Join Parker and Barwick as they discuss how and why they digitized paper records and automated paper-based processes using Laserfiche.

• John will explain how he transitioned Dornsife off a handful of departmental imaging installations onto an ECM system that provides a standard systems architecture and methodology for college-wide content management and allows staff to access documents directly from the college’s transactional database.
• Don will show how his office uses ECM to cost-effectively meet records retention requirements, improve information sharing, cut paper storage costs and automate accounting processes.

These senior IT and administrative leaders will also discuss their selection criteria, best practices and lessons learned from deploying a Laserfiche ECM solution.

This 60-minute Webinar, which will include plenty of time for Q&A, is sponsored by Laserfiche and hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Register today!

I recently got a question from Patricia Anglin, a user in St. John, New Brunswick, about our filing structure. In St. John, the city was expanding Laserfiche from their Office of the Common Clerk to their Building Inspections and Finance Department, and Patricia asked for my advice on how best to set up their template fields.

While the province of New Brunswick has a “Municipal Records Authority” to help develop a filing structure, unfortunately, here in Ontario, we don’t have any standards to follow that would help us develop a filing structure. That type of direction would actually be of some assistance to us!

As far as templates and fields in Laserfiche, our Finance Division uses the following fields:

• Document Type (this contains a drop-down menu to select how to fill this field out)
• Year
• Month
• Company/Name
• Subdivision

While this works for us, my best advice is to think about the type of information you are scanning and more importantly, what bits of information would be useful for future searches? These are the fields you want to set up. To take it one step further, whatever fields you choose to create, use as many drop-down menus as you can since this will aid any future searches someone might perform.

For example, if you are setting up a field called “Month”, set up a drop-down list with the 12 months to select from. That way it will be consistent. Otherwise, someone searching for a document who tries to fill in this field to help with this search won’t know if they are to put in “January”, “Jan”, “Jan.”, “01″, etc. If you are filling in information into a field and then want to search for it later, you have to match it keystroke for keystroke, so drop-downs are incredibly helpful to ensure consistency.

Of course, there is more than one way to do a search. But if you’re trying to use the benefit of templates and fields, drop-downs can be a great aid. So just think about how someone might search for this information in the future and you will be the best one to come up with your own naming conventions.

I’m interested if anyone else has advice on how best to set up a filing structure, or what naming conventions they use.