On this new Support Site forum, your organization can solicit best practices for configuring your system directly from other Laserfiche SLG users from around the country. IT departments will particularly benefit from the group’s technical discussions and tips. Whether you’ve used Laserfiche for years or are configuring your first system, the User Group welcomes users of all levels.

Don’t wait—check out the group today, get involved and learn how others have optimized their Laserfiche systems!

Note: You must have access to the Laserfiche Support Site to participate in this group. For questions, please contact Lisa Miyake, County Government Strategist.

Attend “The Art of Enabling the Government Enterprise with ECM” on January 19 at 10:00 am PT to learn how to:

• Build an ECM foundation that moves beyond siloed applications and enables shared services.
• Cost-effectively meet SLG-specific governance, risk and compliance requirements.
• Automate cross-functional departmental applications like case management and AP processing from the comfort of native applications.
• Trade in legacy document management systems for credit toward upgrades.

Register now!

• Colorado Division of Forestry.
• Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife.
• Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety.
• Colorado Division of Water Resources.
• Colorado Geological Survey.
• Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC).
• Colorado State Land Board.
• Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB).

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box Web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search-and-retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

• Greater public access to information through the WebLink Public Portal, which provides unlimited connections.
• Scalability through unlimited servers and volume discounts on user licenses to accommodate future growth.
• The bundled functionality of Web Access and Workflow.

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:

• The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s Website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
• Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
• The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s Website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems Website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:

• Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page.
• Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
• Agree to the disclaimer.
• Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
• Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  • Group: Historical Flooding.
  • Document: Historical flood photographs.
  • Type: Photographs.
• Hit the search button.
• A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production Web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production Web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production Web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external Websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

“The Art of Enabling the Government Enterprise with ECM” on November 16 and December 8 at 10:00 A.M. PT demonstrates how state and local governments (SLG) can streamline transactional content management and improve citizen services across their enterprises with expanded Laserfiche ECM systems.

Attend to learn how your organization can:

• Build an ECM foundation that moves beyond siloed applications and enables shared services.
• Cost-effectively meet SLG-specific governance, risk and compliance requirements.
• Automate cross-functional departmental applications, like case management and AP Processing, from the comfort of native applications.
• Trade in legacy document management systems for credit towards upgrades.

Sign up today!

“In light of budget cuts and a volatile economic climate, our broad network of local government customers have repeatedly underscored the vital role that technology plays in enabling them to deliver critical services to the community,” said Kimberly Samuelson, Director of Government Strategy at Laserfiche. “What Laserfiche contributes to these winning cities is ECM infrastructure that improves service delivery while reducing costs.”

Ten top-ranking cities in the four following population categories were selected: 250,000+, 125,000-249,999, 75,000-124,999, and 30,000-74,999. The Laserfiche customers on the list include:

250,000+

• City of Corpus Christi, TX
• City of Fort Worth, TX
• City of Long Beach, CA
• City of Riverside, CA
• City of Virginia Beach, VA

125,000-249,999

• City of Alexandria, VA
• City of Augusta, GA
• City of Hollywood, FL
• City of Hampton, VA
• City of Chesapeake, VA
• City of Chula Vista, CA

75,000-124,999

• City of Lynchburg, VA
• City of Pueblo, CO
• City of Simi Valley, CA
• City of Roanoke, VA
• City of Westminster, CO
• City of Independence, MO
• City of Santa Monica, CA

30,000-74,999

• City of Danville, VA

Winners will be honored at a special awards ceremony concurrent with the National League of Cities annual conference on November 11 in Phoenix, AZ. For a full list of winners, visit http://www.digitalcommunities.com/survey/cities/.

For more information about the benefits of enterprise content management (ECM) technology for state and local government, please visit http://www.laserfiche.com/en-us/Industry/State-Local-Government.

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.

As the leading provider of ECM for municipal government organizations, Laserfiche designs its software to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite supports industry-standard SQL and Oracle® platforms, features a two-way integration with Microsoft® SharePoint® and includes fully integrated, transparent DoD 5015.2-certified records management.

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

“As organizations transition from a physical records management environment to an electronic one, they struggle with end user acceptance and ensuring that the technology is customized for their needs,” said Jonathan Goldman, vice president, Records Management Programs at USIS. “With our records management expertise and Laserfiche’s leading-edge technology, we can bridge the gap between operational needs and technology implementation.”

Government agencies continue to migrate their records and data from a physical environment to an electronic environment. USIS and Laserfiche will provide solutions that enable these agencies to successfully implement and maintain their data and records in an electronic format. USIS has expertise in managing library and records operations, digitization of agencies’ physical files, and providing records management consulting services. Laserfiche provides a DoD 5015.2-certified ECM solution that reduces the cost of compliance by enabling transparent records management to enforce consistent, enterprise-wide records policies.

“Our strategic alliance with USIS will give government agencies a clear roadmap for reaping the benefits of electronic content and records management, including decreased compliance costs, improved productivity, and increased transparency,” said Brian LaPointe, vice president, Strategic Solutions at Laserfiche.

Together, USIS and Laserfiche will offer a consolidated solution for government agencies, consisting of the hardware and software platforms; records management consulting, training and technical support; integration of processes, databases and workflow; and private cloud hosting to help agencies manage their content in a more collaborative and cost-effective manner.  This solution takes a holistic approach to providing agencies with professional services for either turnkey or customized implementations, based on agencies’ needs and requirements.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that set the standard for information management within all five branches of the U.S. military, CIA, FBI and the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security. 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.

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

About USIS

USIS provides services under more than 100 contracts and is the largest commercial provider of background investigations to the federal government.  It has more than 6,600 employees working in all 50 states and overseas. USIS offers litigation support as well as customized solutions for helping government clients manage records, information and documents. In addition, it specializes in construction surveillance services, physical/personnel/facility security and investigative analytics.

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Media Contacts: Jack Papp, 703-245-0867; Mobile 571-251-3978; or jack.papp@altegrity.com

Sharon Chai, 562-988-1688 ext. 211 or Sharon.chai@laserfiche.com

The impact has been significant, as Datamax recently closed several deals:

• BenefitMall, an insurance industry middleman serving over 7500 brokers, has purchased a Rio pilot system for its New Jersey office, with plans to deploy to all 15 of its markets serving two million clients.
• Taylor Olson Adkins Sralla & Elam, a Dallas-based law firm servicing local governments, is implementing a 34-user Avante system with a Trusted Edge email archiving solution from Laserfiche PDP partner FileTek.
• Ecom Atlantic, a multi-national trading company that imports over 75% of the coffee used by Starbucks, implemented 35 Workflows with over 250 outcomes in its global traffic department, and has plans to expand system use to all 30 Ecom offices in 30 countries in the next five years.

Jeff Flory, enterprise solutions consultant at Datamax, credits this success with having sales and technical staff capable of offering clients the scalable, end-to-end solutions the market demands. “BenefitMall, for example, was really a team effort,” he says. “Our business analysts were able to leverage Laserfiche’s open architecture and scalability to deliver exactly what the client asked for, using extensive integration with internally and externally hosted line-of-business applications.” The sales cycle, Flory notes, took place over the course of three meetings followed by a three-week implementation.

“By doubling the size of our staff this year we have been able to leverage the full capabilities of Laserfiche as a truly agile ECM solution that can scale and integrate to meet the content and business process management needs of any enterprise,” Flory concludes.

Like Laserfiche, BAS software is created using the latest Microsoft Windows development tools (.NET, SQL Server) and is designed for ease of use and quick access to information or processes. “Laserfiche will facilitate direct access to essential building and code enforcement information, and improve workflow and productivity across building departments,” said Robert Vitti, vice president of BAS.

Together, Laserfiche and BAS provide a wide array of municipality solutions that automate and consolidate tax collection, utility billing, building permits, complaint tracking and clerk licensing.

“As the enterprise content management leader in the municipal market, we are always very pleased when companies like BAS, which have complementary software systems for cities, integrate with us,” said Alex Wilson, director of the Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program at Laserfiche. “Our municipal user community benefits a great deal from the user-friendly, purpose-built interfaces BAS provides that streamline many of their day-to-day activities. Being able to store all the related documents in one place and take advantage of our workflow creates a system whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Established in 1987, BAS provides software and services to more than 700 clients (towns, cities, villages and counties) throughout New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and is recognized as a leader in the development of software solutions for municipal government.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 28,000 organizations worldwide have used 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 Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms 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 is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“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.”

Brownfield sites are a particular concern in Elkhart County for two reasons:

• Sandy soil, high water levels and a reliance on wells make residents especially susceptible to getting ill from consuming polluted groundwater.
• The close proximity of residential and industrial zones means that residential property values are often adversely affected by the presence of brownfield sites.

To help combat the problems associated with brownfields, Elkhart County was awarded a federal grant as part of the EPA Brownfield Assessment Grant program. One of the main objectives of the grant was to create an inventory of all 5,000 of the county’s brownfield sites, along with an easy-to-use tool for finding and managing information about them.

Such a tool—which would come to be called e-Atlas—would ultimately enable the county to better prioritize these sites for Phase I and II Site Investigations, which include visual inspections, records review and/or the analysis of soil, groundwater and/or building materials. These investigations provide potential buyers with information that can help them determine clean-up and redevelopment costs, increasing the likelihood of selling and rehabilitating the land.

Information Overload

According to Hulewicz, the county had plenty of information about the brownfield sites, but much of it was crammed into 44 file cabinet drawers. “The paperwork was available, but it was difficult to wade through,” he says.

