As the IT Director for Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) in Ontario, Canada, Mike Hiltz provides IT leadership and proactively brings technology opportunities to HWDSB’s various departments. Full story »
LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)—November 2, 2010—Laserfiche today announced the release of the new Laserfiche-Granicus Connector, which allows government clients to combine Laserfiche Agenda Manager with Granicus’ Webcasting and live meeting capabilities to create a content-rich video and document library available 24/7 for live or on-demand access through the Web. Full story »
Laserfiche is pleased to announce the release of Agenda Manager 8.0.1. This release includes enhancements and fixes for Agenda Manager.
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Laserfiche Agenda Manager streamlines and automates the creation of meeting agendas. Staff members propose agenda items using a Web form, and proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, are routed to reviewers based on an approval workflow you create. New in Agenda Manager 8 is the ability for Approvers to reroute items back to previous stages in the workflow. Full story »
Laserfiche is pleased to announce the release of Agenda Manager 8.0. This release makes submitting, preparing, and approving agenda items more collaborative and comprehensive.
Significant new features include the ability to save draft agenda items, hassle-free staff report editing, flexible item management and approval, and department-level collaboration.
Full story »
Laserfiche Agenda Manager streamlines and automates the creation of meeting agendas. Staff members propose agenda items using a Web form, and proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, are routed to reviewers based on an approval workflow you create.
New in Agenda Manager 8 is the ability to assign delegates to approvers—to allow a user to review a submitted agenda item on behalf of another user. To do so, assign User B as a delegate to User A. User B will receive all e-mail notifications that User A is configured to receive. When User B approves an item, the agenda item’s history will denote that the item was approved by User A’s delegate, User B. Administrators can configure delegates for other users or users can configure their own delegates.
Full story »
• Note: The tech tip below is a preview of the upcoming Agenda Manager 8. Note that the details and appearance of certain elements may change between now and the final release.
Laserfiche Agenda Manager streamlines and automates the creation of meeting agendas. Agenda Manager was designed to meet the needs of all participants in the agenda process. All organization and interaction takes place via the Web, except for interactions with Microsoft Office on a local machine (e.g., creating the agenda). More details about the forthcoming release of Agenda Manager 8.0 can be found in the “What’s New in Agenda Manager 8.0” white paper.
Staff members propose agenda items using a Web form, and proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, are routed to reviewers based on an approval workflow you create. New in Agenda Manager 8 is the ability to create a workflow for department-level collaboration and another workflow for city- or organization-wide routing.
For example, before submitting an item for inclusion in the Summersville City Council meeting agenda, the Water, Fire, and Police departments need the ability to approve or reject items within their own teams. The following workflows should be created:
• Water Department Workflow
• Fire Department Workflow
• Police Department Workflow
• City Council Workflow
Users will submit an item to a department-level workflow first. If the item is approved by the department, it will proceed to the primary workflow, which includes approvers outside the department. Items not approved by the department will not be reviewed by the rest of the organization.
In this scenario, the department-level workflows are connected to the primary workflow. This can be set up when creating a workflow using the drop-down box in the following image.
In addition, Agenda Manager administrators can specify which workflows a user can submit items to, allowing users to choose if an item should skip the department-level workflow and proceed directly to the primary workflow.
For example, Jane has the Submit to Workflow permission for the Fire Department Workflow and City Council Workflow. When submitting an item, Jane can choose which workflow to submit the item to.
Alternatively, Bob the Agenda Manager administrator does not want Jane to be able to skip Fire Department Workflow. Bob assigns Jane the Submit to Workflow permission for the Fire Department Workflow but not for the City Council Workflow, which requires her to always submit to the department-level workflow.
Agenda Manager 8.0 is on its way — and the timing couldn’t be better. As your government rounds the sharply-cut corners of the economy, Agenda Manager can help soften the rough edges by making the agenda life cycle more efficient and collaborative.
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The City of Riverside, CA, has been a shining example of Laserfiche in action since implementing Laserfiche in 2001. In fact, due in part to her efforts with Laserfiche, the International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC) awarded City Clerk Colleen Nicol the designation of Master Municipal Clerk in 2002.
But in the last two years, Nicol and her staff have shined even more brightly in the Laserfiche Luminary Community by hosting guided tours of their offices so prospective cities can see Laserfiche in action. “We just enjoy sharing our success and trust it will help with their decision making or implementation,” she says.
It has. Nicol and her staff have hosted Bakersfield, South Pasadena, Thousand Oaks and Fontana—all California cities now using Laserfiche. Nicol was faced with an even more interesting opportunity recently when reseller Mike Dillon of National Technology Solutions told her that Boulder City, NV, was looking for new and better ways to utilize its existing Laserfiche program—especially its most recent addition, Agenda Manager.
“This was the first time we hosted a city that already had the product installed so the conversation there could be more in depth,” Nicol notes.
