperless work environment, which in the long run will save resources and promote cleaner air.”

Baker doesn’t hesitate to recommend Laserfiche to his peers. “My advice to those looking to implement document management is this,” he says. “Laserfiche is a ground-breaking solution that gives you the ability to be more efficient, confident and reliable as an organization. Once we installed Laserfiche, our information management challenges soon became yesterday’s news.”

“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.

Boulder City gets more than its share of requests for its public records. It’s a relatively new city—it turns 50 next year – and many of its original citizens still live there. That makes for a very active citizenry.

“Sometimes it’s a very hot political climate – voter turnout can be as high as 80%,” explains Malmstrom. “The community is so hands-on. We get so many requests for records. Some citizens would call everyday. We wanted something to simplify all their requests for records.”

When BC first implemented Laserfiche a decade ago, the town’s reasons for needing an electronic document management system were as simple as they were familiar. “By 1999, everything was in disarray,” remembers Records Clerk Teena Pickens. “Our filing cabinets were made of cardboard. It was a disaster.”

Malmstrom’s predecessor Vicki Mayes (now BC’s City Manager) looked to the neighboring city of Henderson, which had also been researching document management solutions. Mayes researched other systems, but in July 2001, chose Laserfiche based on two simple factors: “Because of the cost and it fit our needs,” relays Pickens. The age of the cardboard filing cabinet drew to a close and a new era began.

Boulder City implemented its new system, wisely, in phases.

City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom

“We started in-house, so it was easier for us,” Pickens remembers. “The permanent records were the first. We started with resolutions. As far as setting up folders, I thought about how it was going to be easiest for people other than myself to find what they were looking for. We set up a ‘Resolutions’ folder, then the different committees—‘Planning,’ ‘Redevelopment,’ etc. Then by years.”

“It was a lot of trial and error,” Malmstrom admits.

Buy-in from other departments was gradual but steady.

“We started in the City Clerk’s office and then moved on to other departments and got them comfortable with using the system. People in general can be resistant to change. It’s a learning process,” she admits. “The more department heads see the benefits, the more departments come on board,” she says proudly. “The whole city’s using WebLink now—the police, personnel—everybody.”

Says Malmstrom, “Once people get the hang of it, Laserfiche is easier to use than Windows. It just takes a while to adjust.”

Boulder City may be a small town, but it covers a large area, including the El Dorado Valley, home to the city’s “Energy Zone,” which is devoted to developing solar power– and where development is closely watched by the public. “People are very interested in anything that happens and they want to be able to research it,” says Pickens.

“The BC Landfill is another hot topic,” adds Malmstrom. “That’s an understatement,” Pickens laughs.

Records Manager Teena Pickens and Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm

“We had people who wanted to see land sales,” adds Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm. “We had enough calls from citizens where it made sense to make them available.” BC had been using WebLink internally since 2001, but by 2006, the addition of a security firewall allowed access to the public. But with public access came the need to file Boulder City’s land sales to make them, well, more accessible. Explains Krumm, “We came up with a system where the agreements were apart from resolutions and ordinances.”

Citizen buy-in has been near-unanimous. “The concerns and complaints have been few,” Krumm says. “If you know what you’re looking for you can find it in the folder structure.”

But, she says, that’s only because a lot of care went into setting up those folders.

“You have to think about how you want to set-up folder structures. If you don’t make it easy, you’re going to get more calls,” warns Krumm.

One thing’s for sure, fulfilling requests is easier. “When we have a request for a contract in the energy zone, you can be on the phone attaching it to an e-mail and sending it—as opposed to getting up walking down the hall, finding the file, going through 150 pages, locating the pages, copying them and then sending them out.”

The most recent addition to the Boulder City Laserfiche family, has also been the most resource-saving: Agenda Manager.

“I’d been asking for Agenda Manager for years,” Malmstrom sighs. When a 2005 primary election budget wound up unspent, Malmstrom requested the funds go to purchasing Agenda Manager.

The results in her office were instantaneous. “Instead of printing out 23 500-page packets, people just look up agenda packets online,” she says. “It just condenses paper and time.”

The rest of the city has followed suit, slowly but surely. “It takes a while to adjust to change, but once you get used to [using Agenda Manager], it makes everything much easier, especially if there are a lot of last-minute changes,” offers Pickens. “I can’t even imagine what we’d do without it.”

Next up for Boulder City is the introduction of Quick Fields as part of its latest acquisition—Laserfiche Records Management Edition, due early next year.

“We’re continuing to evolve,” says Malmstrom.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is one of the things makes Boulder City truly unique among the state’s neon-cityscapes: “We’re the only city in Nevada that doesn’t have gambling,” she explains.

But doesn’t mean Boulder City doesn’t know how to have a good time.

“We’re actually small enough that we can still shut down the streets for community events,” offers Malmstrom. It sounds so idyllic, you imagine someone could be passing out milk and cookies at these community events. “More like beer and margaritas,” she laughs.

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.

“Wayne has been the man all along,” says Glens Falls City Clerk Robert Curtis. “Without him, probably

none of this work would have been done. Laserfiche has truly been a wonderful asset to this office, and Wayne has been the point man all along. Whether it’s securing the funding or keeping the database updated, Wayne is the one that puts it all together.”

Glens Falls is a city of about 15,000 residents located in Upstate New York’s hardscrabble Lower Adirondack Region, an area not known for investing in novel government technology. Still, when the city’s microfilm vendor showed Wright that Laserfiche brochure, he couldn’t help but think about that old copier.

“We were probably printing out about 1,200 certificates each month,” Wright says. “Every day you had to drag out those books, find the record, flip the books over, cram them onto the copier glass, and then hope you got a shot you could actually use. It got to where I hated doing it.”

So, Wright applied for—and was rejected for—a grant from the New York State Archives. At that time, the State Archives was concerned about the long-term prospects of what was still a novel technology. When the grant was turned down, Wright turned to the City’s Common Council and, with the City Clerk’s blessing, the Council approved a three-year lease-to-own purchase plan for a Laserfiche software license, scanner and computer.

With the city’s commitment to document imaging backing him, Wright applied for another Archives grant, only this time he specified the money was to be used only for back-scanning archived records. With a $12,800 state grant in hand, Glens Falls began scanning its vital records—and Wright began getting less of a workout at work.

A vendor was hired to do the back-scanning, leaving Wright free to begin creating the city’s first electronic historic archive. This was evening and weekend work for which Wright, as city historian, was paid a stipend augmented only by his love for the project. He traveled from city businesses to homes to government record rooms pulling out, copying and scanning documents, postcards, building plans and proclamations.

As he was reconstructing the city’s past, Wright was also building its future as one of the Northeast’s leading small cities in electronic document management storage, according to Bruce Cadman, regional sales representative for Rochester, NY-based, Laserfiche reseller General Code.

“Wayne has done an incredible job getting all sorts of documents into Laserfiche,” Cadman says. “He made it his personal mission to make a searchable database that can be much more easily accessed by everyone in City Hall.”

As Wright’s co-workers were getting to know Laserfiche better, so were the folks at the State Archives’ grant office. Glens Falls was awarded a $22,000 grant for its Laserfiche project a few years after the first, followed by a third grant for $32,000 and a fourth for $43,000.

Along the way, the city’s computer has been upgraded three times, a server was installed to store scanned images and the first scanner was replaced with a smaller and faster color unit. Glens Falls also upgraded from Laserfiche 5 to Laserfiche 7, which helped Wright to expand his database to incorporate other City Hall departments, according to General Code tech support engineer Brian Hoody.

Laserfiche streamlined the city’s scanning and storing operations, so Wright was able to expand the system’s scope. He used grant funding to start scanning city court indexes, personnel, cemetery and public works department documents, winning him friends outside the clerk’s office, nowhere more than in the building department where, again with the help of State Archives grants, Glens Falls has been aggressively scanning both new and old building plans.

It’s the latter that can be particularly useful to residents renovating an older home, building inspector John Ward says. Residents can even get copies of the municipal code and master plan on compact disc. Now, when residents want copies from the building department, Ward sends them over to see Wright, who pulls them out of Laserfiche within minutes, instead of hours.

“When Wayne showed me what he wanted to do with this system I thought it was great,” says Ward. “It’s been very, very helpful particularly with all the older buildings we have in Glens Falls.”

As the database has expanded, so has its sophistication. Laserfiche Snapshot instantly stores Microsoft Word files and other internal documents in Laserfiche. And scanned images are exported to the city’s microfilm vendor, who creates permanent microfilm copies of the records using a Kodak Archive Writer.

The last State Archives grant written by Wright was to scan records which had been microfilmed years before. The original records were destroyed after they were filmed, so using the film was the only way to add them to the Laserfiche database. Through the help of then Mayor LeRoy Akins, Jr., the funding was used to purchase a Canon microfilm scanner and pay two temporary employees to run the machine. This project was a great success and the City plans to share the microfilm scanner with other local governments when possible.

When Wright dons his City Historian hat, he has the ability to bring the Laserfiche historic records archive with him on CD. Doing field research with Laserfiche, Wright says, enables him to more easily separate the historic documents he already has from those he wants to add to the archive.

Still, there is much more Laserfiche could be doing for the city. The city bought Laserfiche Quick Fields but Wright still indexes documents individually after they are scanned. Hoody plans to work with Wright to install Quick Fields and make Wright’s job even more manageable.

Then there are Agenda Manager, Workflow, WebLink and Web Access, which are all firmly on Wright’s list of possible purchases. Mayor Akins died in August 2008 from cancer and council-wide elections are also slated for next year, so such purchases will likely be deferred, Curtis says.

Then there’s always the matter of finding the money, but that’s where Wright’s work as a State Archives grants writer comes in. Over the past few years, the granting agency has seen more and more benefits in funding electronic document management systems for small communities like Glens Falls, according to State Archives Director of Government Records Services Geof Huth.

“There have been plenty of grants submitted for Laserfiche, because it’s fairly popular with medium-sized governments,” Huth says. “The reason the State Archives is awarding more imaging grants is that more people are interested in document management—and that’s because of the work of people like Wayne.”

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.

When Beahen came to Elk River as assistant chief in 1998, the department was still using typewriters and carbon paper. “There were these two PC’s with a word processing program for transcription purposes,” he remembers. “We used a main frame computer that operated in DOS for our existing records system, which was purchased in 1984.”