“Managing the information and responding to requests from the public had become an increasingly time-consuming task,” he adds. “Our resources were stretched thin and work performance was suffering. Field staff was spending more time in the office than conducting inspections. To remedy the situation, we needed to create a tool that would combine GIS capabilities with enterprise content management.”

Hulewicz says he “dreamed of the day” when Elkhart County employees would be able to click on a parcel of land within the county’s ESRI ArcGIS application and gain instant access to information relevant to that site, including:

• Historical site records.
• County-wide environmental scoring.
• Groundwater protection records.
• Pollution reports.
• Elkhart County’s parcel information portal.

With such a tool, the environmental health department would be able to have a complete inventory of brownfield sites and associated records at their fingertips, enabling faster site assessments and knowledge sharing. Ultimately, the tool would help the department achieve its mission of “preventing disease, preserving the environment and improving the quality of life in Elkhart County through education, assessment, and assurance.”

e-Atlas Is Born

In order to create the e-Atlas tool, however, it was necessary to standardize the information relevant to the brownfields in the county. Elkhart turned to Symbiont, an environmental engineering firm based in Wisconsin, to collect and analyze the data, and then to map the sites to Elkhart’s ArcGIS system. The resulting database provided a table of primary reference coordinates for linking information.

Next, the e-Atlas project team needed to select a content management system that could store, index and link digital copies of relevant reports and records to specific GIS coordinates. A couple of content management solutions—including Laserfiche—were actually already in use in different county departments. In the end, the team chose Laserfiche as the information management anchor of its new assessment tool for two main reasons:

• Ease of integration. “The integration between ArcGIS and Laserfiche was quick and simple,” explains Ryan Eckdale-Dudley, GIS coordinator at Symbiont and the e-Atlas project lead. “People query sites in the GIS application, and Laserfiche WebLink provides a hyperlink to associated records and reports. It works exactly as intended.”
• Ease of use. “Laserfiche is useful and easy to use,” says Hulewicz. “You don’t need a PhD to understand it. We can train someone to retrieve documents with Laserfiche in ten minutes flat.”

The team purchased its new system from BOLT Document Management, a local Laserfiche reseller. BOLT scanned and indexed thousands of pages of county brownfield records, loaded them into Laserfiche and then assisted Symbiont with the integration of Laserfiche and ArcGIS. According to Eckdale-Dudley, BOLT delivered all of this on time and under budget.

e-Atlas Shrugs

Just as the team was putting the finishing touches on e-Atlas, Elkhart County acted on the advice of a consultant to standardize the county on a different document management system. This meant that all of the content stored and indexed in Laserfiche had to be converted to the new system before e-Atlas could go live.

The e-Atlas project was on hold for over a year before Elkhart County realized that the conversion promised by the new vendor wasn’t going to be easy, fast or cost-effective. When the county’s new IT director came on board, Hulewicz and his team asked to switch back to Laserfiche. After giving the new vendor a last chance to perform the conversion, the IT director agreed.

Within three days of the decision, BOLT had restored Laserfiche and e-Atlas was back online.

Moving Forward

The Elkhart environmental health department is extremely pleased to have e-Atlas up and running again. The tool has been essential in identifying, analyzing and managing potential and existing brownfield sites throughout the county, and it has saved the department “time, storage space and paper cuts,” Hulewicz says.

In fact, the e-Atlas project has been so successful that it received recognition outside of Elkhart County: At the U.S. EPA Brownfields 2008 Conference, the county was awarded Best New Technology Paper for its use of U.S. EPA assessment and cleanup grants.

The success of e-Atlas has also inspired a public-facing tool called What’s in My Back Yard (WIMBY). Accessible through Elkhart County’s Website, WIMBY leverages Laserfiche and ArcGIS to show brownfields and other community threats such as sexual offenders’ residences and former meth lab sites. The long-term goal of WIMBY is to provide the citizens of Elkhart County with easy access to publicly-available information on the health and quality of life factors that affect the communities in which they live.

“As a government organization, we strive for transparency,” explains Hulewicz. “Through WIMBY, Laserfiche provides our citizens with access to the information they need to make a difference in the community.”

When Diane Ward became City Clerk in 2000, she found the city’s Administration office had a legacy ECM system in place that wasn’t being used to manage much. “I found the application cumbersome and not user-friendly,” she says. From an IT perspective, the legacy system was even less friendly. “The company was purchased by other document imaging companies twice. The second time would have required us to migrate to a different system and the maintenance agreement was already pretty high,” remembers Rose Holman, MIS Director. “Since we needed to convert existing data anyway, we were able to make the case to our city council that we needed to find something that fit our needs better.”

Ward and Holman contacted Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital. “The Laserfiche system seemed easier for the end user, which is really important, and the administration of the system seemed easier to understand,” Ward says. Implementation began in Stillwater’s Administration Department in 2005. “That allowed me to familiarize myself with the program and set up the folder structures, templates, and administration console, so we had that foundation in place for future deployment,” Ward says.

Ward began by making agenda packets, minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions, as well as resolutions and ordinances, available to staff through the Laserfiche repository, and the impact was immediate. “I knew the system was successful because it was easy to use and manage. Requests that would have taken me days to complete, sometimes weeks, were able to be completed almost immediately,” Ward says.

Leveraging the Value of ECM Agility through Standardization and Integration

A year later, backlog conversion began in the Finance Department – at times duplicating scanning done into the department’s Springbrook financial management software. Staff soon discovered that finding content using Laserfiche was easier, so Holman contacted Cities Digital to integrate the two applications. “It’s a daily timesaver that enables staff to put information into Laserfiche more quickly and locate it more easily.”

In 2009, Laserfiche deployment extended to the Planning and Building Inspection Department, turning into another chance to explore the value of Laserfiche as integrative middleware, which makes existing data easier to find and use. “As we started putting planning documents into Laserfiche, we realized we could create better searches of, say, address files if we integrated some of the information with the PermitWorks applications we used to do building permits,” so Holman again contacted Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with PermitWorks. Key to the integration’s success was standardizing the metadata of the property file folders when it was migrated from the city’s legacy ECM system. These folders constituted the bulk of the city’s information requests, so adding the parcel identification numbers (PINs) used by other departments and applications to the Laserfiche folders made information even easier to find.

“The benefit is again the ease and scope of research now that the Planning and Building Departments are also using Laserfiche,” Ward explains. “We can see what planning cases involved a specific property, which building permits were issued and the actions of any board or commission or the City Council on that property.”

It’s this ability to align Stillwater’s information assets with ways it can be more useful and therefore more valuable to the community that are at the core of Ward’s ECM strategy. In 2008, for instance, Ward lobbied for and received funding for Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) to mitigate compliance risks. “If I could do it all over again, I would have purchased Records Management Edition when we initially purchased Laserfiche,” she sighs. “Because I didn’t, there was some extra work involved in setting up RME.” But once set up, she says, RME’s automated retention schedules by document type give Ward the ability to easily comply with State policies that the city had been manually following for over 20 years.

Implementing a Popular Public Portal Strategy

The City of Stillwater's WebLink 8 Public Portal, where searchers can access council meeting minutes from as far back as 1888.

This potent combination of automation and transparency has also guided the city’s Web portal strategy. When the city implemented Laserfiche, Ward made resolutions, ordinances, agenda packets, and minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions (some dating back as far as 1888) available to the public using Laserfiche WebLink. The public portal proved so popular that Stillwater recently upgraded to WebLink 8 to take advantage of new features including customized searches, new customization and layout tools, and support for the iPhone and Android mobile devices.

“Our Planning Department developed an On-Line Property Information Lookup Application through our Website which links any planning cases related to a particular address and can be viewed through that application and opened through WebLink,” says Ward. “We hope to make easements and building permits available as well.”

The next step, Ward says, is making WebLink a one-stop shop for Stillwater’s public information. “Presently we post PDF minutes of our City Council and Boards and Commissions meetings on our site,” she says. “We hope to eliminate some staff time by placing them only in Laserfiche. Right now we get 250 hits a month, but that will increase immensely once we direct people to WebLink.”

Holman, for her part, has been impressed by the utility and versatility of Laserfiche. “As we move into other departments such as the police and fire departments, we’ll find ways to make life easier there, too,” she says. “Laserfiche is becoming the backbone for many of our departmental programs, which makes it even more valuable as the central repository for all our content.”

Ward, understandably, sees the value of Laserfiche agile ECM a little differently. “Our City Administrator, who is not real computer savvy, is just amazed at how fast we can find information,” she says. “I have been in municipal government since 1981 and, next to replacing a typewriter with a word processor, Laserfiche makes my job responsibilities easier to complete and manage.”

“Essentially, Laserfiche has become integral to our way of managing information,” she concludes.

For example, it was nearly impossible for employees to append pages to scanned documents that were stored in Alchemy; typically, in order to add pages, the whole document needed to be rescanned and resaved.

Jacquez-Nares urged the city to find a more sophisticated, user-friendly solution. It was at this point that a collaborative, inter-departmental team was formed with Jacquez-Nares as the project manager.

All of the City’s departments—City Clerk, City Manager, Community Development, Community Services, Finance, Human Resources, IT, Police and Public Works—came together to define their requirements for the RFP. The selection came down to two choices: Laserfiche and LibertyNET. In the end, the balance tipped in favor of Laserfiche for two reasons:

• Its comprehensive search functionality and easy-to-use Web interface made Laserfiche the most user-friendly choice.
• A formal needs assessment showed that implementing Laserfiche would ultimately save the city $273,200 by freeing up enough office space to create a total of 13 workstations for essential city services such as traffic management.

