Until September 30, Laserfiche is providing free Laserfiche Web Access—which includes Laserfiche Mobile, Laserfiche Web Access Light (designed for Blackberry, Opera and Safari mobile browsers) and the Laserfiche SharePoint integration—for new Laserfiche Avante customers, existing Laserfiche Avante customers who purchase five or more named users and current customers who upgrade to Laserfiche Avante systems.

“More customers are using smartphones and tablets in the office, as well as for remote and mobile work,” said Tom Wayman, Laserfiche Vice President of Product Strategy. “Laserfiche Mobile provides a complete end-to-end solution that captures and controls mobile content—making it even simpler for users to get their jobs done, whether they’re in the office or the field.”

Laserfiche Web Access allows users to securely access, search and manage documents in their Laserfiche repository through a Web browser, from anywhere with Internet access. Laserfiche Mobile extends these remote access capabilities to the Apple iPhone, enabling users to:

• Create and upload new content with the iPhone camera.
• Automatically crop, straighten and enhance captured information, with full text recognition.
• Copy, move, rename, download, e-mail, print or delete content.
• Browse for documents in a folder structure or search the entire repository.
• Participate in workflow automation processes by accessing metadata fields.

Laserfiche Mobile, which includes a built-in demonstration, is available for free download from the Apple App Store. Users interested in the promotion can call a Laserfiche solutions specialist at (800) 985-8533 or e-mail info@laserfiche.com.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built upon Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL platform and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche distributes its software through a worldwide network of value-added resellers (VARs), who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs. The Laserfiche VAR program has received the Five-Star Rating from Computer Reseller News/VARBusiness magazine.

Laserfiche, Run Smarter and Compulink are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Laserfiche Mobile gives you the freedom to do everything you can do in your office from wherever you are, empowering you to work smarter and more efficiently,” said Tom Wayman, Laserfiche Vice President of Product Strategy. “In this day and age, you shouldn’t have to be tied to your office because all your information is locked away in paper files or the approvals you need are still based on paper processes.”

Laserfiche Mobile takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch screen, gesture recognition and high resolution interface to provide an immersive user experience. With Laserfiche Mobile, users can:

• Create and upload new content with the iPhone camera.
• Automatically crop, straighten and enhance captured information, with full text recognition.
• Copy, move, rename, download, e-mail, print or delete content.
• Browse for documents in a folder structure or search the entire repository.
• Participate in workflow automation processes by accessing metadata fields.

“Laserfiche Mobile significantly changes content capture,” Wayman added. “For twenty-five years, Laserfiche has invested heavily in the development of innovative ways to capture information as quickly and efficiently as possible, with patented PhotoDocs™ photograph processing technology, lightweight Web interfaces and, now, an iPhone app that extends Laserfiche to one of today’s most popular mobile devices.”

Laserfiche Mobile, which includes a built-in demonstration, is available for free download from the Apple App Store. Laserfiche Mobile operates with Laserfiche Web Access as a part of Laserfiche Avante and Laserfiche Rio systems. To accept connections from Laserfiche Mobile, Laserfiche users can download the free add-on, Laserfiche Mobile Add-On, from the Laserfiche Support Site.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Laserfiche® and Run Smarter® are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

In most industries, being unable to access the right information can be costly and inefficient. But in law enforcement, it can be inconvenient—even deadly.

“Officers respond to calls uninformed of safety precautions,” says Elk River, MN Police Chief Jeffrey Beahen bluntly. “They’re on the scene without knowing if the suspect has any violent history, if they own any guns – nothing.” Once back at the station, he says, the real work began – only it wasn’t exactly police work.

“Officers would have to go through multiple locations and cabinets to find anything, which could take up to three days if it was over a weekend,” Beahen says. If officers could find what they needed, he adds, they would often have to return to the office from the field, get the documents and then return to the field—or take someone into custody who could have been cited in the field and released. Either way, that was valuable police time officers in the city of 24,000 at the edge of suburban Minneapolis could more effectively spend patrolling the streets.

Beahen saw the impact of paper on his department was not just organizational, but procedural. “Lost paperwork could impede prosecution,” he says. “Sometimes we’d be unable to coordinate multiple pieces of information and evidence to solve crimes.”