Beahen immediately began upgrading the department’s technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network to get everyone on e-mail. Next up was finding an information storage system to use on the new network. “Everybody knew we needed it. It was more like who wanted to be the first one to get it out there,” he says. Beahen got it out there, and sixteen months later, Elk River was using Laserfiche.

Beahen immediately saw Laserfiche’s potential. “We wanted to get to the point where everything for a case file could be scanned in and filed by case number and the whole thing could be sent out as an attachment,” he says. “We just wanted to make it that simple.”

But before that could happen, two things had to be contended with: old paper files and an outdated database.

“We open between 24,000 and 25,000 files a year—and that takes up a whole storage room,” Beahen explains. “A file for something like a DUI might have 30 or 40 documents, and things get lost. Arson and burglary files, when you consider all the statements and photos, can easily be eight or nine hundred pages. If you’re working a homicide case, you might be adding reports every day.”

For officers who had to testify at court, that meant printing out and distributing seven or more copies of the file to judges, attorneys and detectives, which resulted in both a lot of paper and a lot of transportation costs.

“The county attorney’s eight miles away, the city attorney’s 12 miles away, nobody’s right there in the same building,” Beahen says. “Now, we’re slowly but surely scanning previous years’ case records. When we first started, we had to find case records. Now, once we’ve get them, we scan them. The whole transaction takes less than half a day,” Beahen says proudly. “We’ve been completely paperless since April of 2007.”

Then there was the challenge of maximizing Laserfiche’s potential by replacing Elk River’s outmoded database.

“Our old system was proprietary, so we could only use Laserfiche for storage,” Beahen says. “One of our goals was to find a new records system that would allow us to accept data from the Laserfiche-scanned documents that could be attached directly to the record as media.”

Being able to scan and attach is actually what attracted him to Laserfiche in the first place.

“That’s one of the big reasons why we selected it. With Laserfiche, you just scan all the odds and ends in the same file. We used to have to create all these PDFs and then attach them. Now, Laserfiche interacts directly with our existing records system and scans everything—4×8s, half-sheets, full-sheets—into the same case number,” he says.

But not everyone made the paperless switch as enthusiastically.

“Sometimes the judges and courts just need that paper in front of them, because they’re used to that. But we’ve met with them and they’re now convinced that this is the future. They’ve directed everyone in their offices to work toward a paperless system for everything,” Beahen says. “The tickets we write are already being sent in electronically. Now they’re looking at e-filing complaints and all court orders.

“What wins them over is I can be on the phone with them and tell them ‘I’m going to send it electronically.’ And then, while I’m on the phone, I’ll say ‘Open your e-mail and hit print.’ The speed and efficiency wins over all the doubters.”

What’s won Beahen over is the sheer range of benefits from using a paperless system.

“Last year we saved over $17,000 just in paper costs,” he begins. “Plus, it’s green. There are more energy and resources savings than people might think. Out of my yearly budget that doesn’t seem that significant, but with budget cuts and the actual man hours you’re saving, it adds up.”

Then there’s the technical edge his officers enjoy.

“We’re talking real-time investigative tools at the officer’s fingertips,” Beahen offers. “We’re not a very high-crime area, but we do see our share of property crimes. Like breaking into construction sites and stealing copper. Now we can have an officer on the scene who’s found a guy with cutting tools in his trunk. And we may have a case a month earlier where we have a picture of the shoes used in that crime. The officer can immediately view the picture of the shoes and see if it matches,” Beahen explains. “In the old days, someone had to drive all the way back and look up the file—that is, if they had access to it.

“When you think of giving every officer every piece of information in the car instantly, that’s huge. If we have it, they have it.”

Elk River’s high-tech transition has been almost total: in addition to using Quick Fields and Web Link, the ERPD uses Crimereports.com to provide a link to its service calls and interfaces using an electronic roll-call page.

Still, some old habits die hard. “We were so used to having to put staples through everything,” Beahen jokes. “The biggest headache of using our Laserfiche system is taking everything we had stapled together apart so we could scan it in.”

Not that his successors will have to do that. They might not even need to know what a stapler is.

“We have a new generation of officers that can text with one hand while they talk on the cell and still use the radio,” he observes. “We were moving some old equipment this younger guy saw one of the old typewriters from when I first got here in 1998, and he was asking, ‘What’s this?’”

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.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Rachelle Meredith describe her Laserfiche success in her own words.

When the Town consolidated three administration buildings into one, the Safety Codes department, which encompasses building inspection services, began investigating scanning solutions. When the Town’s records manager was taking a course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, the instructor commented that Laserfiche provided “top-notch products and services for public and private corporations,” says Rachelle Meredith, corporate records administrator.

After researching Laserfiche, the records manager then invited a representative from Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions to conduct a demonstration. After issuing an RFP, the Town selected Laserfiche, primarily for its records management functionality, OCR capabilities and the Agenda Manager and WebLink modules.

“We love Records Management Edition’s versatility. Its ease of use was very important to us, both to gain staff buy-in and work effortlessly in our busy environment,” Meredith says.

Initially the Safety Codes assistant and manager began scanning all new building and development permit applications into Laserfiche. These applications often contain more than 300 pages, ranging from architectural drawings for housing and commercial buildings and all their associated electrical and plumbing permits to individual applications for decks and other home additions.

As Okotoks entered into its prime building season and the number of permits submitted began to climb, the effectiveness of implementing Laserfiche became quickly apparent. “The immediate benefits were obvious,” remarks Meredith. “When we saw how we saved time locating current information, we began to realize how Laserfiche would benefit our external customers as the project continued. It was a great motivation to keep going.”

At this point, Safety Codes has added more than 3,000 records to their system, saving money on paper supplies and reducing impact on the environment. “Staff really noticed the difference,” Meredith comments. “Time savings was one advantage, because finding information was so much easier. Documents were immediately accessible to safety code officers when they were out in the field, and they had access to accurate, up-to-date information that helped them make better decisions.”

And now the benefits of Laserfiche have extended to builders, professional contractors and homeowners applying for permits. “Safety Codes staff can now e-mail approved documentation back to the applicant, as well as receive initial applications by e-mail, which can be dropped straight into the records management system,” Meredith says. “This saves builders time and money, because they don’t have to come to the office to drop off or collect documentation. Instead, they receive an immediate response.”

External clients aren’t the only ones noticing the difference—other departments are recognizing the benefits of Laserfiche too. In fact, Safety Codes staff, including manager Rob Mueller, assistant Diane Scott and support staff member Ann Williams, were recently nominated for a prestigious annual corporate award, based on the effects other departments have realized from the Laserfiche system. “This is a coveted award, because peers from all 22 business units nominate and select the highest performing team,” explains Meredith. “Safety Codes was recognized for their creative approach, which was encouraging.”

In fact, the Assessment Services department has identified several key tasks that have become much more efficient since Safety Codes implemented Laserfiche. “Off-site trips to locate records have been reduced significantly because staff can instantly review documentation to identify if there’s been a history relating to a certain parcel of land. Also, copier wear-and-tear has been eliminated because they no longer have to piece together copies to recreate 24”x36” drawings,” Meredith says.

“Moreover, staff has easy access to permits correspondence and information, making it easier for assessors to identify any deficiencies or problems in blueprints and written inspection details,” she adds. “More importantly, staff can use Laserfiche’s zoom tools to enlarge numbers on blueprints, so they can read details electronically. It makes their lives so much easier.”

Based on the success in the Safety Codes department, Okotoks expanded Laserfiche to their Cemeteries/Open Spaces department. “Cemeteries is a legislated service that requires us to manage cemetery records ‘in perpetuity,’ which essentially means forever,” Meredith says. “So it was critical that this project was done correctly, right from the very start.”

The Cemeteries project was focused primarily on creating archival records, because, by their nature, cemetery records are historically important. Since Okotoks became a recognized municipality in 1904, cemetery recordkeeping has changed significantly, from a receipt of monies collected for the burial plot and an index card with the deceased’s name, to a file containing anywhere from 8-14 internal and external documents.

“From the minute we started this project we knew how convenient it would be to access information from our desktop computers,” explains Meredith. “Having current and correct information to provide to grieving relatives immediately is crucial.”

Cemetery Administrator Monica Caines began the project on a day-forward basis, scanning records as they were received and archiving records as they were pulled. After nearly two years, almost 4,700 records are now searchable through a customized template. In fact, the Cemeteries project proved so useful, Town staff next began scanning and indexing Open Spaces (parks) records. With a customized template to aid in indexing, users can instantly access documents regarding the Town’s parks, boulevards, landscaping and horticulture.

In early 2009, Okotoks residents and other Web users will be able to use WebLink to search current bylaws and more than 100 years’ worth of historical bylaws. The Town also plans to implement Workflow in the Safety Codes department, and eventually expand Workflow into finance and other departments to optimize their business processes.

In recognition of the Town’s success with Laserfiche, Okotoks is currently in the running for this year’s Run Smarter Awards. “Laserfiche is fairly new to western Canadian municipalities,” Meredith says. “We’ve had a lot of attention from other Town departments, and also from other municipalities. They want to know more about how Laserfiche is helping us meet our sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as how we’re using Laserfiche to work smarter, not longer.”

Despite recognition from inside and outside town limits, Okotoks continues to use Laserfiche for the primary reason it was purchased: to support a sustainable future for the town’s residents. “We really believed that Laserfiche was the best overall solution for our long-term needs,” Meredith says.

“We’re a rapidly growing community that has a solid reputation for being progressive and supporting an entrepreneurial, leading-edge culture,” she adds. “Laserfiche helps us as we strive to live and work in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Armed with laptops, compact discs and/or internet access, elected officials are working from electronic agendas that run the meetings that run local government. The technology eliminates mountains of paper, helps with organizing those meetings and—perhaps most important—puts much more information into the hands of the decisions makers as they make those decisions.

“I love it,” says Ramsey, NJ, Borough Clerk Meredith Bendian. “Now the mayor and council open their laptops, call up the agenda and click on the various links for each agenda item as they work their way through the meeting.”

The Ramsey clerk’s office started scanning and storing meeting minutes and other paperwork into a Laserfiche database in January. Ramsey Councilman Arthur Nalbandian heard that other New Jersey communities were using Laserfiche software to help run their municipal meetings, and suggested it might work in Ramsey.

It took two training sessions and over $20,000 in computer equipment— including 10 laptops—but in January the Ramsey Borough Council had its first paperless meeting. They’ve had 21 such meetings since.