Westminster purchased the software from Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging in June 2008. Because Laserfiche is easy to use and Jacquez-Nares already had a lot of experience with it, virtually no formal training was required. By August, the solution had been installed, the City had begun back scanning the Planning Department’s records and by November, all Alchemy files had been migrated into the new system.

Making City Content Accessible in Seconds

As a part of its Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution, Westminster deployed Laserfiche WebLink, a secure Web content portal, to make content immediately accessible to all 402 city employees.

“In the old days, people in our Community Development department had to visit our offsite storage facility three or four times a week in order to locate planning documents,” says Jacquez-Nares. “When you add up the 15-30 minutes it took to drive there, the time spent looking for relevant documents and then the time it took to drive back to City Hall, you’re talking about 4-5 hours a week. With Laserfiche, it only takes a few seconds to call up all necessary documentation.”

The impact of Laserfiche on the City Clerk’s Office has also been great. “As the lead office for Public Records Act Requests, we receive all records requests and hear directly from the public about their concerns,” says Jacquez-Nares. “With Laserfiche, citizens no longer have concerns about transparency or document integrity because digital records don’t get lost or damaged, and they’re available much faster than their paper-based counterparts.”

All the City’s departmental records are currently scanned into Laserfiche on a day-forward basis by Kelly Lore, the centralized scanning records clerk. Just a few of the different types of content stored in Westminster’s Laserfiche repository include:

• Agendas
• Agreements
• Bids
• Building permits and plans, including large format plans
• Deeds
• Planning Department records
• Staff reports

“All of our departments have access to Laserfiche, and people are always coming up with new ideas for how to use it,” says Jacquez-Nares. “It’s much more useful than Alchemy—and much easier to use!”

IT Support Is a Snap

For a city like Westminster, with an IT department of only five employees, software applications must not only be easy to use, but also easy to maintain and administer. In fact, Laserfiche is so easy to support that Jacquez-Nares serves as system administrator, working with users across the City’s departments to structure the City’s content repository, create index fields for various City forms, and set up Quick Fields sessions to automate information capture.

“IT staff members create a backup when they’re updating the server,” says Jacquez-Nares. “Other than that, they pretty much leave everything to do with Laserfiche up to me.”

Future-Forward

Westminster has exciting plans for Laserfiche moving forward. Incoming City Clerk Robin Roberts recognizes the efficiency that Laserfiche ECM brings to Westminster and seeks to build on the project’s success by promoting city-wide use of Laserfiche through added integrations and training sessions.

With the help of ECS, the team is currently in the process of integrating Laserfiche with the City’s GIS system so that all building plans associated with any given address are accessible from within Westminster’s GIS application, CityGIS. Similarly, the City is also working on integrating its electronic permitting application with both Laserfiche and CityGIS. These integrations will save staff from performing time-consuming research to locate information about various addresses or land parcels.

The City also has plans to upgrade to Laserfiche Avante, which will bring Workflow functionality into Westminster’s arsenal, enabling it to automate standard business processes such as approvals and document routing. According to Jacquez-Nares, Westminster is also contemplating integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, which the City owns but has not yet rolled out. Using SharePoint as a collaborative portal would, for one, help the City Clerk’s Office generate agenda Council packets in a paperless manner. Combining Laserfiche with SharePoint would bring imaging capabilities to SharePoint and enhance the SharePoint repository.

Even without these system expansions, the City is extremely pleased with the Laserfiche implementation. “Many people had to work together to make this project a success, and it’s wonderful to see just how effective a collaborative management team can be,” concludes Jacquez-Nares. “People are using Laserfiche, and the positive results have been staggering so far.”

A Need to Improve Data Governance—and a Need for a Plan

In 2006, county departments secured budget approval for a three-year automation planning initiative to replace the county’s AS400 imaging system, which was slow and offered limited search capability. Melissa Buman, records management/administrative services supervisor for the Outagamie County MIS Department, recognized the need to manage electronic documents as intuitively as paper ones.

“The lack of an electronic records management strategy, including e-mail retention, resulted in poor data governance, with a lot of confusion and a lack of consistency throughout the departments,” she says. Add to this the increasing costs of storage and managing paper files in various departments, and it was time for a change.

With the support of County Executive Robert “Toby” Paltzer, the county chose Laserfiche ECM. County MIS staff, who support approximately 40 departments, soon realized that while Laserfiche gave them the right tools, they didn’t yet have a clear vision for how to manage such a large project on top of their existing workload.

Creating Repeatable Processes to Balance Departmental and IT Resources

In 2008, Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital helped the county develop an implementation strategy that would balance departmental and MIS staff resources to ensure success. Led by MIS Project Manager Steve Flater, staff reviewed existing procedures and worked out a multi-year implementation timeline before deploying Laserfiche in the Corporation Counsel, Health and Human Services, Brewster Village, Planning and Finance departments.

“Our strategy was to create a foundation with the first few departments, so the MIS team had repeatable processes to set up individual departments, while still maintaining a manageable IT workload as more departments came on board,” explains Cities Digital Executive Vice President Jessica Welsch.

The paperless (or “less paper”) strategy had an immediate impact county-wide:

• Aging Planning Department files, for instance, could be archived, reducing storage needs and costs.
• Staff at Brewster Village, the county-owned nursing home, used Laserfiche to keep track of internal paperwork as well as managing client case files.
• The Corporation Counsel’s office adopted a paperless incoming mail process, reducing bottlenecks, aiding in e-discovery and improving staff efficiency and productivity.
• The Purchasing Department immediately began distributing requested documents more quickly, and cut down on the amount of time it takes to perform audits. According to Buyer Nicole Schoultz, Laserfiche helped cut the audit time of the county’s procurement cards in one department from 11 hours to less than four.
• Risk Management has likewise benefitted from not just reduced storage demands, but from improved information governance. “Security and retention are big concerns because we’re dealing with a lot of workers compensation and liability claims that involve confidential medical records and legal documents,” explains Risk Administrator Brian Margan.
• “Continuity of Operations—which is our disaster recovery plan—is also something we look to Laserfiche to help with, so if anything happens, we can get back to business as soon as possible,” Murgan adds.

Laserfiche Agile ECM Improves Case Management in Health & Human Services

In the Outagamie Health & Human Services department, with 360 employees serving seven different divisions, Laserfiche has helped staff consolidate and secure patient files, which can grow to ten volumes over a lifetime of care. MIS has set up security settings that improve data governance by limiting access to confidential documents as well as those falling under the HIPAA umbrella, redacting personal information such as Social Security Numbers. “A worker in Mental Health can’t see the records of a WIC client,” explains Kathy Watters, system support supervisor, adding that staff adoption of Laserfiche has been unanimous. “The folder structure wasn’t hard to learn because it’s what they’re used to already,” she adds.

A major procedural improvement has come from integrating Laserfiche with the department’s case management system. “It used to be that when a contracted psychiatrist came in for the day, we had to have support staff wheel all the medical records on a big cart so they could see a patient’s lab results and other medical records,” Watters says. “Now, contracted staff members just click a button in the case management application to see the rest of the files, which are stored in Laserfiche.” Not only does this save staff time, it lessens the load for users and MIS staff who don’t have to train and support hundreds of users.

Making an Impact in the MIS Department

The biggest impact has been in the MIS department itself, which now uses Laserfiche to scan and manage internal billing system records, IT service requests, inventory paperwork, financial and budgeting department forms, meeting minutes, and, of course, documentation regarding the management of Laserfiche for the rest of the county. Users are able to retrieve information such as diagrams, manuals, spreadsheets, presentations or even audio recordings wherever they are. Content is never lost, and multiple staff can access and share information easily.

With the first round of deployments complete, MIS is ready to expand Laserfiche to the Airport, Highway and Coroner departments in the coming year. Plans are also underway to complete a final migration from the AS400 to Laserfiche. As MIS Director Tom Pynaker explains, “Our Website is integrated with the old imaging system and those links will need to be re-established.”

The Value of Automating Repeatable Processes

Outagamie County’s success thus far illustrates the importance of setting realistic expectations and manageable goals. “We looked at this product much like we do Microsoft Exchange/Outlook—that it’s IT-initiated and supported county-wide,” says Pynaker.

“We learned we had to promote a team of users and IT staff to create a complete plan for the use and support of Laserfiche. We also had to look at the complete life cycle of the document to have the proper procedures implemented at the user level,” he adds. “As we continue to cycle through our departments, the same basic processes will be repeated time and time again. Thankfully, Laserfiche is flexible enough to be fine-tuned based on departmental needs.”

The MIS team is now looking at how Workflow can further maximize its resources. “Some of our future projects in MIS include paperless work request processes and using Workflow for additional services such as mail services, print shop orders, records center transfers, microfilm retrievals, and online forms with automatic routing for internal time off requests,” says Buman.

After taking classes at the Empower 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference earlier this month, Buman is confident but realistic. “We’ve come a long way, but there are still many enhancements that can be made to further automate our daily processes,” she says.

As these seasonal influxes fueled Vail’s local economy and luxury real estate market, they also highlighted a need for the town to address the resulting challenges to its infrastructure. By 2007, town administrators looked for ways to lessen municipal government’s footprint on the mountain community. An idea from years prior had by now developed into a need: conducting government with less paper. “We were at the point where we had so much paper, it was either build a warehouse or go electronic,” Wolfe explains. “Vail real estate is so expensive; you really can’t build a warehouse in the valley.”

When Wolfe joined the town in April 2007, he was encouraged that its records manager position was an IT one. “Business technology and information management are enough of a priority that the Content Manager is part of the IT group. It seemed logical given our overall goals for greater reliance on automated tools and the establishment of an electronic records management system,” he explains. “So often, when IT takes on the task without adequate content management, the result is an electronic black hole that corresponds to the former paper black hole.”