Chief Beahen

The cost—well that was a whole other story. “Man hours used to manage documents and case files was the biggest drain on the department,” Beahen says. By his estimates, the ERPD spent over $17,000 a year and needed 3.5 full-time employees just to process and store the paperwork generated by the department’s 24,000 cases each year. “Files might have three or 3,000 pages. But then we had to sort them all, and everyone would to have them – defense attorneys, prosecutors, courts, the state, FBI and other government and county agencies. So they’d all have to be copied, mailed and delivered. That killed a lot of trees.”

Besides case files, there were the gun permits, alarm files and other forms the police department was required to maintain. “We were going through 36 reams of paper a year, which, if you add up all the different copies we’d have to make for everybody, wound up at 251 reams of paper, which was 2.2 tons of paper or 54 adult trees,” Beahen says. He estimates the paper alone cost well over a $1,000 a year, not to mention the storage costs of four shelves required to house all this paper.

Beahen saw that going paperless would transform the way his officers dealt with information, both organizationally and procedurally. Since arriving in Elk River as Assistant Chief in 1998, Beahen had been a proponent of technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network “just to get everyone on e-mail.”

In 2002, Elk River purchased Laserfiche, and soon the city’s reseller, Cities Digital, Inc., expanded Laserfiche to the Police Department. However, the Police Department’s records management system (RMS) worked on a proprietary SQL-based server. “While Laserfiche had an open architecture, there was just no way to bring the RMS together with it. Everybody’s desktop had two icons, so you’d pull up the case number and go into Laserfiche to find supporting documents. There was a lot of jumping back and forth, and no access in the squad cars,” Beahen says. “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, or accessed from a laptop in a squad car.

“We just wanted to make it simple,” he adds.

In 2007, it became just that simple. Beahen was approached by the Law Enforcement Technology Group (LETG) with a Web-based police records management system. “It wasn’t proprietary, so anything we could scan into and store in Laserfiche we could attach right to the record from the RMS. It turned the process of accessing records and documentation into a one-stop shop.”

Interoperability with Laserfiche was key when Beahen worked with LETG to set up the RMS, which Beahen describes as “friendly with Laserfiche,” in a way that media attachments from Laserfiche and police records are simultaneously accessed from a combined repository. “What we were really impressed by is how easy it was to integrate Laserfiche into our Web-based RMS. This kind of interoperability was really important to us because it was simply a matter of knowing how things are stored in one system and how it’s stored in the other and being able to build that bridge between them in a matter of days,” he says. “This is the kind of thing that you hear stories about seven engineers working on and two months and $85,000 later, it still isn’t working right. Our integration was done in less than a week.”

An Elk River PD officer accessing Laserfiche from his squad car

These days, Beahen says, “Everything that we scanned goes into our browser-based RMS system. Officers have a wireless card in their squad car so the computer automatically updates to the central repository. Photos, maps, reports, names – everything is accessible from our squad cars.”

With only the fuzziest of details to search the database, officers responding to a scene can instantly access a criminal’s history and an incident’s full details. “This keeps officers safe all the time, because we have specific and related information available to police in the field instantly,” Beahen says.

Besides resolving the organizational issues associated with the old paper-based filing system, Beahen says the department has seen significant procedural improvements as well. For starters, all content is scanned into Laserfiche using Quick Fields advanced capture. “The time required to fill out paper forms used to be enormous, now it’s just, boom, drop it in the scanner, predetermined templates and voilà!”

Tickets and case paperwork are filed immediately in Laserfiche, which prevents the risk of evidence tampering. “We can cross-reference with other resources prior to disturbing crime scenes,” he says. “That means greater coordination and access to evidence, so we’re solving crimes faster.”

There is also the freedom and necessity of being able to collaborate with other police departments and cities, state agencies, courts, FBI, the Department of Human Services and other county authorities. Beahen cites an example of how effective this information sharing can be. “A missing person’s body washed up about 50 miles down the Mississippi River from us. Because of Laserfiche we were able to quickly provide identifying information to local authorities, identify the victim, and within hours, we were able to notify the family.”

As the Elk River Police Department’s use of Laserfiche shows, you don’t have to be the biggest department to realize real and valuable benefits from using Laserfiche; you just have to have some vision. In fact, the ERPD’s use of technology was recognized with a 2008 award for Excellence in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police– alongside some of the biggest, most advanced police agencies in the world.

Beahen is encouraged by the fact that a lot of skepticism about digital information has been put to rest by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Hesitance on electronic records and processing is not really a big deal anymore, but some people realize this sooner than others,” he says.