“Our council is receiving it very well,” Bendian says. “It enables us to link to every document that has to do with whatever agenda item we’re working on. We put it all in there together with the agenda.”

Bendian builds the electronic agenda by scanning all the upcoming meeting business into Laserfiche, including agenda items requested by the various department heads and any internal supporting documentation those department heads may have submitted for those items. Public communications to the mayor and council are also scanned in.

All that is then burned onto a compact disc that’s handed out to the six council members, mayor and other council officials before the meeting. Before going paperless, all that was printed out and photocopied.

“You wouldn’t believe the number of copies of all these documents that we were making before each meeting,” Bendian says.

While the use of Laserfiche for paperless meetings is an extremely useful innovation, the benefits of Laserfiche can go much further, according to Greg Hart, Borough Administrator for nearby Franklin Lakes. Hart is a strong proponent of paperless meeting technology and has given demonstrations on the subject before the Municipal Clerks’ Association of New Jersey.

Hart introduced the Borough of Old Tappan to the paperless meeting before moving to his new job in Franklin Lakes. His first task at his new job was getting Franklin Lakes government departments scanning and storing their paperwork into a brand new Laserfiche system. Next, the Mayor and Council authorized $30,000 worth of computer hardware and software, including Laserfiche’s WebLink, which provides secure Web access to the Borough’s Laserfiche database.

Reflecting on his first paperless meeting in Old Tappan back in 2004, Hart says, “I’ll never forget it, because it was the most efficient meeting we’d had to date. The Mayor and Council benefit because they have ability to easily access information and, as a result, the governing body makes more informed decisions. Ultimately, they are able to govern more effectively and more efficiently.”

Bendian says she hopes one day soon to take Ramsey’s government operations in the same direction as Franklin Lakes. Hart believes it’s a logical extension of Ramsey’s current program. If Bendian is already scanning all those documents from the various department heads into her database to build each meeting agenda, Hart says, the next logical step is place those documents into a borough-wide Laserfiche system.

“If you’re going to go to paperless meeting and scanning all these documents into some sort of system you might as well have a document management system to organize it all,” he says. “Even if it’s only the documents for the paperless meetings. You start with the concept of the paperless meeting and it becomes an electronic document management system.”

Word of the paperless office is getting out to other New Jersey communities, in part due to Hart’s demonstrations before the Municipal Clerks Association. In Toms River, two council members are working from electronic agendas and the township plans on moving forward with full implementation, according to deputy clerk Alison Carlisle.

In Woodcliff Lake Councilman John Glaser also conducted a trial run using a laptop with both compact discs and internet access to the borough’s Laserfiche database. The trial went well and now he wants to get the rest of the council onboard.

“It’s obviously valuable for preparing for a meeting,” Glaser says. “We did some tweaking with it, but it looked good.”

There is always some customization involved Hart says, but often the hardest thing about transitioning to paperless meetings is winning over skeptical borough hall staff and elected officials. Closter Mayor Sophie Heymann says she’d like to bring paperless meetings to her borough but while staff have shown an interest, she suspects they are a little intimidated. She also wondered about security issues.

Those are understandable but unnecessary fears, both Bendian and Hart say. When working from CDs, the security concerns are no different than working from a paper agenda, and when working from the internet, everything is secured by password.

“I think the real reluctance of communities to embrace this technology depends on how computer savvy the staffers and elected officials are,” Bendian says. “All our council members are all computer literate, which helps. They were all on board for doing this right from the start.”

Hart says in the two communities he’s introduced to paperless meetings it’s been well worth the work.
“There is significant investment but the pay off is so much more than the input,” Hart says. “For us it was very user friendly, and the mayor and council adjusted very quickly. The important thing is that nobody is shuffling papers any more.”

The Westminster Fire Department began using digital data in 1985. Since most fire departments predate electronic data by decades if not centuries, the 1980s brought a wave of digitizing data to fire departments across the country. Fire departments generally use records management systems designed specifically for the firefighting field, although according to Chief Macaloney, there’s no particular consistency when it comes to vendors and most departments keep paper records as well.

“Ultimately, you end up with this mishmash of electronic data and paper data,” he says.

This combination of paper and electronic data proved fortunate for Westminster. “We had a catastrophic failure of our records management system software,” Macaloney remembers, “which caused us not to have any electronic data from the mid-eighties all the way through the year 2000.”

Since Westminster had always kept paper copies of their records, the department could retrieve the paper copies. But resuming digital data storage was a challenge. After the software failure, Westminster was ready to switch vendors and converting data from one system to another was complicated, even with two systems designed for fire departments. Changing over to another fire-response software system for records management would have required rewriting massive amounts of code, which would have been very expensive.

“Transitioning systems wasn’t an issue for me,” he recalls, “because I decided to go out and secure Laserfiche to be my system for records storage and retrieval.”

Chief Macaloney, who had only a massive number of paper records to work with, knew he needed a common way to look at and retrieve data. “Before installing Laserfiche, I had no consistent way to retrieve information regarding any incident without someone telling me specifically the date and time that it happened,” he says. “When we lost our electronic data, we had no ability to look up public records and fulfill a public records request. Laserfiche provided a mechanism to scan the data, retain it, retrieve it, sort it and search it—and not just the records from 1985 forward, but everything. Now I can log into Laserfiche and pull up an incident in seconds.”

So far, the department has scanned in documents from 2002 to the present and is going back in time with the goal of scanning in all their paper records. To that end, Westminster has developed an innovative program that benefits the fire department and senior citizens alike. “In Massachusetts,” Macaloney says, “any city or town that chooses to adopt the provisions of the state law may reduce the tax levy on property for senior citizens who fall within certain income limits. We’ve utilized senior workers in the fire department in the past, but lately we’ve had them scanning in documents, under the direction of my administrative secretary. We record their work hours and send them to town hall and the town abates their taxes. The good news goes beyond our happiness with Laserfiche itself. We’ve been able to use this program to everyone’s benefit.”

Laserfiche also helps the fire department save money in an unexpected way—on envelopes and stamps. “Some of the documents we scan in are for ambulance transports. That information has to be sent to a billing company. We worked out an agreement with our billing company that when we scan in those documents, we FTP the data over to their site, so we no longer have to mail them the paper documents. So in addition to the good things you have about document management and retrieval, there are the secondary things that we didn’t anticipate, such as sending the electronic file for the billing company to process. We save time and the money we’d spend on envelopes and stamps. That’s a big gain right there.”

The fire department initiated the establishment of a network for the city, and built it, running the fiber-optic cable across the parking lot to city hall. Now firefighters in the field can call up documents on their laptops and read information pertinent to the fire sites. “That will become even more important in the future,” says Macaloney, “when we scan in documents such as permits that have never been electronic documents. The network is seamless. It ties alarm receiving to dispatch to records. And it sends an email to my cell phone notifying me of the alarm. Everything is retrievable through the network from the building or anywhere with access.”

It’s clear that Westminster’s technical innovations have far-ranging benefits for everyone from firefighters in the field to senior citizens working to abate their taxes. The technical savvy shown by this town of 8,000 proves that innovation isn’t the sole province of large municipalities. With the police department and town hall in line to integrate with the system, Laserfiche has been and will continue to be an integral part of the town’s success.

The soon-to-be-completed Burj Dubai will be the world's tallest building.

The City of Dubai already had an expansive—and expensive—document management system in place when the scanning project began. Given such an investment, why, then, would they purchase a brand-new Laserfiche system for the project? The answer is simple: Simplicity.

“The City of Dubai’s existing document management system is complex and not very user-friendly or easy to implement,” explains Mustafa Siddiqui, business solutions specialist for Pixel Digital Systems (PDS), the City of Dubai’s Laserfiche reseller. “We needed software that we could implement quickly, and that users could understand right away. We found all that in Laserfiche.”

Siddiqui credits BMB Sal, official Laserfiche supplier to the Middle East, for making the implementation so smooth. “We’ve had a great experience with BMB,” he says. “They responded immediately to our questions during the implementation.”

Installing Laserfiche proved fairly simple. Next came the real challenge: Creating a logical file structure for a diverse array of document types. Siddiqui and company are glad to have Laserfiche’s flexible templates to help them efficiently capture and index documents from multiple city departments. “We have to process documents for all the city’s departments—finance, human resources, building and accounting,” he says, “so the ability to quickly create and modify templates for all these document types is a major advantage.”

It’s not just multiple document types involved in the project. As Dubai becomes ever more multicultural, the need to accommodate documents in multiple languages increases. With 85 percent of documents in Arabic and the remaining 15 percent in English, the Laserfiche system’s strong multi-language support was essential to Dubai’s purchasing decision.

The City of Dubai’s central archive center follows International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Six Sigma quality control standards for archiving and storing documents. To preserve these standards, PDS have engineered a sophisticated quality control process using Laserfiche Workflow. Before they enter the Laserfiche repository, newly-scanned documents are routed to PDS staff for an initial quality check. The second step in the workflow involves template assignment and indexing. Finally, both PDS and municipal staff review processed documents before permanently archiving them. Thanks to Workflow, each step in this process is fully automated, saving time and resources throughout each stage of quality control.

Given Dubai’s surging population and related construction boom, the city deemed it critical to implement a scalable system to manage the sharp increase in incoming paperwork. “It’s definitely the right time for organizations in the Middle East to adopt an electronic document management system,” Siddiqui explains. “Organizations in this region face large amounts of paper coupled with reduced manpower and huge rental expenses.”

It’s somewhat serendipitous, then, that Laserfiche is so well-equipped to handle such growth. Recently, the City of Dubai expanded the current back-file conversion project to include another million pages, and PDS is bidding to for the opportunity to integrate Laserfiche with Dubai’s existing system to handle all day-forward scanning.

Members of the back-file conversion team at the project's kickoff meeting. From L to R: Amine Hakim Karrouche, Fareed Ahmed AbdulSattar, Stephen Macintosh, Tariq Ahmed Zarooni, Hussain Abdulla Fardan, Yousif Shams, Huda Ozair Mubarak, Khalil Hussain, Gurmeet Singh, Ibrahim Miligi, Mustafa Siddiqui, Manoj Ganapathy, Khurram Jamil.

“We plan to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s existing system, which will be used for storage,” Siddiqui says. But for everyday work, users will use the Laserfiche interface exclusively, because it’s so user-friendly.” In addition to greatly simplifying business process, the integration will strengthen the city’s IT infrastructure. “Laserfiche will help the City of Dubai increase the value of its existing investment by making it so much easier to use,” he adds.