With technical support for the idea, Wolfe began to develop staff support as well. “Each department had one or two people who dealt with records and were interested in making some changes. I worked with them to look at applications.” After a needs assessment and departmental demonstrations by Laserfiche reseller Jen Harris of Peak Performance Imaging Solutions, Wolfe and the record custodians chose Laserfiche.

In addition to the great support from Peak Performance, he cites both ease of use and flexibility of administration as deciding factors.

“Laserfiche is an application easily managed by someone in a non-IT position. The security and other administrative elements of the application are easy to administer,” Wolfe explains. “We could provide tight security to anything we didn’t want disclosed, such as social security numbers and other PII, as well as broad access to other town departments and eventually, to the public.”

In July 2007, implementation began with the scanning of clerk’s records and the conversion of Human Resources PDF images from a legacy imaging system to TIFF files, which Wolfe notes “made it a lot easier to search and a lot easier to add pages to later.”

With his strong background in nuclear and legal records management, Wolfe made it a point to establish quality guidelines and procedures for storing content in the new system. “In Colorado you can replace paper with electronic records if you follow certain guidelines. The Colorado Municipal Retention Schedules were developed for the paper environment, but they apply regardless of media. Vail had actually done a pretty good job of managing paper records in accordance with municipal retention schedules, so our job was really just taking the right next steps to better management in an electronic environment.”

Wolfe set up the Laserfiche Records Management Module using retention schedule numbers mirrored in the e-folder structure. “The records management structure reflects the retention requirements, while the document management side mirrors the Town’s organizational structure and the paper world,” he says. “So it’s easy to check the records management folders, click on the Record Series Properties and update retention information as the State schedules are updated.”

By April 2008, several other departments began their respective pushes to reduce paper volumes. The progress was steady and growing. “We have 105 users in about a dozen departments,” he says. Now, Human Resources and Risk Management are completely paperless, the Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to publish municipal agendas and town council minutes, while Community Development, Legal, Public Works, Fleet Management, the Fire Department and Finance staff have all been accessing the system in various capacities.

The holiday season in Vail

“One of the future challenges is to change work processes, creating efficiencies with an increase in document sharing,” Wolfe says. “We’re doing a lot with paper we could be doing in Laserfiche. But we also know how important it is to build a comfort level with people and their ability to access records in Laserfiche. When they see how much time they can save, it builds confidence and they’re ready to make the next step.”

For their next step, departments are eyeing various ways to automate how information is gathered, updated and, most importantly, used. “We want to do more to save user time in Community Development. We use Accela’s Permits Plus, and we’d like to populate selected data into our Laserfiche ‘Building Activities’ template,” Wolfe says.

Other integrations in the planning stages include a link between Laserfiche and the Public Works fleet management application. “We are just beginning to examine the fleet management application and, if possible, would like to send reports directly to Laserfiche,” says Wolfe.

And, inspired by nearby Aspen, Community Development is also eyeing a GIS integration to, as Wolfe puts it, “drill down further” into their records. “Our GIS operator liked what Aspen is doing and would like to able to access Laserfiche documents in Community Development, the Town Clerk’s office, Public Works and other departments using GIS and parcel numbers,” he adds.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some very real tangible progress already. “We’ve been trying to build up our volume of records to make the system more powerful and useful – like it is to HR already,” Wolfe says. “We have over 42,000 documents, which consist of 1.7 million TIFF files weighing in at 189 GB and 12,300 electronic documents which include PDFs and Microsoft Office documents totaling 114 GB in Laserfiche at this time,” he adds.

“From a paper management perspective, we’ve been able to destroy 664 boxes of records. We scanned 364 boxes of backfiles and got rid of 300 boxes of duplicates and records beyond retention. We even built out a couple of offices from the saved space,” he adds.

The real benefits of Laserfiche, he’s found, are the ongoing ones. “The most savings come from recovering staff time. For example, Open Records Requests that used to take two weeks and many photocopies to fill can now be addressed in minutes by looking up the information in Laserfiche and posting the response via WebLink or sending an e-mail.”

Scenic view of the Gore Range from Blue Sky Basin at dawn.

This has done more than make existing staff more efficient, Wolfe says, it’s actually lessened government’s footprint in the townspeople’s eyes.

“Laserfiche helps us create a situation where we’re not growing staff and, over time, the existing staff will be able to do more because they have better tools. You’re touching on goals the community has – even finding parking for municipal employees can become an issue.

“The broader community is very diversified with second home owners from all over the world, so that’s the next step. The longer term goal is to get information out there and available on the Town website for residents,” he adds.

But even now, the system serves the informational needs for life safety officers regarding locations and traffic re-direction during seasonal celebrations. “Our Special Events Coordinator can post event permits which include street closures and barricades on WebLink,” Wolfe explains. “Officers used to have to paw through files to get the right wad of paper. Now our naming convention is by day and event, so officers can just call up the information via the Town’s Wi-Fi network and review the actual permit right in their vehicle.”

Usefulness to law enforcement is also driving Vail’s next project: bringing the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office onboard to store case photos in Laserfiche with an integration into its Intergraph public safety system. “We just purchased an additional repository and the Laserfiche Software Development Kit (SDK),” Vail IT Director Ron Braden says. “Once we beta the Sheriff’s Office, we will bring all our law enforcement agencies on board.”

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.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefited from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees were allowed to look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Olsen says she found strength in the numbers of her fellow users attending Regional Training. “Networking with the other municipalities within Alberta using Laserfiche has opened all kinds of doors,” she says, “from working in the system on an everyday basis for our human resources department, to condensing our development department filing room by amalgamating all our safety codes, permits and subdivisions into the Laserfiche for easier tracking and usage.”

And she was also was able to follow up on an Agenda Manager webinar she attended last year with a personal demonstration of Okotoks’ AM system at the training, courtesy of Municipal Secretary Linda Turnbull. “We ran through the conversion of an agenda with it,” she says. “We’re currently using Adobe to make our agenda, but I really like the tracking system of Agenda Manager. If we decide to change things up, we’ll definitely look at Laserfiche.”

Laserfiche Luminary Rachelle Meredith, Corporate Records Coordinator for the Town of Okotoks, liked this year’s addition of a bonus no-cost educational overview day hosted by staff from Laserfiche and the training’s sponsor, Canadian reseller IKON Office Solutions – A Ricoh Company. Designed for all users, the first day of training’s free, all-day workshop pulls together the most popular presentations and demonstrations—including tips and tricks, Quick Fields 8 and Workflow 8—from January’s International Conference, as well as case study success stories from local Laserfiche Users.

“Especially in this economic climate the User Workshop was an excellent way of encouraging new and current users to get the most out of Laserfiche,” Meredith says. “What more could a Laserfiche user want?”

Practical Inspiration: Tips, Tricks and Future Projects

Meredith picked up some simple tips she says will go a long way to make Okotoks’ system even more user-friendly. “The number one is desktop shortcuts straight to specific file classifications,” she says, “which is a nifty little trick to secure further buy in from Town personnel who are comfortable knowing their electronic records are accessible and secure, but don’t necessarily want to see everything we have every time they use the system.”

She adds that the Town of Okotoks is currently looking at a mapping module that will complement the already captured cemeteries documentation residing in Laserfiche as well as a workflow implementation in several other town departments. “We’re only just scratching the tip of the Laserfiche iceberg,” she says.

Just scratching the tip of her own Laserfiche iceberg was Natacha Leblanc, Okotoks’ newest Desktop Support Analyst. “As the newest member of our IT team, the training was a huge bonus for me. I now know what to expect when our users ask for my help.”

Rekindling the ‘Wow’ Factor

Town of Okotoks rekindles the "wow" factor with regional training

Besides the tips and tricks users were able to take home, Meredith found real value in the relaxed but still intense learning environment. “We’ve been using Laserfiche 8 for almost a year, but in the work environment you tend to go with what you already know, because there isn’t always time to just play with the application and discover new things. So to have the opportunity of a session where we get to explore some of the features I use less often, that alone rekindles my ‘wow’ factor,” she says.

“The training’s just a very cost-effective way to discover new and/or different practices for the various modules,” Meredith adds. “It’s easy to see how you can streamline some of your day-to-day processes.”

And Olsen’s already looking ahead to the next training for her fellow Lac Ste. Anne staffers. “I’ve recommended that our IT Director attend the Administrator’s training portion next year,” she says. “One area we do need to work on is setting up our administration console for any new Departments who wish to start using Laserfiche.”

Our Laserfiche training team is headed around the world for the rest of 2009. From Ghana to Georgia, they’ll be in your neighborhood – wherever that might be. Check out the schedule and reserve your seat here.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”

The county published its RFP in December 2006, and soon after a committee drawn from several county offices (District Clerk, County Clerk, Auditor, Sheriff, Tax Office, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Purchasing, IT and Records) determined that Laserfiche (as bid by reseller MCCi) was the best fit for Collin County.

Anderson notes that she had had county-wide support from the start. “The success of the project is directly attributable to getting these larger user departments involved in both identifying the requirements for the RFP and making the selection,” she says.

Anderson had visited the Laserfiche booth at past ARMA conferences (an active ARMA member, she was a presenter at last year’s conference and is scheduled to present again at this year’s conference, October 15-18 in Orlando, FL). Anderson looked to Laserfiche for three things: its scalability and extensibility; the Laserfiche Toolkit, for integrating Laserfiche with existing and planned software applications; and the Records Management Edition (RME), in order to manage retention for electronic documents.