And his advice for other law enforcement agencies facing the challenges he was? “Have patience, a plan and a budget. Get past your fear of courts not liking electronic documents, put the old ways in the file cabinet you’ll be getting rid of, and make the quantum leap.”

That meant finding a way to help staff keep up with processing the 50,000 pages of statements that arrived in the mail each month, adding to the 20 years of back files spread out over 400 square feet of file cabinet space that had already spilled over into two storage lockers filled with statements and account records.

“We decided to go paperless,” says Mike Adams, Cambridge’s Director of Information Technology, who turned to Laserfiche reseller Gordon Flesch Company to help tailor a solution that could capture the up to 50,000 pages and merge them seamlessly with the firm’s own business processes and existing information systems. “When they recommended Laserfiche, we decided to go for it.”

“Going for it,” meant capturing the maximum amount of information per page at the point of entry, and that required configuring Laserfiche Quick Fields to accommodate the 100 different formats of broker statements arriving every month. Adams and Cambridge’s IT developers used the Laserfiche SDK, which, with its powerful integration tools, sample C# and Visual Basic.NET source code, allowed them to create custom connections between Lotus Notes/Domino, the firm’s CRM, and Quick Fields. As Adams explains, once a document is scanned into Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Pattern Matching match it using one of the 90 broker and bank statement sessions. “Quick Fields recognizes the broker account number on each document and populates the Laserfiche template fields with information from Lotus Notes/Domino and our portfolio management  software,” he says. Adams’ team also created custom scanner profiles to use for each broker’s forms that would optimize scanning on documents with, say, background anti-tampering lines or colors that would otherwise reduce OCR accuracy.

The effect of this enhanced automated capture was pronounced and immediate. Cambridge was already required to reconcile incoming statements with their internal accounting system within 14 days; just processing the incoming statements could take up to three days. But thanks to the custom connections Adams’ IT team built for Quick Fields, this now could all be done in a single day. “We get our statements processed and viewable in Laserfiche in less time than it used to take to sort the paper before,” Adams says. “It used to take up to three days with our old information management system, now they’re in the database and the information’s in use the same day it arrives. To date we have scanned 1.8 million pages.”

Cambridge has recently upgraded to Quick Fields 8 to turn what was a multi-step process into a single one during an actual Quick Fields session. “We want to take full advantage of the new real-time capabilities for database matching,” he says. “We want to move custom scripting out of Quick Fields and use Quick Fields Agent to extract data as documents are being scanned at the point of capture instead of post scanning.”

Besides providing better service to its customers, Cambridge has proven itself a valuable contributor to the Laserfiche Community. Adams notes some of the firm’s staff are members of the new GFC Laserfiche User Group in the Columbus area. Adams adds that Cambridge will be publishing its Quick Fields template files for other registered investment advisors to use, with details and specifications available at his class in the Industry Solutions track at this year’s Laserfiche Institute Conference January 11-13 in Los Angeles.

Cambridge is also a member of the Laserfiche Professional Development Partnership (PDP) program. “Gordon Flesch Company suggested that there was a demand among their clients for more custom programs,” explains Adams. “We plan to keep developing these tools to integrate Laserfiche directly into the menus of applications such as Great Plains and Auto CAD. We have everything we need,” he says, “but we are looking to help other Laserfiche users. Everyone wins.”

No one as much as Cambridge staff themselves. Staffers can process 35-60 pages a minute, with an error rate of less than 0.5%, and whatever errors do occur are automatically corrected through a series of tools built to correct common OCR mistakes. Misfiled and lost documents have been reduced to virtually zero. The process is so efficient, the firm has implemented all tasks without additional staff. Additionally, Cambridge has reclaimed 400 square feet of file cabinet space and two storage lockers, since Laserfiche allows for off-site storage backup – meeting SEC and broker dealer contingency plan requirements. The efficiency is so cost-effective, Adams says Cambridge has realized its ROI in less than one year after implementing Laserfiche.

For his part, Adams credits the company’s success so far with being able to take full advantage of the expanded functionality of Quick Fields using the Laserfiche SDK to automate and enhance very unique and important business processes.

“I like that Laserfiche has an SDK available and that it works well. A number of programs don’t have one available,” Adams says. “It’s malleable to all sorts of enterprise applications.”