While the plans for citywide expansion of the Laserfiche system are not yet finalized, if recent results are any indication, expect Laserfiche to become a key part of Dubai’s infrastructure. “We’re very happy to have been awarded a contract extension for the back-file conversion project,” Siddiqui says. “We look forward to continued success with Dubai, and hopefully, to new partnerships with other municipalities in the region.”

Before the clerk’s office installed Laserfiche, staff literally spent hours each day fulfilling information requests. “It was so time-consuming,” recalls City Clerk Lynn Mulhall. “Other city employees would come to our office to submit requests, and they’d have to wait at the counter while we went to the records room and searched for the relevant documents. We definitely needed a better way to share information with other departments.”

Records Administrator Janet LeBlanc puts it more succinctly. “I cringe when I think about how it used to be,” she says.

Mulhall and her colleagues found what they were looking for at an Arizona Municipal Clerks’ Association conference, where they spoke with a Laserfiche representative and saw the software in action. Using Laserfiche, they’d be able to digitize and index all their documents, eliminating almost all of their paper archives.

“We really didn’t look at anything else,” Mulhall remembers. “Laserfiche was the only known product to meet the needs of city clerks, and once we saw it, we really liked it.”

The clerk’s office installed Laserfiche in 2001, and staff began scanning agendas, meeting minutes and other documents into the Laserfiche repository. In 2002, LeBlanc started an initiative to move all the office’s documents into Laserfiche, and she began scanning records one series at a time. Because documents hadn’t been named consistently, LeBlanc focused on developing a template with drop-down fields recording the document type, how it was approved, and contract numbers and terms, among other information.

“I really created it through trial and error,” she says. “But now it’s so easy. We can search by keyword to instantly locate the information we need.”

As LeBlanc added more documents to the Laserfiche repository, staff found it increasingly simple to locate information requested by other city departments. In fact, because they could e-mail documents from within Laserfiche, staff could fulfill many requests instantaneously.

As employees throughout the city became more comfortable with electronic documents, they began contacting the IT department to request access to Laserfiche. Rather than rolling the Laserfiche Client software out citywide, IT used WebLink to power a Web portal that provides staff with round-the-clock access to the Laserfiche repository.

“We held training sessions to show staff in other departments how to locate documents in Laserfiche,” LeBlanc says. “Because Laserfiche is so easy to use, everyone caught on quickly, and it’s definitely made us more productive. Our city manager, for example, absolutely loves it—he saves a lot of time by accessing contracts and other documents right from his desktop.”

In addition to making documents more accessible, Laserfiche has also helped the clerk’s office streamline everyday work processes. For example, before the office installed Laserfiche, preparing agenda packets was a tedious process that required hours of staff time. “We used to place the reports in black binders, which we’d then carry between people’s desks,” Mulhall remembers. “We had to create a Microsoft® Access® database to determine who had the binders, or even who’d seen them last.”

After creating the final agenda, staff had to assemble the packet by hand and create 40-50 photocopies. Last-minute additions required staff to photocopy more pages and append them to the end of each packet. “We certainly killed a lot of trees,” Mulhall notes.

Thanks to Laserfiche Agenda Manager, staff have dramatically cut the time, effort and copies required to distribute agendas and prepare minutes. Using Agenda Manager, staff members propose agenda items using a simple Web form. Agenda Manager then automatically routes proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, to the appropriate reviewers. Mulhall or one of her staff members can easily add approved items to the final agenda as well as remove or rearrange items to accommodate last-minute changes. Mulhall publishes and distributes the finalized agenda with the touch of a button, then posts it to the city’s Website.

“Our signers love it, and we all thought they’d resist,” Mulhall says. “They’re definitely ‘paper people,’ but not a single one has complained about it. In fact, they all tell us how great the system is.”

Goodyear uses Agenda Manager to manage over ten different types of meetings, so to help staff use it most effectively, the deputy clerk developed a how-to manual and several training classes. “As new people go live, either she or I go to their desk, give them the manual and walk them through preparing their first report,” says Mulhall. “It’s so easy to use that the questions we get are about how we prefer the report to be formatted, not how to use the product.”

The city has also integrated Agenda Manager with Granicus® to create and manage both meeting minutes and audio and video recordings of the proceedings. The video is indexed in real-time by each agenda item. “The public loves it,” Mulhall comments. “In fact, we all love it. If someone misses a meeting, they can watch it, click on an item and immediately access the staff report.

“In fact, it’s hard to tell what’s Agenda Manager and what’s Granicus, they’re so well-integrated,” she adds.

Goodyear now uses Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office, the municipal court, the city manager’s office and the engineering department, which has helped reduce copies of both paper and electronic documents city-wide. There has also been a marked decrease in internal records requests, because city staff can locate their own information. Staff have also managed to stay on top of an increased workload without hiring additional employees.

“We couldn’t do it without Laserfiche or Agenda Manager,” says Mulhall. “There would be no way we’d be able to do everything. Laserfiche has eliminated so much from our workload, it’s incredible.

“The change with Laserfiche is drastic enough that everyone has noticed,” she adds. “It’s a great tool that streamlines our work processes and makes us more productive on a daily basis. Laserfiche is truly something every city can benefit from.”

Like many eventual Laserfiche users, the City of Riverside found itself awash in paper and inefficiency. The city clerk’s office alone used multiple document management systems, which wasted time and resources and caused frequent needle-haystack incidents when staff looked for documents.

“Our system was organized, but also very cumbersome,” recalls City Clerk Colleen Nicol. “We used a data entry-intensive DOS-based program to index city council minutes and record file locations. An even older system identified file locations by topic, meaning staff had to make subjective judgments on where documents had been indexed.”

The time wasted on inefficient search and indexing snowballed into productivity bottlenecks. “The process of filing council meeting minutes took at least two weeks,” says Nicol, “which would be fine—except the city council holds weekly meetings. Inevitably, there were backlogs, which made locating yet-to-be-indexed documents very time-consuming. Before Laserfiche, we were three months behind in data entry and filing.”

Knowing that perpetuating these problematic processes would be detrimental to public service, in 2001, Riverside reviewed a number of potential solutions. Although the systems’ features were comparable, Laserfiche stood out, she says, due to its simplicity and flexibility. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s very user-friendly, and can handle departments of any size,” she explains. “It’s also very cost-effective, especially compared to competing products.”

Laserfiche’s searching power also stood out—literally. “Highlighted search results were another ‘must-have,’” Nicol adds. “We all take this feature for granted now, but Laserfiche was the only product to offer it at the time. It’s equally beneficial to all departments, saving time and frustration when reviewing large documents.”

Staff eagerly anticipated the Laserfiche installation, which Nicol attributes to their thorough understanding of the system’s benefits. “Support for Laserfiche was widespread,” she recalls. “IT, the city manager’s office and department representatives all took part in the selection process. Explaining the benefits to them in advance helped foster support and secure funding when we were ready for purchase and installation.”

Although it’s been many years since Riverside installed Laserfiche, Nicol still has fond memories of the implementation process. “Staff were eager to learn,” she says, “and the technical support we received from Laserfiche made the launch easy. We even had a visit from Laserfiche founder and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker.”

The pleasant installation experience was a harbinger of things to come. Staff began realizing the promised benefits quickly, starting with the bane of many a city clerk’s existence: the aforementioned city council agenda. The Agenda Manager module has completely transformed the agenda compilation and publishing processes. Rather than assembling and hand-delivering bulky paper copies of agenda items, staff members from various departments now submit council reports and attachments online. This has eliminated the routing of draft reports, as well as the confusion that can result from having multiple copies of the same document.

Publishing the agenda is equally smooth. Rather than making multiple paper copies, Nicol simply publishes the agenda online. This saves natural resources, and in the event that someone requests a paper copy, staff can easily submit the agenda for printing electronically instead of calling on their xerography skills. Nicol reports that publishing the weekly agenda using Agenda Manager has eliminated the need to perform quality control on agenda items, number pages by hand and deliver hard-copy agendas to the print shop. On agenda publishing days, all these tasks involved up to eight staff members—but now, one deputy city clerk can easily do it all.

A streamlined agenda process isn’t the only improvement in the clerk’s office. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, staff handled all research requests from other city departments and the public by mail, telephone or in person at city hall. Now, city departments—and thanks to WebLink, the public—can search city council history online, so they can do their own research immediately. Due in part to her efforts with Laserfiche, the International Institute of Municipal Clerks awarded Nicol the designation of Master Municipal Clerk in 2002.

Fueled by Nicol’s enthusiasm, Laserfiche devotion has percolated throughout the city, all the way to Steve Reneker, Riverside’s CIO. As Nicol recalls, Reneker didn’t initially believe that Laserfiche could deliver on his vision of citywide improvements. “At first, he wasn’t convinced that Laserfiche was an enterprise solution,” she says. “However, after looking into Laserfiche’s capabilities and potential for integration, he’s now embraced it as a city-standard solution and is working to take it enterprise-wide.”

In fact, Reneker has become such a champion of Laserfiche that he took the podium as the keynote speaker at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference. “Laserfiche has helped us maximize the value of our other technology investments,” Reneker said this past January. “By improving information access, we deliver better public service citywide.”

Superior service and increased efficiency are alive and well in multiple city departments, including the police department, which securely stores audio and video files and case-related documents in Laserfiche. And by implementing Laserfiche in the finance department, Riverside has dramatically streamlined payment processing. But the city’s really looking forward to implementing Rio, the first packaged enterprise content management system from Laserfiche.

“With Rio, and with all our planned integrations, we’ll expand our Laserfiche user population two- or threefold,” Nicol says. Laserfiche’s industry-best Microsoft SharePoint integration will automate workflow and accelerate business processes. The finance department will integrate Laserfiche with its primary software to add functionality and simplify everyday tasks. And integration with the city’s GIS software will enable city staff and the public to access information related to land parcels online.

Having witnessed the benefits that technology can bring to city government firsthand, Nicol hopes to encourage other cities to achieve the same results. And what better way to inspire her peers than to serve as the vice president of the International Institute of Municipal Clerks? She’s on the ballot for the upcoming election, and, given her ability to move the City of Riverside forward, it’s easy to imagine her guiding other municipalities towards greater efficiency and improved public service.

In the meantime, however, this Laserfiche Luminary and her colleagues throughout the City of Riverside are content enjoying the benefits of their Laserfiche system. “Laserfiche has helped us improve our business processes, reduce staff frustration and provide better public service,” she says. “It’s an excellent product.”