“RME provides a standard methodology for administering the state mandated retention requirements for all records as well as providing an audit trail for disposition,” Anderson says. “And all of this occurs in the background, so it’s transparent to the user.”

Collin County installed Laserfiche in mid-2007, followed by its first production implementation that November, starting with 100 user licenses and 500 WebLink retrieval licenses just to accommodate cross-departmental use.

The first offices to deploy were the District Clerk, County Clerk (which handles vital records, land recording, and county court at law records), District Attorney, Auditor and Records Department. Because the county was migrating from a legacy system dating from the ‘80s, a massive backlog conversion to Laserfiche was first priority. “Records was actually already scanning for the DA and Auditor, so we switched this to Laserfiche first,” Anderson says.

In the District Clerk’s office, a massive backlog conversion of documents from 1846-2000 into two million images added to the county’s Laserfiche system. “While we eliminated some paper files, we did keep the 1800s paper files for their historical value,” Anderson notes.

When it came to the auditor’s office, the County focused on integration to optimize business processes. “We added a property tax receipts interface with our RT Lawrence receipt processing system,” explains Anderson. Because the tax assessor/collector relied on paper documents, the 10 days it took to process mail resulted in over $1 million lost each day in interest. The county was able to get the assessor’s office up and running by the end of the year to coincide with the heaviest period of property tax receipts.

“Now we process payments much more quickly—up to 10 days faster,” Anderson says. “In fact, we eliminated almost 400 records storage boxes just with this one Laserfiche implementation.”

The County Clerk’s Office also uses RME as the back end for the court’s case management system, where it provides records retention for closed and inactive case files.

Finally, the Justice of the Peace, which manages traffic, truancy, small claims and evictions records, came onboard in June 2008.

With an implementation this extensive, there were understandably some hiccups along the way. “One of the mistakes we made was only purchasing one license each for Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Real-Time Lookup,” Anderson says. But with the approval of the FY2009 budget, the County will be adding Workflow, to be installed when the county upgrades to Laserfiche 8 by the end of the year, as well as additional licenses for ScanConnect, Quick Fields, Zone OCR, and Real-Time Lookup.

The biggest hurdle, however, hasn’t been what modules to use. “I’d say one of our biggest initial challenges was helping departments understand their business processes so we could develop a records series plan tied to record management and retention,” Anderson says. “It’s really an educational process.” Anderson and her team of what she calls “Customer Department Advocates“ employ business plan questionnaires, user guides and demos of successful intra-county implementations, and even help departments choose the right scanners.

These Advocates identify training needs, review business processes, records series structure and templates, and scan sample boxes of files into Laserfiche so departmental staff can see how their records series and template structures will work in the new environment.

As more departments successfully use Laserfiche, even more want to get on board. The Commissioners Court has a planned deployment through September 2009, which includes implementations in IT, the Auditor’s Department, Development Services (permitting and animal control), Human Resources, Sheriff’s Office records, Tax, Motor Vehicle and Purchasing.

“We based our 2009 deployment plan on several factors, including percentage of permanent records maintained for the department, volume of records, distributed accessibility requirements, and overall reduction in paper storage space in the new administration building for the departments moving their this year,” Anderson explains.

The County’s still quantifying ROI from using Laserfiche, but Anderson can point to a windfall of newfound efficiency.

“By using Laserfiche and changing the internal process to take advantage of the system’s new capabilities, the Auditor’s accounts payable office has already identified 300 hours of staff time saved, and reduction in volume of file folders and labels formerly used to place each paper copy of a check and the backup into a separate folder on their departmental shelving,” Anderson says. “The internal audit staff is able to review case files and receipts as part of their auditing process —freeing Auditor-, departmental-, and records staff from pulling paper files for auditors to review.”

Then there’s the peace of mind knowing that Collin County’s doing its part to provide better and more sustainable customer service now and in the future.

“We’re finally getting a handle on our electronic records, even though it’s going to take three to five years to fully implement,” Anderson says. “And we’ve definitely enjoyed faster response time when a customer or citizen requests a file. Even better, multiple users can access the same record from different locations simultaneously.”

Speaking of simultaneous, Anderson says that her biggest obstacle is handling the requests from remaining departments to implement Laserfiche. “The hardest thing I have to do is tell someone, ‘Not yet –can I work with you to make sure your needs are included in next year’s budget?’”

But as Collin County is proving department by department, the results are worth the wait—and the planning time.

Business Processes In this Case Study:

• Accounts payable
• Automated life cycle management
• Back-end records retention
• Backlog conversion
• Business continuity
• Case management
• Internal auditing
• Microfilm conversion
• Property tax processing
• Transparent records management
• Web retrieval

The Eastleigh Council Revenue and Benefits Department faced a considerable challenge: increasing operational efficiency while transitioning from their rapidly-declining Document and Image Processing System (DIPS). Their current DIPS was slowing down information access and hampering staff productivity, due to an aging, ineffective query function. Whatever system the department chose, however, had to eventually integrate with the council’s planned enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Lesley Cox, Local Taxation Manager, knew that the revenue and benefits department was working with a limited budget and had to procure the best-quality system available. By implementing a Laserfiche® digital document management solution, she was able to centralise the department’s records in a single repository, saving her staff time and aggravation while simplifying future integration with the council-wide CRM system.

The Situation

The legacy DIPS was causing more problems than it solved for the department’s 20 employees. Slow inputting, incorrect indexing and inefficient searching meant that department staff were spending significantly more time looking for information than actually acting on it. Their most urgent needs were to first replace the dying system that was slowing their workflow down and, second, to increase operational efficiency.

Thanks to Laserfiche, the department found a solution that met both these needs.

The Solution

“Our system was very basic, and had been on its last legs for years now,” comments Cox. “We needed not only something quicker and more sophisticated, but we also needed a platform for workflow later on. Ultimately, we needed to migrate our legacy data to the new system. So we had to find something that would meet all those needs.”

The department put the project out to tender, and, with the help of their IT Manager, Andrew Walmsley, began reviewing different systems. Specifically, the department needed a system that would enable them to file documents securely. They were also looking for a system that would support a single, centralised electronic repository, replacing their current system that consisted of a repository spread across a number of optical drives. Their system also had to support efficient, quick search and retrieval functions.

Ultimately, they chose Laserfiche not only because it is easy to use, but also because its data and structure would make it simple to move existing information into the new CRM system when it became available. “Although the council is trying to introduce a CRM system across the whole of the authority, we needed to integrate whatever platform came along with our DIPS workflow,” Cox says. “However, the project wasn’t moving forward quickly enough—our old system would have been obsolete far before the CRM system could go live. So whatever solution we chose had to ultimately tie into the CRM system when it was up and working.”

Steve Livermore, Director of Laserfiche authorised reseller Crusader Technologies, helped the revenue and benefits department implement their solution. The initial installation took place over two days, with additional integration and customisation tasks taking about four weeks. “We had around 160 optical drives to convert to Laserfiche from the legacy system,” Livermore says. “These optical drives were over ten years old and worked on a DOS-based system, which made it time-consuming to copy data into a format that Laserfiche could identify—it was possible, however.”

Once the drives were converted, Livermore worked with the department to develop a program that auto-populated the Laserfiche template with data from the current revenue and benefits database. Users can easily identify documents populated with template data and move them to the correct system sub-folder. “The training went smoothly, due to the fact that we built a system that requires minimal operator intervention,” Livermore comments. “We made sure that the user profiles were set up correctly so that users could retrieve information within seconds when on the phone to their clients.”

Currently, the revenue side of the revenue and benefits department is using Laserfiche to store community charge documents, council documents and non-domestic rates documents—all documents supporting the council’s local taxation activities. They have one employee who scans and indexes documents manually. Documents are kept for three months to assure they’ve been indexed correctly and then are shredded—a holdover from the legacy system, which frequently indexed documents incorrectly and required re-scanning and re-indexing. “We haven’t had that problem with Laserfiche at all,” Cox says. “We’re scanning documents in quite happily.

“Compared to our old system, the new Laserfiche system is so much quicker,” she adds. “The problem was, the old DIPS didn’t work. We couldn’t access documents, and our prime concern was to have a replacement. We had to have access to our existing documents and we had to scan and retrieve the documents we receive on a daily basis.”

Because the revenue and benefits department is currently using their Laserfiche system for document imaging, finding information quickly is of paramount importance. Staff usually search under their account reference order, as documents are only scanned in after staff have finished working with them and have placed the appropriate reference numbers on the documents. This makes it simple to track multiple accounts. “It’s a lot easier for staff to access and to interrogate to find things,” Cox says. “Scanning is quicker and simpler—our old system used to be very laborious and would take several minutes. If the information was on an optical drive that wasn’t in the jukebox at the time, you had to go through, find it, put it in the jukebox, install it, reset the jukebox and rerun your search. With Laserfiche, there’s no messing around. You just go in, look for your document and it will search across the entire database in seconds. You don’t have to muck around changing drives in the jukebox.”

In the future, the revenue and benefits department would like to expand their Laserfiche system to include the benefits side of the department, as staff there still use paper documents and manual filing systems to store and index information. In fact, the Department believes that other council departments could implement Laserfiche, and that ultimately, the solution could serve as the backbone of an archival system for the entire council. With its open architecture, Laserfiche is the perfect tool to connect mission-critical front-end applications with a repository full of information.

“We view Laserfiche as our platform for moving on to bigger and better things,” Cox says. “It has a lot more potential for us.”

That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that the improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.

“That’s the thing about Laserfiche,” says Todd Pickthorn, an IT expert with the Marshall School District. “Once you’ve completed one project with Laserfiche, your eyes open up to the new projects that are possible. That’s been the case with all the agencies we’re working with. When one makes an improvement, everybody reaps the rewards.”

