For users who are looking for an easier and more flexible way to secure annotations and their contents, making an annotation protected or private is a great place to start.

Protected Annotations: These can be viewed by any user who has the appropriate rights but can be modified only by its creator or the document’s owner. This is especially useful if you have an annotation that provides information users need to be able to see, but whose data you don’t want to be accidentally changed.

• Example: Sally works as a shipping clerk for ECU Electronics and uses Laserfiche to keep track of shipments. When an order is ready to be shipped, she places a sticky note with the order’s reference number on the shipping label stored in her repository. She makes the annotation protected so the reference number can be viewed by other clerks but not changed.

Private Annotations: These can be viewed or modified only by the person who created it; to all other users, it will appear as if the annotation does not exist. This is especially useful if you have an annotation whose content is sensitive or irrelevant to other users.

• Example: Charlie is an HR representative for M&T Scientific and part of his work involves reviewing employment applications for prospective hires. He places annotations on each application to leave notes for himself about a candidate’s interview performance. Because only he needs to view these notes, Charlie makes his annotations private so other users cannot see them.

You can configure an annotation’s protected or private status on an annotation-by-annotation basis or you can set a default status for your entire repository.

To mark a single annotation protected or private:

1. Right-click on the annotation and select Properties.
2. In the Properties dialog box, select the Metadata tab.

   

3. Do one of the following:
   • To make an annotation private, select the Annotation will only be visible to its creator checkbox.
   • To make an annotation protected, select the Annotation may only be modified by its creator or the document owner checkbox.
4. Click OK.

To configure the default annotation status for your entire repository:

1. From the Tools menu, select Options.
2. In the Options dialog box, select the General node under the View node.

   

3. Use the Default annotation style drop-down menu to do one of the following:
   • Select Normal to allow all newly created annotations to be viewed and/or modified by all users with the appropriate rights.
   • Select Private to make all newly created annotations private.
   • Select Protected to make all newly create annotations protected.
4. Click OK.

Note: Default annotation status can only be configured if you have Laserfiche Client 8.1 or later.

Note: Setting a default annotation status for your repository will only apply to newly created annotations. All existing annotations will maintain their current status.

For instance, you might add an explanatory callout box to a report, and also highlight an important section of the report. If you then wanted to send the document, complete with the callout box and highlight, to a client who doesn’t have access to your repository, you could do so by exporting the document as a PDF. The PDF would contain the annotations that you included, just as they would be included if you printed them to a TIFF image for export. However, when your client opens the report in Adobe Acrobat, he can work with the annotations natively. For instance, he could add another comment or question to your callout box and send it back to you, or he could choose to remove the annotations so that he can print a clean copy of the report.

To include annotations when exporting documents as PDFs, open the Tools menu and select Options. Expand Export and select Images. Make sure that Include redactions on exported image and Include all other annotations on exported images are selected. This will print the annotations to the exported document. To make sure that the annotations are converted and editable in Adobe Acrobat, also select Convert annotations into PDF annotations. The next time you export a document with annotations as a PDF, the annotations will be included and converted to PDF format.

Note: Editing a PDF requires a full version of Adobe Acrobat; PDF editing cannot be performed in Adobe Reader.

These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.

It’s this kind of progressive approach to information and process management that’s transformed the Hamilton Police Service from a command-and-control police model to a community-based-and-problem-solving service over the last decade. As HPS Records Supervisor Gary Holden puts it, “Laserfiche has allowed us to spend more time in the community and less time travelling back and forth to the station.”

But this progressive approach had to begin somewhere, and it started in 2000 when IT Manager Ross Memmlo began investigating document management to alleviate storage costs and repurpose valuable office space. Franz Gangl of Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions demonstrated Laserfiche’s information management capabilities for Memmolo, IT Administrator Diana Scime, Shari Moore and Holden.

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

• Business Functionality: “It needed to be really user-friendly, no matter how comfortable staff were with computers. Our reseller showed us an example of an agency about our size using a system similar in size and capacity to our proposal.”
• System Architecture: “The flexibility and expandability to allow for future development and integration was important.”
• Organization/Support Training: “We knew whenever we had a question, all we had to do was make that call to the 1-800 number.”
• Project Schedule: “According to our funding cycler, the system needed to be up and running by year’s end.”

Working with IKON, Memmlo planned a phased implementation that would begin with current reports, advance to backlog conversion, and finally establish Web access for officers and staff. Phase I began in fall 2002, scanning current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.

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In early 2002, the implementation team developed “banner pages” to enable Quick Fields to index various reports, which helped with a massive backlog conversion project that would eventually add 860,000 images to the system. “We were able to scan anything and everything – photographs, willsays, handwritten notes – into folders,” says Holden. By 2004, the Laserfiche repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.