Pam Malmstrom, City Clerk of Boulder City, was well aware of Riverside’s success. “I met Colleen at the IIMC Region VIII Annual Conference in Tucson, Arizona this year and was impressed with her knowledge and enthusiasm about Laserfiche,” she says. On Dillon’s recommendation and Nicol’s invitation, Malmstrom and her staff paid Riverside a visit.
Once you have stored your published agendas into Laserfiche, by clicking on View/View Metadata/View Links, we can add the agenda report and minutes that correspond to a particular agenda. That way when someone does a search and pulls up the agenda, report, or minutes, they can view the links and view the corresponding documentation for that particular meeting without having to do a separate search.
For example, if my search revealed that my item was on an agenda for October 24, 2008 and I previewed the agenda to find out what item number it was, I could then look at the links and go directly to that report number (thanks to our naming convention) rather than search the reports. I could also look at the minutes through the links rather than search the minutes. This saves a lot of time and frustration.
This function is within the repository and is available after we place the .TIFF image of the reports into our folder structure. We could also link any resolution to the minute action if we needed to.
There, Riverside staff were able to provide in-depth instruction on the use of Agenda Manager and actually provided a manual of user/submitter/approver instructions for Boulder City to take home. Senior Deputy Clerk Cheryl Balz shared some tips for processing agendas, incorporating additional committee agenda preparations, and showed Malmstrom’s staff some tricks with Laserfiche metadata linking to make research easier (see sidebar). The Riverside Police Department showed BC’s PD representative more advanced uses of Audit Trail and other modules, and Roz Vinson offered copies of their structure for BC staff to take home to Nevada. “They were very receptive to our demonstration, had lots of questions for their reseller, and our staff and were excited about their future Laserfiche usage,” says Balz.
Boulder City was understandably grateful for the experience—and emboldened to expand its own use of Laserfiche. Says Malmstrom, “It was great to see how another city used Laserfiche and it reaffirmed our staff was on the right track in setting up our file and information formats in a similar fashion.”
The way Nicol sees it, she’s just paying forward the same service she and her staff were shown when they had their own questions years ago. “I recall how helpful it was to see the installation at Buena Park when we were first considering Laserfiche,” she recalls. “To see the solutions in action in an operating City Clerk’s Office brought the features to life and underscored the efficiencies, work flow improvements, and cost savings.” She’s confident her guest cities take away the same benefits. “At the conclusion of every tour, without exception, the visiting organization emphasizes the value from seeing the product in action and having our team of people who actually perform the work, as well as our technical staff, available to share ideas and solutions.”
Even now, as Nicol campaigns for the vice presidency of the IIMC in next year’s election, where she hopes to continue to inspire other municipalities towards greater efficiency and improved public service, she doesn’t hesitate to offer her office as an example when the opportunity arises. “Whether we’re referred by a reseller or I meet someone at a conference and the topic of Laserfiche comes up, I readily offer to demo the products,” she says. “We enjoy bragging about what a good tool Laserfiche is.”
Located at the southern shores of Chautauqua Lake, Jamestown, NY, is the largest city in picturesque Chautauqua County. The Jamestown Public Schools serve approximately 5,000 students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade at six neighborhood elementary schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school.
In 2003, the Jamestown City School District’s human resources department began investigating document management as a possible solution to managing an ever increasing amount of paper. The department’s six employees were responsible for managing personnel records, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, employment applications and reports regarding civil rights, unemployment and workers’ compensation, as well as all files relating to negotiations, arbitrations, grievances and meeting minutes of the district’s seven unions. Full story »
Compared to other cities in Nevada, Boulder City is something of an anomaly. Unlike nearby Las Vegas and the rest of Henderson County, BC is relatively quaint, with a population of just 15,000.
“We’re close to Las Vegas, we’re close to the Hoover Dam, but we’re surrounded by 200 miles of land. It’s like a buffer around us,” explains City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom. “Clark County has been one the fastest growing counties in the country. We’ve taken steps to not grow so rapidly.”
But even as modest Boulder City seems buffered from the noisy neon of its neighbors, it still faced the same information management concerns as every other city in the state. Especially since late 2007, when the state legislature passed a resolution mandating that all government agencies in Nevada be able to honor requests for public records within five working days. Full story »
The versatility of Laserfiche’s electronic document technology has inspired creative applications that have taken the paper out of countless government agencies and operations over the past 20 years. Now it’s reaching outside the office into that bastion of paper rustling, public government meetings.
This month’s Global Municipal Exchange spotlights the successful Laserfiche installation in Goodyear, AZ. Goodyear doesn’t just use Laserfiche to manage information, they also use it to streamline agenda management. With their integration between Agenda Manager and Granicus, they provide citizens with one-stop access to agendas, meeting minutes and video recordings of meeting proceedings.
“We really didn’t look at anything else,” City Clerk Lynn Mulhall says. “Laserfiche was the only known product to meet the needs of city clerks, and once we saw it, we really liked it.”