In a world where government bureaucracy is the norm, the Marshall collaboration’s streamlined operations are a remarkable accomplishment which is earning national acclaim—and in an arguably unexpected part of the world.

Marshall, a quiet prairie town, is 40 miles from the nearest interstate and 200 miles from Minneapolis. Yet in the late 1990s, a forward thinking group of residents and elected officials calling themselves “Prairie Net” vowed the information superhighway was going pass a lot closer than Interstate 29 in South Dakota. Monthly meetings were held, resolutions were passed, grants were received and bonds were issued. And with official commitment clear and money in hand, Marshall soon had ISP providers waiting to wire up the community. It took a few years but eventually a brand new fiber optic cable stretched some 75 miles from Sioux Falls, SD, down every street in Marshall.

Next step was deciding what to do with that cable. Prairie Net knew it was crucial to provide Web access to serve the whole community, including residents, government and businesses alike. And they knew Laserfiche was going to play a large part in it, they just weren’t sure how to go about it. That’s where planning came in.

“It’s all about planning and having the group meetings where we all talk about our road map for this system and how to plan on using Laserfiche down the road,” Pickthorn says. “We knew that having that new fiber optic cable in place opened a lot of opportunities to us.”

It was in those meetings that the idea surfaced to have a shared document management system connected by the new cable. Prairie Net recognized that different government agencies were responsible for similar tasks in their respective offices—and that duplication of effort would be eliminated by having all their records maintained in a single location.

Bringing four distinct government operations together under one IT roof was no small task. City Hall and the city’s utilities already shared a Laserfiche system, while the school district and county had their own systems. The district decided to merge their system with the city’s, and the county followed suit soon after. With an enterprise Laserfiche system encompassing the four different agencies, staff were able to share ideas on its construction, upkeep and expansion.

“Each entity had its own unique challenges on how they wanted to organize and store their data,” Pickthorn says. “We were able to take the efficiencies we learned through working with multiple schools and apply them to city government and municipal utility operations. We’ve been able to take things we’ve learned through experience, such as file naming conventions and standardization, and apply them throughout the system.”

“In a big city it would be very difficult to get something like this done, simply due to the politics involved,” says Clayton Baer, software designer for Marshall’s Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Not to say that there hasn’t been opposition, including intervention by the courts when one judge questioned the legality of the collaboration, says Marshall’s City Director Harry Weilage. However, the system’s success has won over most of the skeptics.

“The last departments in the various agencies that wanted to get into this technology were the financial departments,” Pickthorn says. “Now, it’s staff in those departments who use Laserfiche the most.”

For the four agencies, sharing a single enterprise system means that costs are managed more easily. According to Pickthorn, a single IT staff member is able to serve three of the four different agencies. And with one large system instead of four smaller ones, there is also considerable savings on costs.

“The initial investment is one-quarter of the price,” says Baer. “That was probably the biggest selling point when it came to getting grants. Why would we build four separate infrastructures when we could just build one? They all serve the same taxpayers.”

This cooperative approach is appealing to more than just grant issuers. National computer experts Daniel Pink and Daniel Tascot accepted invitations to review the Marshall system and were duly impressed, says Weilage. There has also been plenty of local attention, particularly through a program that recruited developmentally disabled residents to undertake some of the scanning needed to get the original paper documents into digital format.

All the attention has helped spread similar collaborations among government agencies in other parts of the state, Weilage adds. In Anoka County, 11 different police departments all use a county-wide enterprise Laserfiche system. Ditto for the 10 school districts in Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District.

“Where this might be too expensive in another rural school district, Northwest was able to manage it because they all worked together to create a system that serves the entire school district,” Baer says.

Right now, Marshall is in the most ambitious phase of its IT infrastructure project. The Marshall Portal, as it’s being called, is a multi-media interactive website with links to every organization and agency in town. Prairie Net now wants to upload the various Laserfiche repositories onto that portal, so town employees will be able to access their work documents from home and students and taxpayers alike will be able to research public records.

“We want to offer one-stop access to information, whether it’s local government, school district or county government records,” Weilage says. “The Marshall portal will offer quick and easy access to all the information we have in Laserfiche. Whether a resident is looking for sports schedules, meeting minutes or to sign up for little league, it will all be there.”

Marshall has more than its residents in mind with its portal plans. This community of 12,500 hosts three billion-dollar industries—Archer Daniels Midland, Schwan Foods and US Bank—and having all this information on-line is going to be helpful for them as well, according to Weilage.

But ultimately, the benefit of Laserfiche is in how the community—of residents and staff alike—has embraced it.

“You can spend as much as you want on new technology, but the key is getting the most out of it,” Weilage says. “That takes getting the community to take advantage of it, and here, they are.”

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

A view of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, from its gardens

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

“Upper Deerfield’s document management system is bare bones yet staffers are getting everything out of it they can,” Babb says. “For a municipality with just over 7,500 residents, there’s minimal staff in Upper Deerfield’s government offices, far fewer than other municipalities I’ve seen.”

Upper Deerfield made a very important commitment two years ago when elected officials and municipal staff determined that municipal record keeping management needed to be streamlined. At that time town administrator/clerk Roy Spoltore asked for and received permission from the Township Committee to request proposals for the purchase of a document management software system. The Township Committee eventually awarded the purchase of a Laserfiche document management system.

During the past three summers, the Township has employed Ashley Wolk to build Upper Deerfield’s new database. Wolk pulled reams of government documents from boxes and filing cabinets throughout the building and fed them into an electronic copier that converted them into digital images. At the same time those documents were scanned they were stored in the township’s growing electronic database.

Township Committee meeting minutes and resolutions dating back decades have been scanned into the new system as well as minutes and resolutions from all Local Boards, Commissions and Committees. Records from the Construction Office, Housing Office, Zoning Office and Assessor’s Office have also been scanned into the database as well as the year-end reports for Finance, Animal Control, Fire Safety and the Tax Collector departments. Soon vital statistics such as birth, death, and marriage certificates will also be scanned into the database.

Now, when a resident requests a document from any of these Upper Deerfield agencies, the name, date or other specified means to help identify the document are typed into a computer much like searching for something on the internet. An instant later, links to electronic images of documents containing that information pop up on a computer screen. Staff then click on the link they want and a legally binding, official document is ready for printing.

“For my use, it’s easy to find anything in the database,” says administration clerk/typist Linda Martin. “I have people that come in looking for ordinances and resolutions and things from years past and I can go right to the database without the time-consuming search through books or filing cabinets. It takes just seconds to go to the computer, put in the key words, and its right there.”

Planning Board secretary Vicki Vagnarelli has also grown very fond of the new system. “Before we had Laserfiche I constantly had to go through books searching for specific documents, it was extremely time consuming,” she says. “Now, Laserfiche is the first place I search when I need to gather information relating to the Planning or Zoning boards; Township Committee ordinances and resolutions, or any other area of municipal government that is pertinent to our needs at that time.”

Along with the storage and retrieval abilities of Upper Deerfield’s document management system, another software program has been added to keep track of who accesses which documents in the database and when. Another software program being installed will automatically take internal working documents that staffers produce on their own computers and index and store them in the database without having to print and scan them first.

All this software has to be custom tailored to each community’s filing system needs, Babb said. Such filing systems can date back centuries. Upper Deerfield’s system has been in full service for just 18 months, but documents reaching back to the 1920s—when Upper Deerfield was founded—have been scanned into the database. “As more documents are scanned in, staff will become more familiar with how to find them and that will enable the system and staff using it to become more productive,” Babb says.

Similar systems are working all over New Jersey, some considerably more sophisticated than what Upper Deerfield has so far installed, Babb said. Document management technology has reached levels where meeting agendas can be compiled without a shred of paper; password-secure websites can be created to remotely access town hall databases, documents can even be worked on from remote locations using some of the new software modules available.

Babb says he hopes that some day soon Upper Deerfield will have all that technology available to its staff and residents. In the meantime, the new database has helped a small town staff handle a big city work load.

“I’d love to see Upper Deerfield some day take full advantage of all the additional technology,” Babb says. “Still, I’m amazed at what Upper Deerfield Township has accomplished with the small entry level system they invested in. They really went to town on Laserfiche and maximized those features available to them.”

Please join us as we congratulate this year’s winners: the City of Lynwood, CA; Thurston County, WA; the City of Okotoks, AB; BC Biomedical; Berger Financial Group; Texas A&M University; Jamestown, NY, Public Schools; and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted nominations for this year’s award—and we’d like to invite you to join us at the Conference January 12-14 in Los Angeles to congratulate this year’s winners.

City Government: City of Lynwood, CA

Lynwood was a city in transition: the community, attorneys and staff wanted things quicker, yet storage space was maxed out. Legal expenses rose, customer service dipped, productivity slowed and documents were misplaced as storage overflowed.

Laserfiche increased internal productivity, while shortening request times by the public for resolutions and agendas. The finance office knows if old bills have been paid by looking up scanned checks, while staff no longer have to make trips to the clerk’s office for copies of resolutions, agendas or agreements.

Staff has decreased actual paper printing: instead of mailing documents to vendors, they just e-mail them, saving on postage. Litigation is now smoother—and less costly—because overtime hours aren’t being spent digging through files during discovery, and the city isn’t paying fines for taking too long to find submit them. Instead of delivering bulging binders for court cases, now they get all the documentation they need on a single CD.

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of adopting Laserfiche was Lynwood’s ability to win over its not-so-tech-savvy public.