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the city clerk, staff quickly adopted the new system and began scanning documents into the Laserfiche repository. But the project lost momentum when the clerk retired. Many departments didn’t take the time to develop effective file structures in Laserfiche, and staff soon began adding documents to the repository without properly recording document metadata. As a result, they couldn’t make the best use of the Laserfiche search tools, and many departments continued to rely on their old, paper-based filing systems.

In 2005, Bill Matson, the city’s records and elections coordinator, undertook an initiative to reorganize the city’s document repository and help staff use Laserfiche more effectively. As part of this process, he worked with departments to recreate their current filing structures in Laserfiche and to design document templates that would capture the most useful metadata. Thanks to Matson’s intervention, staff soon integrated Laserfiche into their everyday work processes, and the city significantly increased the return on its Laserfiche investment.

“I tell people that Laserfiche is a great system—you just have to make sure you’re using it correctly,” Matson says. “Unfortunately, we started scanning documents into the repository without taking the time to think about how we’d search for them later on. Ultimately, our own lack of foresight kept us from using Laserfiche to its full potential.

Since 1846, the Maid of the Mist has given visitors an up-close view of Niagara Falls.

“For example, one of our more mundane tasks is to maintain a library of press clippings that deal with city business. Prior to 2005, multiple people scanned these clippings into Laserfiche, resulting in duplicate files scattered across a number of folders. Worse, we didn’t capture consistent metadata—clippings about the city’s budget, for instance, were assigned a variety of subjects, from ‘Budget’ to ‘Finances’ to ‘Fiscal Information.’

“To correct these problems, we created a separate Laserfiche folder for press clippings, with subfolders for each year. We also designed a new template to capture key metadata, including the clipping’s date, type and subject. To ensure consistency, we provided staff with drop-down lists of types and subjects to choose from, rather than allowing them to enter free text. This uniformity has made searches easier—and a lot more accurate.”

Instant access to information helps staff throughout the city work more efficiently. Staff in the clerk’s office, for example, can quickly locate agreements, leases, correspondence and other documents dealing with important city business. Staff in the municipal works department can easily find the maps, schematics and engineering plans they need to improve and repair city infrastructure. And staff in the planning department can promptly retrieve zoning and other information in response to citizens’ requests.

Matson notes that the planning department includes some of the city’s most avid Laserfiche users, and he attributes their success to careful project planning. Over the years, he explains, staff had created around 20 document categories—such as “Zoning,” “Subdivisions” and “Tourism”—and they then organized documents within each category alphabetically. Prior to scanning documents into the repository, they recreated this file structure in Laserfiche. Because of this foresight, staff can locate documents simply by browsing to the relevant folder. They can also use Laserfiche to perform more elaborate searches, including full-text searches across large numbers of documents.

In addition to helping staff find information, Laserfiche helps them share it with citizens. “In the past, responding to information requests usually involved a trip to the records room,” Matson says. “Once we found the correct file, we had to take it apart, photocopy the relevant pages and then either mail or fax them to the requestor. Now, when someone calls with a request, I can locate the relevant documents in just a few seconds, and then e-mail the electronic files from within the Laserfiche repository. The citizen literally receives the documents before I hang up the phone.”

In many situations, however, citizens simply visit the city’s Website to find the documents they need. Using the WebLink™ module, the city’s Information Services staff provide the public with online access to a variety of documents stored in Laserfiche, including bylaws, council agendas and meeting minutes. Matson reports that requests for printed copies of these items have dropped significantly, while citizens have become better informed about issues the council members discuss.

Along with its Web publishing capabilities, Laserfiche includes a number of other features that benefit the city’s IS staff. Integration with Microsoft^® Active Directory^® simplifies security management and eliminates the need to create separate Laserfiche accounts for each user. Support for a variety of standard and specialized scanners enables departments to use their current hardware with Laserfiche. And a flexible application programming interface promotes rapid integration between Laserfiche and the other applications staff use every day.

“We first integrated Laserfiche with our Vadim^® accounts payable software,” says Dave Etherington, the city’s network services manager. “Because of this integration, staff can easily retrieve scanned invoices and other Laserfiche documents from within Vadim, eliminating the need to switch between systems or log in to multiple applications.”

Built in the early 1920’s, the Sir Adam Beck generating station still provides power to the city of Niagara Falls today.

From Etherington’s perspective, though, Laserfiche’s most useful features are also the most straightforward. “It gives us a great deal of control over who can access information, and it eliminates worries about lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “It’s also a lot smarter to store documents on one server than in multiple file rooms. We back up all of our servers nightly, and we do an off-site backup of our entire Laserfiche repository once a week. If anything unexpected happens, we know we’ll be able to recover our information and get back to work.”

The city is currently in talks with its Laserfiche reseller, IKON Office Solutions, about implementing two additional Laserfiche modules: Agenda Manager™ and Records Management Edition™. Agenda Manager will help the city automate nearly every aspect of the agenda creation and distribution process, while the Records Management Edition will help staff more easily manage record retention schedules.

As he looks forward to installing these additional Laserfiche modules, Matson thinks about the lessons he and his colleagues have learned in the years since their first Laserfiche installation. “In hindsight, there are things we should have done differently,” he says. “But we’ve really turned things around, and I know we’ll continue to have success with Laserfiche in the future.”

With 50,000 residents and 13,000 utilities accounts to service, Gilroy’s 300 city staff members confronted a considerable challenge in providing timely service based on accurate information. Staff members’ far-too-frequent excursions to the file room were compromising service quality and consuming precious staff resources.

David Chulick, Gilroy’s director of information technology, explains the problem: “We needed a centralized document repository, so staff could quickly gather needed information. We also needed to maintain our records retention policies, some of which are very complex. But most of all, we needed an easy-to-use system that users could adopt quickly.”

Gilroy had already implemented Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office when Chulick arrived in January 2004. But under his leadership, new Laserfiche installations—and new business process improvements—are sprouting citywide. Gilroy has gone from one scanning station to nine, and its police, fire, human resources and community development departments all achieve remarkable results with Laserfiche. But it’s the finance department’s utility billing division that has realized the greatest transformation.

Before deploying Laserfiche, processing utility bill payments was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Clerks first separated checks and remittances, and then manually entered them into Gilroy’s financial system. After comparing the checks and remittance totals, they physically rubber-stamped each check and bundled them in stacks of 100 for courier pickup. “There was so much extra work,” Chulick notes. “50 percent of the time, some step of the process had a mistake, which was very labor-intensive to correct.”

Gilroy Gardens Theme Park is home to the famous “Circus Trees.”

Processing 6,000 checks per month using this error-prone method caused the city to hemorrhage time and money. Chulick was determined to stop the bleeding. The only problem? After a six-month search, Chulick found that no existing product could streamline check and remittance processing, increase accuracy and speed collections. So he decided to build one.

Working closely with DataNet Solutions, a Laserfiche reseller and Professional Developer Partner™, Chulick dreamed up the plans for an ideal solution. “The bank provided a check-scanning utility,” he says, “but it didn’t address remittances, which are half the transactional data. Other systems were cost-prohibitive, and couldn’t scale to meet our current and future needs.”

Chulick needed a product that would maintain “envelope integrity” by securely archiving scanned checks alongside their accompanying remittances as multi-page documents. After six months of development and beta-testing, he achieved the desired result: Checkmation™, an application that automatically scans and processes payments, then stores them in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Now, check processing still involves some manual labor: staff have to remove checks from their envelopes and feed them into scanners. But after that initial step, the system verifies—with over 90% accuracy—the customer’s bank account number, routing number, utility account number and amount paid. The program then compares that amount to the balance owed and marks discrepancies in red, so staff can quickly identify them during verification. To promote more responsive customer service, the program routes the scanned documents to the Laserfiche repository, then automatically creates WebLink™ shortcuts to them, which staff can easily access from the city’s financial system.

Whether as a seasoning, vegetable or ice cream flavor, freshly-harvested garlic dominates Gilroy’s epicurial landscape.

“When clerks need to resolve a billing issue, these documents are easy to find,” Chulick says. “Instead of three days’ worth of research, the clerks can spin their monitors around and show these documents directly to customers. The clerks don’t even realize that they’re retrieving them from Laserfiche—the integration is that seamless.

“When we finished implementation,” he adds, “the finance department was ecstatic. The clerks get upset on the rare occasions when the system is offline. ‘We don’t want to go back to the old way,’ they say.”

The efficiency gains from the new process are remarkable. But Chulick reveals an unintended perk: the city gets paid faster. “We send the bank a cash letter at 5 P.M. every business day,” he explains. “The bank converts the checks to an ACH payment, and the funds are available the next morning. Previously, there were two to three days of ‘float’ time.” Gilroy has also reduced bank fees by 56%, and Chulick suspects that, with paper handling costs increasing, these savings will climb even higher.

In addition to inefficient check processing, the utility billing division formerly faced a formidable challenge in following records retention policies. Every month, department staff filled up to six banker’s boxes with remittances, then transported them to a vault for safekeeping. To meet the two-year retention requirement for billing records, staff had to continuously manage almost 100 boxes of physical records. They’ve since forsaken the file vault in favor of scanning billing records into Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME).

Staff are currently migrating most of Gilroy’s other files into RME, too. With the HR department next on the slate, Chulick will rely on Audit Trail™ to monitor activity involving sensitive employee information. “There are so many regulations to follow—HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley—but if we do have a breach, we can go back and trace it,” he says.

So far, Laserfiche has played a vital role in the city’s mission of providing more agile, broader-reaching services. Thanks to WebLink, citizens can already retrieve agenda minutes and city ordinances online, and, in the coming months, the city will introduce twelve new online services, including crime reporting and payment of utility bills, permits, business licenses and other fees.

But the benefits won’t extend only to citizens. By accessing WebLink over Gilroy’s citywide Wi-Fi network, police officers will be able to retrieve case documents and audio files from the Laserfiche repository while in the field. And, when Gilroy integrates Laserfiche with its GIS system, the police and fire departments will be able to remotely retrieve aerial maps and other documents related to land parcels.

As one of California’s agricultural centers, Gilroy is somewhat predisposed to thinking green—and Laserfiche only promotes the city’s green initiatives. “Not printing five reams of paper per day has brought our paper and copying costs way down,” Chulick notes. Gilroy’s City Hall, already a certified green organization, will become even more eco-friendly when it achieves a paperless office with Laserfiche.