“One challenge we faced was reworking our existing paper processes,” explains Holden. “Many of our serious offences needed to be disseminated to many different officers and divisions. The new process had to ensure the report was coded according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, then scanned, entered on the Canadian Police Information Center (CPIC) system and reassigned for further investigation. The process changed how our Records Business Centre handled the reports.” To remedy the situation, Holden created a color-coded folder system staff use to process reports prior to scanning.

Quick Fields’ automated indexing also helped Holden to standardize the record keeping process, which, along with Laserfiche’s fuzzy search capabilities, has almost completely eradicated misfiling. “If a report is improperly indexed, we simply run a search to locate it within the database,” explains Holden.

This search capability has become especially empowering to police officers. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows the front-line officer to glean valuable information from reports that wasn’t possible in the past,” Holden says.

“If an officer wants to know more about a rash of Breaking & Enterings where all he knows is a red pick-up that has a unique decal on the side door was involved, he can use Laserfiche search to look up other reports,” he adds. “We can’t possibly index every piece of information within a police report, but OCR and fuzzy search addresses that problem, making it a valuable investigative tool.”

It has become even more valuable since Hamilton deployed Laserfiche WebLink in 2004. Police Chief Brian Mullan, responding to a need for heightened police presence, realized he didn’t necessarily need to hire more officers if officers spent less time looking for paperwork. Holden explains. “With Internet access to the Laserfiche repository, officers can view police reports on their MDT [mobile data terminal],” he says. “It’s effectively made our cruisers an extension of our Records Management System (RMS). They can search five historical reports right away without linking.”

Adds Holden, “The ability to view active missing person photos or photographs of lost or stolen property is critical when locating a missing youth on the street or locating previously stolen property.”

For 2009-2010, the HPS Laserfiche team plans to expand Laserfiche to Hamilton’s Human Resources and Legal departments, but not before answering concerns about employee confidentiality and security rights.

For support, Holden looked to the Laserfiche Police User Groups he’s been attending for three years. “I knew York Police Service used Laserfiche in its HR department, so I thought, ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’ I asked them about their implementation and training process and what worked.” Based on what he learned, Holden formulated his own strategy, highlighting the ability to assign multi-layer security to employee records in transit, the ability for assigned HR staff to view documents from their desktop, as well as reducing paper files and better controlling retention.

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

“We have three separate divisions. Laserfiche will allow yearly performance reviews to be shipped electronically between offices,” he explains. “It’s easy to understand Laserfiche as a simple storage repository, but you can move things around so you’re actually managing active records. The security capabilities of Laserfiche were a huge benefit for me to ensure confidentiality during this process, because I could assign rights that allowed a user to browse a report but not open it. They’d be directed to see the proper authority to obtain a copy of the report where necessary, which facilitated our disclosure processes.”

The ability to redact sensitive information was also key to the Records Business Center’s ability to process disclosures to the Courts and outside agencies. “The redaction ability of Laserfiche is by far, one the greatest assets to address these needs,” Holden says. “We used to copy our reports—twice—then black out the information and then copy the vetted version again. Redacting in Laserfiche saved us a fortune in paper and time. We also use stamping and sticky note annotations to address disclosure/non-disclosure issues and verification/validation processes of ongoing police investigations.”

It wasn’t until Holden could show that Laserfiche Audit Trail would ensure the integrity of legal documents that the Crown [District] Attorney signed on. “I had meetings with the Crown Attorney to ensure them there were no legal issues producing these documents as evidence in court,” Holden remembers. “We discussed the quality of the images and how we’d be using Audit Trail to confirm when a document was scanned or modified. We were ultimately able to scan in every document—except for witness statements, which they requested to remain in their original paper form.”

Ultimately, the Hamilton Police Service has realized a significant amount of savings by using Laserfiche to refine its business processes:

• $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly.
• Officers spend more time in the community because they no longer need to attend Central Station to view reports.
• Clerks save time, because they no longer need to locate reports and read them to officers over the phone.
• Valuable floor space has been reclaimed from paper storage.
• Redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” as Holden puts it, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

• Spring 2002: The Project Team chooses Laserfiche.
• Fall 2002: Phase I begins. Staff start scanning in current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.
• 2003: Indexing is automated with Quick Fields. Backlog conversion of historical occurrence reports (860,000 images) takes 30 weeks.
• 2004: Phase I is successfully finished, with over 300,000 records and reports scanned into the system. Phase II begins. When it is finished, every officer and designated civilian will have direct access to Laserfiche through the Internet.
• 2009: Web access expands Laserfiche access to 120 additional users, including officers in their patrol cars.
• 2010: The Police Laserfiche Team plans to expand use to Human Resources and Legal Services departments.