City IT staff used Laserfiche to create a custom interface for the public to access documents called MYDOCSPOT which uses a virtual mascot, Spot, to fetch agendas, resolutions and other documents as a dog might fetch a stick. He’s not the only one wagging his tail; morale’s up amongst city employees and last but not least, the city is intuitively working towards a greener, paperless environment.

Read the full story here.

County Government: Thurston County, WA

The sheriff’s office used to have to transport 14 heavy-duty filing cabinets up and down the elevator to jail to access the civil orders and warrants issued by district and superior court judges to make sure a warrant was still active—a process both cumbersome and dangerous. The elevator broke down frequently and workers would get injured hauling the cabinets.

Prosecuting attorneys and assigned counsel trying cases couldn’t share client folders, while the payroll department would need days, sometimes weeks, to verify length of employment for retirees.

Now civil orders and warrants are scanned into Laserfiche for remote access, so there’s no more hauling file cabinets up and down the elevator and a lot fewer worker’s compensation claims. Attorneys on both sides can pull up their client cases remotely, even in court. And the payroll department can verify retirees’ work history faster, while storage costs are way down and employee morale is way up.

“At first I wasn’t sure if everyone in the county was prepared to use this tool—and boy was I wrong! Now everyone wants it and they want it yesterday,” says IT Consultant Bonnie Hilyard.

Read the full story here.

International Government: City of Okotoks, AB, Canada

Okotoks was a mid-sized but quickly-growing municipality preparing to consolidate staff from three buildings into one new administration building with considerably less storage space. In preparation for this move, and in consideration of a corporate goal to reduce paper, Safety Codes—the town’s building inspection services—embarked on a scanning project at the beginning of 2007.

The challenge of scanning new building and development permit applications that could contain anywhere from two to 297 pages each into Laserfiche became even more challenging once prime building season came around in April. Right away it was obvious that finding permits was a lot easier, and with approximately 3,026 images scanned, Safety Codes saw they were saving on paper supplies with reduced environmental impact.

But the real impact was on time spent looking for documents, as Laserfiche made the documents readily accessible to Safety Code Officers in the field and provided real-time information, enabling the staff to make more accurate decisions.

Now the benefits are rippling out to builders, contractors and residents. Safety Codes staff are now able to e-mail approved documentation back to an applicant as well as receive the initial applications over the Web. The level of automation saves builders time and money because they don’t have to visit the town’s office to drop off or collect documentation, plus they receive an immediate response. Likewise, homeowners can now have instant copies of their permitting and inspection process documentation.

As Laserfiche is a new product to Western Canada, this success has drawn attention from other departments within the Town and also from other Canadian municipalities. Perhaps most enduringly, it’s empowered staff to meet the town’s sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as streamline its work processes.

Read the full story here.

Healthcare: BC Biomedical – Surrey, BC, Canada

BC Biomedical Laboratories Ltd. is the largest physician-owned and operated lab in British Columbia, with more than 1.8 million patients visiting one of its 43 patient service centers. For 50 years, its medical diagnostic services have been an integral part of the province’s healthcare system.

But its system left room for improvement. Patient requisitions for test results needed to be photocopied and sent out, while phone calls to the Patient Services Center for requisitions were a constant if necessary interruption.

Now with Laserfiche, all requests are scanned in to a central database and requisitions can be made available online. Paper storage costs have been eliminated, the 28 hours of staff time it took each day to either file, re-file, fax or mail documents has been eliminated, and the phone isn’t ringing off the hook anymore with requisitions requests.

Read the full story here.

Financial Services: Berger Financial Group, Inc. – Medicine Lake (Plymouth), MN

As Berger Financial Group, Inc., (BFG) evolved over 30 years from a CPA firm into a full-scale financial services firm, so did the complexity of its files.

Since implementing Laserfiche in 2003, BFG has transformed its daily work processes, fueling the firm’s rapid growth. Instead of digging through file cabinets, its 14-member staff retrieves client information, spreadsheets, e-mails, even phone messages from their computers, while the front desk clerk scans printed mail as it’s received.

Quick Fields automatically processes 8,000 pages of incoming monthly electronic statements into individual well-organized client folders, saving staff hours of sorting. “It’s not just a benefit for us,” says Principal Mark Berger. “Our clients don’t have to fill their basements with old statements, reports and tax documents, because we store all those for them.”

Audits are easier; instant access means staff no longer have to search through file cabinets or off-site storage.

“Increased overall office efficiency and auto-sorting of statements are something all firms can benefit from. Not to mention that Laserfiche has enabled us to grow our practice at a much greater rate than our staff,” says Berger. “We’ve been able to provide a greater number of services for our clients that just wouldn’t have been possible before.”

Read the full story here.

Higher Education: Texas A&M University AgriLife Department and Health Sciences Center

Moving documents scattered throughout a state as big as Texas was cumbersome. And costly, especially if disbursements relied on other documents that had to be sent overnight, or if payments were held up because of a need for additional paperwork. Redundancies in the state-wide filing system abounded and countless workers’ hours were spent matching and filing documents.

Laserfiche allowed for Work-in-Progress folders to be set up in a central repository for the 300 or so units of Texas A&M AgriLife spread out over 86 locations. Disbursements could obtain invoices and other paperwork for quicker processing and payment. How much quicker? What used to take eight days now took just one. The system-wide automation has reduced and in some cases eliminated work hours spent matching documents into single case folders, and all but eliminated the need to print paper records. With the new file sharing comes the peace of mind of enhanced security with assigned users and assigned user groups. If someone leaves a user group, they leave their access rights as well.

When the Texas A&M Health Sciences Center was planning to build its 200-acre new central campus, it wasn’t planning on using space that could house students and labs to house file cabinets. Add to that a system that spanned the state and often required costly overnight delivery of paperwork to its central office, then a need to duplicate and store copies of that paperwork, and Laserfiche was just the cure Project Manager Kristin Nace was looking for.

“We’ve already seen a cost savings by reducing our overnight delivery charges for sending documents, which also translates into a smoother more efficient business process,” she explains. “But our largest unexpected benefit came in realizing how popular Laserfiche has become within our organization.”

Explains Nace, “I’m regularly getting requests from our departments to set up additional folders, processes, or even repositories. I knew people would love the product, I just didn’t expect they would love it this much. In the planning stages I remember wondering what I was going to do if our departments didn’t buy-in to Laserfiche. How was I going to get them to use it? I’m so pleased to say they bought in after the first training class. As a matter of fact, I’ve not had to convince anyone to use it, if anything I cannot keep up with all of their requests to bring more documents into the system. We are excited it has taken off as quickly and easily as it has.”

K-12 Education: Jamestown, NY, Public Schools

The Jamestown City School District’s Human Resources Department began looking at document imaging in 2003 as a way to solve what had become an increasingly varied set of paper management problems for their personnel records, employment applications, Freedom of Information requests, and reports regarding civil rights, unemployment and worker’s compensation.

Employees on different floors had trouble accessing files; multiple users sometimes needed to access a single file, and then would make copies of confidential files, which then were re-filed with the originals creating potentially confidentially problems and extra paperwork taking up extra space.

Once Laserfiche was chosen, personnel records were organized into separate folders with different sub-headings depending on who needed access to them and how confidential they needed to stay, which added a level of security without adding need for more file cabinets. In fact, the city’s HR Director is now so confident in Laserfiche’s abilities, hard copy records are being permanently moved off-site and a new HR and payroll package has been implemented, saving both time and money but also ensuring continuity, effectively disaster-proofing the district’s vital data and its ability to work no matter what.

Then Jamestown really started to discover what Laserfiche could do. The district saved money by not having to hire a third party to scan to scale architectural drawings, schematics and building maintenance manuals. Board of Education meetings became paperless, doing away with the need to produce and distribute hundreds of pages of documents for each board member. Contract negotiations with the seven unions the district deals with are smoother now that Laserfiche can trace the evolution of contract provisions from every contract they’ve worked from in the past 25 years. And Laserfiche’s powerful redaction tool allows Freedom of Information requests to be fulfilled without compromising confidential information directly or indirectly in compliance with the New York State Committee on Open Government.

Read the full story here.

Commercial: The Star Tribune – Minneapolis, MN

The newspaper needed to replace their legacy document imaging system—one with no support or upgrade path—with one that could migrate massive databases from shared servers.

During the migration process more than 25,000 missing files were found. Now, database fields in Oracle and SQL associate a PeopleSoft record with a Laserfiche document. By integrating PeopleSoft, RightFax, Oracle and Laserfiche, the Star Tribune was able to automate workflow.

For example, an expense report entered in PeopleSoft has a bar code, which RightFax sends to a network folder where Laserfiche Quick Agent recognizes the bar code, files the receipt in Laserfiche and then notifies PeopleSoft that the expense can be reimbursed.

What started as an Accounts Payable solution is now being used by Circulation, HR, Asset Management and Interactive Media, with Laserfiche Records Management Edition on deck to manage contracts for the entire company.

That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.

But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.

The County must have heard other departments’ pleas, because suddenly several departments’ annual IT portfolios had requests for imaging systems. The County’s IT Manager, Brian Ferris, stepped in with the authority from its Information Technology Committee (ITC) and Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), and the search for an enterprise content management (ECM) system was on.

Back in 2006, IT Consultant (and now Laserfiche Administrator) Bonnie Hilyard and appointed imaging committee members were given the task to look at bringing an enterprise content management system into the county for all the departments to use. There was additional urgency because the overflowing records building had already spilled over into a second storage building. “We were looking at possibly needing a third down the road, and we knew we had to stop the insanity,” she recalls.