Although the system has only been in place a few years, Chulick remembers the time before Laserfiche as if it were a bygone era. “In the last four years, service has really blossomed. Laserfiche has helped our IT division deploy several cutting-edge technologies already, and I believe that in the coming year, our service offerings will rival those of any city of any size.”

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, which connects St. Tammany Parish to New Orleans, is the longest bridge in the world.

Prior to installing Laserfiche®, staff in the office’s criminal records department spent most of their time managing paper. The department’s supervisor, Captain Margie Hennessey, remembers the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets staff would have to search through when detectives requested a file. To save storage space, records older than five years were transferred to microfilm; finding information in those files required staff to locate the correct film cartridge, load it into a microfilm reader and scroll until they reached the page they were looking for.

“Although the indexing system we used was fairly efficient, searches could take us anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or more,” Hennessey recalls. “Occasionally, we’d start looking for a document and discover that it had been misfiled. At that point, chaos would often result, as everyone got involved in the search.”

The office’s IT staff began researching document management systems with the goal of eliminating these manual search processes and reclaiming physical storage space. After evaluating several systems, the office selected Laserfiche because of its ease of use and because of the local technical support they’d receive from their Laserfiche reseller, ImageTek of Louisiana. Staff were also impressed by the system’s security features. “It’s critical that we protect the information in our case files—most of which can’t be released without a court order,” Hennessey explains. “Scanning documents into Laserfiche makes them much more secure than the paper copies we used to store in filing cabinets.”

“During Hurricane Katrina, we experienced some very traumatic times. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it wasn’t for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

Captain Margie Hennessey
St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office

Now, when detectives create a case file, secretarial staff scan the documents into the Laserfiche repository, where they’re stored in electronic folders whose structure replicates the physical filing system the office used in the past. As part of the scanning process, Laserfiche’s OCR functionality indexes each document’s content, making it immediately available for full-text searching.

Although Hennessey and her staff do a lot of scanning themselves, they also perform quality control on documents scanned by the secretaries. “We make sure that each document is legible, is indexed correctly and can be retrieved by our detectives,” she says. The detectives particularly appreciate the Laserfiche Plus™ module, which enables staff to quickly burn documents to CD. Because each CD includes a built-in document viewer, detectives can use the same search tools on these documents that they use on their desktop computers to search the full Laserfiche repository. “Thanks to the CDs, our detectives can review case documents on their laptops from wherever they need to be—and even work on cases from home,” Hennessey says.

Despite the time and efficiency savings Laserfiche has brought to the sheriff’s office, detectives continue to create a paper file for each of their cases. “The district attorney likes to have physical copies of documents on hand, for use during discovery,” Hennessey says. “So, after we scan the case file into Laserfiche, we deliver the original documents to the district attorney’s office, and they store the paperwork in their records room.”

Even though staff in the district attorney’s office continue to work with paper documents, Hennessey explains that they, too, have benefited from Laserfiche. “We provided the district attorney’s office with view-only Laserfiche licenses. Whenever we send them original documents, we drop the scanned images into their Laserfiche folder,” she says. “Thanks to Laserfiche, staff in that office can now view documents right on their computer screens, and they can use the system’s search tools to quickly find the information they need, without having to look through the paper file.”

In addition to the criminal records department, other divisions within the sheriff’s office use Laserfiche to streamline processes and eliminate paperwork. For example, the human resources department uses Laserfiche to manage personnel files and job applications. The jail uses Laserfiche to manage booking sheets and inmate health reports. And the occupational licensing division uses Laserfiche to manage documentation on each of the 8,600 vendors registered to do business in the parish.

Along with its flexibility, one of the major strengths of the Laserfiche system lies in the way it helps government agencies continue operations when a disaster occurs—something that was put to the test when Hurricane Katrina struck St. Tammany Parish in 2005. Hennessey says that, as the hurricane approached, she and her colleagues were confident that the office’s criminal records were secure. “Our IS division regularly backs up all our servers. Once the hurricane passed, they brought the servers back online, and we went back to work,” she says.

Once the storm passed, however, the parish had to deal with the aftermath. “We experienced some very traumatic times; there was devastation and loss of life all around us,” Hennessey remembers. “We lost several employees due to relocation. At one point, the records division was down to three staff members—and we usually have a staff of nine. If it hadn’t been for Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with our caseload.”

A good old-fashioned Louisiana crawfish boil.

That caseload has only increased in the years following the hurricane, as displaced residents from New Orleans and other neighboring areas have resettled in St. Tammany Parish. But Hennessey and her colleagues haven’t had any trouble keeping up with the demands that accompany all of this growth. “In the four years since we installed Laserfiche, the parish’s population has increased by more than one-third, and our office has put 35 more deputies and 20 more detectives on the street,” she says. “Yet we haven’t hired more staff in the records department.”

She adds that staff are both more productive and more accurate than they used to be, and that they spend far less time making photocopies and searching for documents. In fact, since the office installed Laserfiche, they’ve reduced their photocopying costs by two-thirds.

Hennessey doesn’t mince words when she’s asked whether she’d recommend Laserfiche to other law enforcement agencies. “Not only would I—I already have,” she says. “We’ve had staff from other agencies visit our office, and they’ve been impressed with what they’ve seen. Generally, they’re most concerned with budgetary questions, and I tell them that Laserfiche will pay for itself in a short period of time.

“Laserfiche has definitely helped us better serve the parish’s citizens,” she continues. “Laserfiche makes us more efficient, meaning we can organize case files and get them to the district attorney’s office more quickly, which helps the parish keep criminals off the street. Prosecuting the people who commit crimes is the bottom line—there’s nothing we do that’s more important than that.”

The blue jay is one of over 180 animal species found in the greater Toronto area.

As Records Manager John Annunziello explains, accomplishing daily tasks prior to installing Laserfiche was often costly and time-consuming. Staff stored paper documents, such as agenda packets and meeting minutes, in color-coded, numerically-ordered folders, then used Lotus® Notes® to keep track of the folders. Meanwhile, the TRCA’s extensive photo library, used to create the posters, flyers and presentations that play a key role in the TRCA’s outreach initiatives, took up so much space that it had to be stored off-site. Besides taking up physical storage space, Annunziello notes, the paper-based system had many other drawbacks.

“Our previous system didn’t manage our structured and unstructured data,” he says. “All the photos in our library were stored on CDs in a satellite office. Staff had to go there, search through binders of photo thumbnails to locate the right CD, then burn the image to another CD or e-mail it to the staff member requesting it. It often took days to get a photograph.”

“Although a totally paperless office is not possible, it’s always our goal to conserve resources whenever possible. Laserfiche is a major part of that initiative.”

John Annunziello
Records Manager

With an eye towards managing all its information, regardless of medium, the TRCA began searching for a digital document management solution. A four-member committee sent out an RFP, seeking DoD 5015.2-certified solutions to ensure information security. They judged the eight respondents on a variety of criteria, including ease-of-use, scalability and reliability. Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ was the clear winner, not only for its features, but also for its comprehensive support system.

“We wanted to deal locally,” Annunziello explains, noting the importance of having support close-at-hand. “Our local reseller, IKON Office Solutions, put together an excellent response to our RFP, providing a point-by-point answer to each of our questions. They also showed the best understanding of our document and records management needs.”

After the TRCA installed Laserfiche, staff quickly began scanning thousands of paper documents into the Laserfiche repository. In addition to archiving permanent records, such as deeds and agreements, they completed a back-file scanning project going back one year. Thanks to Laserfiche’s OCR capabilities, all these documents are full-text searchable.

Besides the ease and convenience of digital search, Annunziello notes the many other benefits Laserfiche has brought. “We’ve achieved peace of mind regarding our 2,300+ scanned deeds. Backup copies are available should the original be lost or destroyed. We also have our minutes from the past 50 years stored electronically.

“Laserfiche has helped us cut down on our paper use, too” he continues. “Previously, if staff wanted a copy of an agenda item, they had to produce extra copies—sometimes up to 100 pages—of the entire agenda. Now, staff can access Laserfiche to find the specific two or three pages they need.”

Part of the TRCA’s outreach efforts includes citizen participation in local cleanup projects.

Taking advantage of Laserfiche’s integration capabilities, the TRCA configured Laserfiche to automatically replicate the organizational structure of their Lotus Notes-based system. Annunziello explains, “Opening a Notes record automatically creates a folder and populates template fields in Laserfiche. This enables us to immediately import information into Laserfiche without disrupting the way we work.”

Scanning paper documents and better organizing information might immediately spring to mind as benefits of digital document management. But the TRCA has enjoyed a somewhat-unintended perk in the form of its new digital photo library. As Annunziello explains, “The photo archive was an afterthought. Our marketing group has a full-time professional photographer who needed to manage her photos. We realized that we needed to create a photo library so staff could easily access corporate photographs.”

Using Laserfiche, and a bit of ingenuity, the TRCA created a digital in-house archive of its thousands of photos, ranging from pictures of local wildlife to aerial photos of waterfront projects. With the help of their reseller, staff developed a bulk utility to import multiple CDs’ worth of photos into Laserfiche, as well as downsample them for faster retrieval. “Now,” Annunziello says, “staff search for photos within categories in Laserfiche. Once they locate a photo, they can quickly insert it into their report or presentation. If an image is to be sent outside of our organization, it gets watermarked to signify that it’s TRCA property. Template information assigned to each photograph shows the location of the original CD, should we need a poster-size print. Now, the whole process takes minutes, instead of days.”

One of the thousands of images in the TRCA’s digital photo library.

That’s a far cry from a car ride to a satellite office—and the resultant fuel savings fall right in line with the TRCA’s mission. But ultimately, staff enjoy the greatest benefits in the form of time and effort savings. Annunziello explains, “In our original proposal for Laserfiche, we suggested that we could save most of our staff an hour a day by searching for records electronically as opposed to finding the paper copies. Although there’s no way to measure, many staff have definitely realized this kind of return.”

And while the TRCA has achieved tremendous benefits so far, they’re not stopping anytime soon. “Our goal is to digitize all our forms processing,” Annunziello says. A major part of this initiative is enabling online submittal of land-use and development proposals. Sound planning is critical to building new facilities while preserving local watershed ecosystems. With that in mind, the TRCA reviews building permit applications to ensure that developers follow environmentally-friendly policies before, during and after construction. Applications for new planning and development are all currently available online, and soon, prospective builders will be able to submit them for review online as well. “Then,” Annunziello says, ”staff will be able to access a form online or through our server, fill it out and route it through Laserfiche Workflow™ to its correct location.”

