Government Newsletter Archive

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

Lakewood, CO, looks to Laserfiche ECM to integrate content with line-of-business applications

October 13th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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

Making Integration Just a Click Away

Cary, NC, leverages Laserfiche as integrative middleware to deliver shared library services to its departments

September 13th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

Cary, NCWith a diverse population of over 141,000, the Town of Cary is the seventh largest community in North Carolina. Since coming to Cary 21 years ago, Technology Services (TS) Director Bill Stice has drawn on his 17 years of prior experience in the private sector to develop a proactive approach to the role of TS. “The public sector is really several businesses under a single umbrella,” he observes.
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The Tipping Point

LaPorte County, IN, chooses Laserfiche as the county enterprise content management standard

August 23rd, 2010 by Meghann Wooster Meghann Wooster is a Laserfiche Luminary

la porte county sealAs chief probation officer for LaPorte Superior Court No. 4 in Indiana, Steve Eyrick knows a great deal about rehabilitation. Every day, he works with clients who’ve been charged with misdemeanors and Class D felonies, and it’s his job to help them turn their lives around.

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
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Cutting Through Silos

Building on a decade of departmental success, Eugene, OR, looks to Laserfiche Rio and its own IT staff to extend enterprise content management city-wide

July 12th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

100px-EugeneOR_sealIn the decade since the City of Eugene, OR, first implemented Laserfiche to “get everyone on the same page,” as former city recorder Mary Feldman put it, Laserfiche has been deployed to the City Manager’s Office, City Attorney’s Office and Public Works Administration, Planning and Development, Police, Wastewater, City Prosecutor, and Municipal Court. As Department Application Team Manager Loring G. Hummel explains, this resulted in four separate Laserfiche services, one of which included multiple workgroups that shared concurrent licenses between the City Manager’s Office, Planning, and Public Works Administration.
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Foundational Compo-Net

Led by its proactive IT department, Oshkosh delivers transparency, accountability and value using Laserfiche ECM

June 9th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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

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

Brownfield Management

Elkhart County, IN, integrates Laserfiche with GIS to improve its tax base by better managing brownfields

May 13th, 2010 by Meghann Wooster Meghann Wooster is a Laserfiche Luminary

elkhart countyFor Indiana’s Elkhart County—known primarily for its large Amish population and for manufacturing roughly half of the world’s recreational vehicles (RVs)—brownfield sites have long posed a challenge.

“A brownfield site is an abandoned industrial property with an environmental or safety stigma attached to it,” says John Hulewicz, environmental health supervisor in the Elkhart County health department. “Maybe people think there’s hazardous material onsite that’s leaching into the water supply, or maybe they believe that the property is a gathering place for vandals and gangs. Whether these beliefs are based in fact or fiction, brownfields decrease the county’s tax base. Our goal is to encourage revitalization and redevelopment wherever and whenever we can.”
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Stillwater Runs Deep

Stillwater, MN, leverages the value of Laserfiche through standardization and integration

April 7th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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

Seven-time Digital County award winner Charles County, MD, looks to Laserfiche to win numbers eight and nine

March 16th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

charles county, MDCharles County, MD, was named America’s #1 advanced digital county last year by the Center for Digital Government and Digital Communities magazine. In fact, the Washington DC-area county with 130,000 residents has won all seven years the award’s been given out. But what makes Charles County different from the other 20 Laserfiche users on the list is that the county only began its Laserfiche implementation late last year. Now thanks to a comprehensive data governance strategy and a new Transparency Web Portal, Charles County is poised to continue its winning streak using Laserfiche.
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Data Gover-nuances

Florence, AZ, gets big value from re-investing in its Laserfiche system

February 9th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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

Our approach to technology has always been to be proactive, not reactive,” says Town Clerk Lisa Garcia.
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Ahead of the Game

Outagamie County, WI, uses Laserfiche agile ECM to improve IT services while empowering departments

January 26th, 2010 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

outagamie countyOutagamie County, WI, has a tradition of innovation. Appleton, its county seat, is home to Hearthstone, the very first home in the United States to be powered solely by Thomas Edison’s hydroelectric technology and light bulbs, way back in 1882. Now, almost 130 years later, that innovative spirit can be seen in the county’s deployment of Laserfiche agile enterprise content management (ECM) to expand and enhance information services in several departments.
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WebLink Wonderland

Mountains are for snow, not paper, in Vail, CO

December 9th, 2009 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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

Norfolk, VA, has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche community

November 3rd, 2009 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

norfolk-vaNo municipality has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche community more visibly this year than Norfolk, VA. So much so that the city’s in-house Laserfiche champions have encouraged user interaction by co-founding the Hampton Roads User Group, one of an unprecedented number of user groups that have sprung up across the state in the last two years.

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

The Town of Brownsburg, IN, uses Laserfiche to deliver better, more cost-efficient service with exponential results

October 14th, 2009 by Hobey Echlin Hobey Echlin is a Laserfiche staff member

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