In the meantime, Annunziello has many current projects to attend to, such as refining the TRCA’s records series for implementation in Laserfiche Records Management Edition. The TRCA also plans to create an organizational knowledge base for internal reference purposes.

Given the TRCA’s success with Laserfiche so far, these goals seem well within reach. And of course, there’s the larger goal of preserving the local environment for future generations. Says Annunziello, “Although a totally paperless office is not possible, it’s always our goal to conserve resources whenever possible. Laserfiche is a major part of that initiative.”

Before installing Laserfiche, Alexandria archived its documents on paper and microfiche. With a rich history dating back to the eighteenth century, the city could ill afford to trust the aging system. Says Milligan, “We have all kinds of documentation dating back to the early 1900s. Our paper copies and microfiche were beginning to deteriorate. We didn’t want to update that technology—we needed an imaging system.”

With the goal of quickly responding to document requests from citizens, city councilors and staff, Milligan set out to implement an electronic document management system. She’d already heard a lot about document imaging from her colleagues, and she believed it was important to get a city-wide system in place that would enable all city departments to share documents.

Milligan already had a good idea of what was important to her in a document management system: “Good support and easy maintenance. I also wanted to ensure we could access the system over the Web and that it could support a Microsoft® .NET™ programming environment. Because we were going to import personnel files to conform to state-mandated retention dates, I knew we had to have security as tight as we could get it—down to the file level.”

Laserfiche security features made the product stand out over the others the committee considered. The ability to redact sensitive information such as Social Security numbers was a big plus for Milligan. “I also liked it because it took different media— paper, microfiche, aperture cards—in different sizes,” she recalls. “And Workflow™ was so easy to set up because it’s so familiar—it’s just like Windows® Explorer.”

Alexandria first installed Laserfiche in the fire and code departments, and it wasn’t long before other departments wanted Laserfiche for themselves. Says Milligan, “When the staff got a taste of it, they loved it. As with anything city-wide, it took a while to get them started, but once we did, we couldn’t stop them. It sells itself.”

Currently, both the accounting and treasury divisions of the finance department, as well as the planning and zoning, police personnel, city attorney, environmental services, transportation and IT departments use Laserfiche. Getting the support of the city was easy once staff noticed the improved work environment and saved storage space. Milligan estimates that it took a few weeks to get each initial installation up and running smoothly. And the results have been dramatic.

“We get a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from citizens,” Milligan continues. “Instead of making all these copies, you can hit one button and print the documents, or e-mail them to citizens.”

“FOIA requests have short turnaround times,” says Supervisory Administrative Officer Virginia Clarke. “They usually require some action within 24 hours—at least to respond with the cost of reproduction. If we don’t meet the deadline, the city is subject to monetary penalties. When we had to go off-site to find the document, the 24 hours were gone. With Laserfiche, we can see how many documents we have and calculate the cost without leaving our desks.”

City Hall overlooks the Alexandria Farmer’s Market.

Searching through files was tough enough when things were properly filed, but misfiled documents were particularly aggravating. “Previously,” recalls Clarke, “if something was misfiled, it was a nightmare trying to find it. But Laserfiche corrected that problem. If something’s been misfiled, we can search for it in any number of ways, get the information we need and file it properly without missing a beat.”

Accounting Clerk Jan Pettey notes the boost in efficiency: “I scan all the AP and payroll documents,” she says. “We were looking for something that would make it easy to search for paid invoices —and we found it in Laserfiche. Now staff can go directly into Laserfiche instead of asking accounting to pull the originals and send copies. They have so many ways to search: by payment voucher, invoice, vendor number or document number. They really like it—we rarely get calls any more.”

Laserfiche has greatly improved efficiency for the IT fiscal analyst by eliminating backlog-related errors due to the huge volume of invoices. “We set up Workflow so that the second the invoices come in, they’re scanned and e-mailed directly to the person who has to approve them,” says Milligan. “Invoices get paid much faster, and they don’t get lost. And I can refer back to them easily to calculate how much I spent on a specific project.”

As Alexandria expands its system, Milligan is overseeing an increasing number of integrations with other applications. Alexandria has already integrated Laserfiche with the city’s real estate receivables software, and will soon do the same with its GIS and permitting programs. The city is also upgrading its treasury department’s collection system to automatically file checks upon scanning. Milligan largely relies on Quick Fields™ to streamline operations for departments using these integrations. “Because it automatically populates the data fields, it greatly reduces errors by filing documents in the right places,” she says.

Milligan is about to roll out Laserfiche to the city clerk’s office, which has long posted past agenda packets and city council meeting minutes to the city’s Website as TIFF files. However, citizen demand to access them in PDF format led Milligan to try a couple of conversion methods, both of which were painfully slow. She was pleased to learn that a simple tweak with the Integrator’s Toolkit™ would enable Laserfiche to import TIFFs and export them out as PDFs all at once.

Alexandria currently has 387 licenses, and is gearing up to add more. Milligan is in the process of installing Laserfiche in the sheriff’s office, with plans to add the real estate asessment, housing and finance revenue departments. “We had to start with baby steps,” she says. “But soon we’ll be city-wide. I hope to get a site license soon to expand access even further. It’s just a great product.”

Milligan’s advice to other cities just starting implementation? Be prepared. “I suggest getting a technical team ready, because it could take off overnight. And when it does take off, you’re absolutely bombarded—I could keep six programmers busy right now.”

But she’s sure next year will be bigger and better, and she’ll have even more valuable advice. Meanwhile, Virginia Clarke sums up the sentiments of Alexandria’s staff: “It’s wonderful to be able to access our documents this way. It’s fantastic.”

Once it had developed a substantial archive, however, Buffalo began to outgrow its initial digital system. In addition to experiencing support problems when the city upgraded its operating system, staff found that the search function became painfully slow when the document database accumulated several years’ worth of records.

MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick

With an eye toward efficient search and retrieval, as well as integration with the city’s GIS system, Auger and MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick formed a committee to spearhead the search for a new digital document management system. Shinnick remembers, “We wanted a system that could do a better job of organizing our information, so that we could purge documents to keep them from taking up physical space in our office. We needed to import documents from the previous system, perform full-text searches and save disk space by efficiently storing files. Staff also needed a secure system that would enable the city to share public documents over the Web.”

Shinnick consulted with experts from other cities, many of whom recommended Laserfiche^®. After demonstrations from Laserfiche, Fortis^® and DocuWare^®, Laserfiche was the clear winner. Not only could Laserfiche software meet all the city’s requirements, but its ease of use made it the overwhelming favorite of city staff. The user interface was so straightforward that it made the other options seem difficult and cumbersome by comparison. “The search function in Laserfiche was so much more dynamic than in our previous product,” says Auger.

A few months after purchasing Laserfiche, Buffalo had installed all the features it needed and completed its document conversion. The city then faced the challenge of accommodating all the city staff who wanted to scan documents into the system. Buffalo set up a second scanning station to handle the demand. Now, the city’s administration, finance, utility billing, water/sewer/electric and engineering departments all use Laserfiche, with users in different locations connecting to the same system.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

—Merton Auger
City Administrator

Implementing a geographical information system (GIS) integration was critical to Auger’s vision of collaboration. In addition to office staff relying on GIS for planning and zoning functions and utility services, field personnel needed access to these documents as well. “Whether it was our street department people trying to locate a storm sewer outlet or our water and sewer department looking for a water shutoff valve,” says Auger, “the bottom line was collaboration and cross-departmental functionality. Laserfiche met these criteria.”

Buffalo’s reseller, Crabtree Companies, Inc., helped the city find just the right tool to set up the integration. Geodoc, developed by Urban Crossroads, Inc., enabled Buffalo to link Laserfiche with its GIS software, ArcIMS™ from ESRI^®. Buffalo beta tested the product. “And it worked very well,” says Shinnick. “There wasn’t a lot of room for improvement or enhancement. They’ll continue to make enhancements to it, but for something that came right out of the box, it didn’t function like other beta products—it was already very good.”

Urban Crossroads is now making Geodoc available to users through the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which showcases innovative, third-party solutions to integration challenges. Information about this integration is available through the new PDP Marketplace.

“We have a mobile wireless network here in Buffalo,” adds Auger. “With the Laserfiche/GIS integration, both applications are Web-based so our field crews can access information from their laptops. That really supports the collaboration we need. If a citizen calls in about a broken streetlight or a manhole being plugged, the crew can use the tablet PC in their truck or car, access the database, find the location and fix the problem in real time.

“We also handle some of our Web-based functions for interaction with citizens that way. My philosophy has always been that whatever information we have is owned by the citizens of Buffalo. Basically, we want to get as much information as possible up and accessible for citizens. We also have a very big interest in achieving a paperless office, and that means you don’t exclude anything, except where there are security concerns to prevent access to people with wrongful intent.

“It goes along with our philosophy,” Auger continues, “that citizens should be able to access information any time they want. If they work during the day, they don’t want to get off work and come into our office to access information. They can go to our Website and access information when they want to, so we’re on their schedule. And it cuts down on our desk time, too.

Buffalo is currently in the process of getting the fire department onboard with the system. The city plans to arrange for laptops for the volunteer firefighters so they can log onto the system and realize the full benefit of the GIS integration. “Our plan,” says Auger, “is to push the system out to every department, so they have access to the information they need. Again, it’s all about collaboration.”

Auger, who is directly accountable to the city council, has been preparing agendas electronically for years, using Adobe® Acrobat®. Now he automatically enters those documents into the Laserfiche repository, so citizens and councilors can access them within the same folder structure they use to access all the city’s documents. Auger notes, “As a management practice, we scan almost everything and our people have been instructed how to use a central scanner.” That practice enables Auger to include handwritten or other non-digital supporting documentation with the council agendas.

Since the city installed Laserfiche, Shinnick has noticed positive changes in the way Buffalo conducts business. “Previously, a couple of people might be designated to ‘file’ documents,” he says. “Now each department is becoming more involved in the storing of this information and is taking an interest in it. They know that how they put the information into Laserfiche will determine how they get it out. It eliminates the problem of one person arbitrarily making decisions about where something gets filed because they don’t understand how the filing in each department functions.” Shinnick also notes that the Laserfiche solution has added to staff’s productive time, in some cases eliminating the need to hire new personnel or the need to go off-site to look for a document.

“Laserfiche has saved us a tremendous amount of time, money and space,” says Auger. “All of our property records are electronic, for example. All the building permits and planning and zoning information for particular parcels are stored in the Laserfiche repository. Our office would have to be about three times its current size just to store them, if we hadn’t adopted digital document management in such a big way.

“Yesterday, when someone called with a permit request, all our staff had to do was call the document up from the desktop and ask where to email it. When you do a simple search it comes up so fast—it saves so much personnel time. You used to have to go to the file, find the document, copy it—it could have taken hours. What’s more, a lot of times staff doesn’t even have to be involved—citizens can perform those searches themselves. I don’t even think we know how much time it’s saved us.”

Most valuable to Auger is the quick access to information from anywhere in the city for both staff and citizens. The staff and citizens of Buffalo love the system. “Just yesterday,” recalls Auger, “someone called the office asking for information about a building permit, and he happened to work for a nearby city of 40,000. Our front-desk staff was able to quickly email him a scanned document. He wrote back, ‘That’s really awesome—we can’t even do that where I work!’”

Buffalo’s Deer Lake Orchard produces a bountiful harvest each fall.

Auger finds Laserfiche especially useful when addressing city finances. “It really helps me when the council does the auditing of the bills,” he says. “Before, I had three large file folders full of paid claims, and if they wanted to question something I’d have dig through the whole file to find what they were looking for. It could take the whole hour we had set aside for the review just to find the right document. Now I just open the digital archive on the computer and I can locate the proper file right away. We have two large screens in the room we use for auditing, so I can bring it up on the screen for them to look at. It saves a tremendous amount of time.”

Shinnick is particularly enthusiastic about the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ bar code feature. “We’ve implemented that solution with our finance office so they can scan in paid invoices. It reads the voucher that gets attached with the details of what’s been paid and it automatically files it. They can just throw a stack of these things into the scanner and the system will scan them all, file them appropriately and fill in the template fields. It’s so quick and easy! It’s a tremendous tool for them.

“It didn’t take much to get that mechanism in place, either. We just had the company that supports our finance software add some bar codes to the bottom of the check stub voucher so that Quick Fields could read it.”

Buffalo plans to increase the already-sizable role that Laserfiche plays in its municipal planning, workflow and recordkeeping. Says Auger, “We’re going to be even more successful in the future and make the system even more accessible. I want to market the system so that citizens know it’s there. In order to be relevant to people, we have to do business the way they do it with their bank, or wherever they order online. Government has to be as relevant as anyone else, or more so.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

With space a premium commodity, a storage room full of paper was a luxury the City of Denton, Texas couldn’t afford. But that’s what city staff was facing in late 1999. The city’s human resources department had 15 lateral 5-drawer file cabinets, filled to overflowing, crammed into 300 square feet of space. Even worse than sacrificing the storage space was trying to comb the files for information.

“We entered our Laserfiche installation in the ‘Best of Texas’ competition and won the

award for the most innovative use of technology.”

—Mary Collins
Technology Services Manager

Staff was losing valuable time searching for documents, making copies, routing information and returning it to the original files, not to mention trying to locate documents that were misfiled or yet-to-be filed.

“One of the major issues was finding documents. So many times a file had been pulled and we couldn’t find it,” says Technology Services Manager Mary Collins. That just wasn’t good enough for this county seat that includes leadership, innovation and outstanding service in its mission statement. To solve the problem, Denton staff began searching for a digital document management system.

The City of Denton Technology Services Department began by evaluating a number of products. “We had a directive from our city manager to look at document imaging,” says Collins. “We looked at a number of products over a long period of time. And the technology changed during that period.”

After a small, failed pilot project with another product, the city chose Laserfiche®. In 2000, Denton tested Laserfiche with a pilot program in the city manager’s and city attorney’s offices. In addition to the success the city experienced in accomplishing necessary tasks in those offices, the support Denton got from its reseller, DocuNav, made Laserfiche the city’s choice.

With funding from a bond project, the city expanded the installation to other departments two years later. “We moved forward with some enhancements to the city manager’s office and expanded to HR and administration,” recalls Collins.

HR staff expected it to take five to seven years to get a document imaging system up and running. But in October 2002, HR began implementing Laserfiche to manage its documents. “I looked at that room full of paper and thought it would take 5 years to digitize. It ended up taking 6 months,” says HR Operations and Training Specialist Sally Cavness. “By spring 2003, we completed the Laserfiche conversion of all our personnel files.”

And it’s been a dramatic improvement over the previous, paper-based system. Staff finds needed information in a fraction of the time it used to take. Sarah Mabel, HR assistant for records management, notices a huge difference in handling open-records requests: “We used to have someone who had that as a full-time job. Now I’ve taken it over and I estimate that filling open records requests takes somewhere between eight and 13 percent of my time. If someone wants an entire personnel file, I can just burn it to a CD in five minutes instead of taking two days to print all of the information out.”

Cavness adds, “We also had a full-time file clerk that we don’t need anymore. We’ve reduced the time it takes for records management period, so that Sarah has more time to focus on other things.”

“Once you get used to it, you start thinking about ways to further integrate it into your system.”

—Jesse Perez
HR Technician for Selection and Placement

When it comes to selecting candidates for employment, Denton’s integration of Laserfiche with its JD Edwards^®(JDE) Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) software has proved crucial. With a volume of nearly 8000 applications a year, the paper used to really pile up. Some applicants apply multiple times a year for various positions and each application is considered unique. With the paper system, HR might store 10 paper copies of the exact same application in 10 different folders.

Some employees have been with the city for more than 30 years, and their files would be enormous. Copying them took up to two days and generated three times the paper of the original files. Security concerns dictate redacting portions of the files and the paper-based process was long, tedious and wasteful. Staff would copy the records, black out portions with a marker and make a second copy to completely black out the original text.

With the goal of a paperless employee records system, HR integrated Laserfiche with its online application process and its Internet and intranet applications. “The City of Denton has developed a user-friendly process that dramatically increased the human resources department’s effectiveness and efficiency. We now have an online job application process that includes the civil service exam registration,” notes Cavness.

DocuNav helped the city design a custom program to integrate Laserfiche with the department’s HRIS software. “HR doesn’t have to type in all the index information,” says Cavness. “It pulls it in from JDE. We assign the documents a specific number and the program uses this number as a guide to fill in the blanks by retrieving it from JDE. We now use it for workflow as part of our selection placement process.”

Downtown Denton's fine arts theate

Jesse Perez, HR technician for selection and placement, explains, “Whenever there’s a vacancy, we enter the employee requisition into the HRIS system. We set up an appropriate folder in Laserfiche and that’s where all the images and the application are scanned. We use our customized application to retrieve all the information in JDE and populate the fields for the name, ID number and position and then put them in the only folder that the supervisor has assigned rights to. Each supervisor is assigned a unique login and password for access to the intranet.” Applicants can update their information as needed over the Web and while each application is still unique, the system can pull candidate information from what’s already stored in the system.

The entire selection process is totally automated, from the initial application to the creation of a new-hire personnel file. HR receives applications electronically via the Web and the system populates the HRIS with pertinent applicant information and sends the applications to Laserfiche. Supervisors can then view applications over the city’s Intranet via WebLink™, from the comfort of their own offices. “By eliminating the need to shuffle paperwork back and forth between the supervisor and the HR department,” says Cavness, “we’ve eliminated the risk of losing applications.”

Laserfiche has accelerated searching not only for files, but for information within files. Sometimes staff only knows a bit of information about an employee and that made searching through paper files difficult and tedious. Because Laserfiche is integrated with the city’s payroll software, city employees can now search remotely by name or employee ID number. Redaction capabilities have eliminated the previous, cumbersome process of manually blacking out and copying portions of the files.

Laserfiche has saved city staff legwork as well as time. “As a city,” says Cavness, “we have buildings that are very, very widely spaced. Previously, supervisors might have to come all the way across town to look at paper applications. Being able to view applications from their desks is a tremendous time saver, not only for the supervisor, but for us, because it’s one less person who walks through the door and takes our attention from something else.

“And here in HR,” Cavness continues, “viewing the files from our desks means we don’t have to physically search for or return files. Previously, it could take up to two weeks for a new application to get filed. Now that process is normally completed within a day, with information almost instantaneously at our fingertips.”

Success with Laserfiche has not been limited to HR. The library uses it to track memorial donations and the fire department uses it for administration and inspections, as well as for the civil service files that they send back to HR. In addition, city staff has scanned map books and building footprints into Laserfiche and made them available on CD, so that firefighters can access them from their fire trucks.

The city secretary’s office has scanned in thousands of documents, including city council minutes, ordinances and resolutions going back to the 1900’s, and cemetery records and abstracts from the 1800’s. Using Laserfiche, the tax department saved thousands of records, dating back to the 1950s, from being lost to aging due to deteriorating paper.

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The City of Denton Engineering Department manages easements, ordinances, sewer and waterline camera videos, contracts, plats, as-builts, project files and a variety of other documents with Laserfiche. City workers access the documents over the Web. From the city’s intranet site, images are linked to other applications, such as their Geographic Information System (GIS), Cartegraph®. Field personnel onsite can use their laptops to view records or videos pertaining to a specific location onsite, enabling the engineering department to more easily share updated information with other city departments.

Engineering also uses the Web to make information available to appraisers, developers, engineers, investors and surveyors, who have given the city a lot of positive feedback about the benefits of quick access to documents.

The city uses Laserfiche in the municipal courts and utility departments, and looks forward to expanding Laserfiche use to the building inspection and police departments.

If the sentiments of HR staff are any indication, Laserfiche is bound to grow in use and popularity throughout the City of Denton. As Jesse Perez puts it, “Once you get used to it, you start thinking about ways to further integrate it into your system. I don’t want to deal with paper any more—I prefer digital images. They save everyone time—you can send documents out more quickly, email them to people and you can really cut down on the space you need for paper documents. You have lots more room on your desk, you don’t have to search through piles of paper and once a document is scanned, you know it’s going to be there.”

Mary Collins adds, “In 2003, we entered our Laserfiche installation in the ‘Best of Texas’ competition and won the award for the most innovative use of technology.”

Sarah Mabel sums up the feelings of her HR coworkers. “When Laserfiche first came to the department, as with any new program, we were a little scared of it—we had that kind of mentality. Now, not a single person in our department can live without it. I love it.”