The imaging committee’s vision for the County’s ECM system was more than simply a virtual storage building. “The system would have to do more than address both our short-term and long-range needs for document imaging. We definitely needed an application that had open architecture, regional support, Web capabilities, document and records management as well as a powerful workflow engine,” she says. “Plus, a huge requirement was the ability to integrate with all of our existing business applications.

The County’s initial goal was to meet current and anticipated business requirements for 10-15 years, promote efficiency of county operations, save the time and costs of filling public record requests, as well as to save storage space. Whatever system they chose would have to allow for decentralized use for all levels of staff through easy desktop access, as well as the ability to integrate primary business applications with the system—all while providing multi-level security features.

What Hilyard and the team were looking for was a solution as enterprise-wise as it was enterprise-wide. Where did she find one?

“The county identified requirements for an Enterprise Imaging system and then released a Request for Proposal based on those requirements. After an extensive review process which included matching the county’s requirements with each proposal and visits to other jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon that used the proposed systems , we determined that Laserfiche was the best choice” Hilyard says.

“One of the biggest moves for us was to be able to certify the system we purchased with the State of Washington State Archives Certification process,” she adds. “This certification would allow us to eventually destroy some of the paper documents that were scanned into the system—a big move for shrinking our storage costs.” This was such a big move, in fact, that Hilyard and her team made sure only records associated with the records retention schedule set by the Secretary of State were added to their system.

Initial implementation was rolled out in three pilot offices: the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), and Development Services Department (DevSvcs).

The BOCC had ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1910s, as well as board meeting minutes that staff scanned into Laserfiche. Almost immediately, citizens and staff could search and print out documents themselves, which was a huge time saver for the board’s secretary. Says Hilyard, “Now she scans them in and they are automatically posted to the Web with WebLink. She can then send an e-mail notifying everyone that it’s posted, and she’s done.”

Next, Hilyard’s team is installing Laserfiche in the PAO, mostly due to the office’s sheer amount of paperwork. By law, cases must be kept for at least 20 years, but this retention period can stretch even longer when the appeals process is included. After an outside vendor scanned 3.7 million pages into TIFF files, Hilyard’s team used Quick Fields to automatically import them into file structures organized by year. As the documents were imported, Laserfiche’s OCR engine automatically extracted searchable text, simplifying retrieval. In 2009, Hilyard says, the PAO hopes to be scanning the documents as they come in, but she’s realistic about the process.

“We know that this transition will be hard on some staff, so we’re not going to completely eliminate the ‘safety folders’ at this time,” she says. “We’re hoping the attorneys will see they can use their laptops to locate all the up-to-date paperwork for the case in the court room or office.”

To help the effort, Hilyard’s team designed a folder structure where each case has its own file folder so all subsequent incoming information could be routed to these folders by staff using Snapshot or through Laserfiche Workflow.

“We decided to go this direction because as a case is closed, Workflow will move the active folder to the Records Management module to begin its records retention,” Hilyard says. The PAO has almost finished linking Laserfiche (through an application programmable interface (API) created by VPCI) with their Damion business application.

Next, Development Services Department technical staff and VPCI programmer are working together to create an API for their business application, Amanda, and Laserfiche using Web tools, a project, Hilyard notes, that is now 80% complete.

With pilot projects underway in the first three departments, Hilyard started looking across all departments to see who could benefit from the relatively new system. She admits, though, that for as inevitable and organic as the County’s enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche seems now, it wasn’t always easy.

“Implementing such a large scale roll out has been challenging for myself and our Records Manager. Keeping up with the demand for all the scanning requests has also been a big challenge,” notes Hilyard. “It’s amazing now that the cat is out of the bag how many people in the county are knowledgeable about this technology. I hear no negative comments about the implementation, just a lot of thanks.”

Up next is exploring the possibilities of Laserfiche 8, which TC implemented just this month. “I’m hoping that maybe somewhere along the way I can find the time to learn how to use the Toolkit myself so that I can develop API’s internally,” Hilyard muses.

Somehow, she always finds time to sing the praises of Laserfiche to local governments. “I recommend Laserfiche on an ongoing basis. I share all my stories, documents and knowledge whenever I’m asked,” she says.

“It’s nice to have a community in Washington and Oregon State where we all get together and share. You know you’re not alone and if it’s something that can be done, maybe it’s already done and I don’t have to re-invent it.”

According to Administrative Analyst III Daniel Baker, Lynwood was looking for the technological answer to a variety of challenges. “The city environment was changing in a technological sense,” he recalls. “Community members wanted information quicker.”

Citizens weren’t the only ones with demands. Lynwood faced many of the classic challenges of working with paper documents: mounting shipping and handling costs, proliferating documents and dwindling storage space. City staff were growing tired of inefficient paper-based business processes, especially when it came to producing discovery for an influx of litigation. “We were spending a lot of our funding digging through loads of paper documents in response to discovery,” Baker remembers. “The City Attorney would assign short deadlines for finding documents for ongoing litigation, and if staff couldn’t find documents in time, the City could be penalized. That required staff to work a lot of overtime.”

These issues were overwhelming on their own, but were made even worse by Lynwood’s lack of an official records policy. “We needed to develop and maintain guidelines for an efficient records program,” According to City Manager Roger L. Haley. “Furthermore, we had no backup plan in case of fire, flood, earthquake or other disaster.”

Expanding Laserfiche proved to be more than an answer to any specific challenge; in fact, it empowered Lynwood to maximize the value of citizens’ tax dollars.

“The city has a responsibility to provide excellent customer service,” Haley continues, “including quick access to city records and improve service with today’s technology.”

Laserfiche’s tried-and-true document search, retrieval and distribution capabilities proved fit for the task—and for keeping costs down.

“Laserfiche has decreased our printing of paper documents by making it so easy to send files digitally,” Baker says. “The majority of agreements, letters, resolutions and other correspondence are now being e-mailed to vendors instead of mailing a printed copy, which reduces our dependence on the postal system and lowers costs.”

Baker also reports faster response times for records requests, such as resolutions and agendas, while finance department staff can confirm if bills were paid by looking up scanned checks. Staff members looking for copies of resolutions, agendas and agreements no longer trek to the City Clerk’s office, meaning staff productivity and efficiency have increased. “Documents are now at our fingertips instead of in a box in the basement,” Baker says.

Of course, even the most powerful software is only as useful as it is intuitive. That’s why ease of use played a major role in Lynwood’s purchasing decision—and why Laserfiche was the clear choice. “Laserfiche’s functionality is not only rich but easy to learn,” Baker says. “It gives people who aren’t very computer-savvy the confidence to use computer programs in the workplace.”

It’s no surprise that Lynwood would want to extend easy information access to the community. But while city staff quickly came to understand and appreciate Laserfiche, many citizens were hesitant to retrieve documents via Laserfiche rather than making pilgrimages to City Hall. “Many residents refused to change the way they were retrieving information, because they couldn’t understand how valuable a tool Laserfiche is,” Baker recounts.

Lynwood’s electronic document management team adroitly addressed customer concerns, taking Laserfiche’s user-friendliness to new heights with a custom WebLink interface.

“Most public document search engines come off as intimidating to the public, and as a result, few people use them,” Baker explains. “We wanted our approach to be user-friendly, with a likable theme to encourage use.”

Baker teamed with IT Technician Mike Ochoa and Graphic Technician Jamel Goodloe to create a public records portal with an emphasis on accessibility. “We wanted to people of all ages and experience levels to be able to search for documents,” Baker says. The resulting site, called My Doc Spot, features a public records mascot, Spot, who “fetches” agendas, minutes, resolutions, budgets, RFPs and agreements for Lynwood citizens.

Response to the records portal has been overwhelmingly positive, from both citizens and the city staff who formerly had to manually respond to records requests. In fact, My Doc Spot helped Lynwood fetch a coveted 2008 Laserfiche Run Smarter Award. Of course, it also helps that the city now has a codified records policy in place.

“Laserfiche has provided us with a system to cope with our records challenges while meeting ISO standards,” says Baker. “We can now easily classify, store and search for all our records, which satisfies the California Public Records Act,” he adds.

Laserfiche has also helped Lynwood overcome its increased litigation challenge, dramatically reducing the time it takes to respond to discovery requests. “With Laserfiche,” Baker notes, “we can look up what we need to find by a simple keyword search, with no added expense. And instead of giving attorneys binders of documents, we can give them their requested documents on CD.”

The most important benefit of the Laserfiche system, according to Baker, has been establishing and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, Laserfiche centralizes all of Lynwood’s vital documents—including agendas, resolutions, printed checks and invoices, agreements, minutes, budgets, city maps, and public requests—for storage and regularly scheduled backup. “Our Laserfiche system makes it very easy to copy images to a DVD-R or tape and send them to a protected location,” Baker says.

Laserfiche went five-for-five in meeting all of the city’s information management challenges. But it’s the unexpected benefits—like increased staff morale and a decreased carbon footprint—that have been especially satisfying for Lynwood staff. “Our staff have definitely taken a liking to the Laserfiche system,” Baker reports. “Most use it to store all their vital and general correspondence, with the confidence that their files will never be lost. By using Laserfiche so much, we’re also promoting a paperless work environment, which in the long run will save resources and promote cleaner air.”

Baker doesn’t hesitate to recommend Laserfiche to his peers. “My advice to those looking to implement document management is this,” he says. “Laserfiche is a ground-breaking solution that gives you the ability to be more efficient, confident and reliable as an organization. Once we installed Laserfiche, our information management challenges soon became yesterday’s news.”

“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.

Boulder City gets more than its share of requests for its public records. It’s a relatively new city—it turns 50 next year – and many of its original citizens still live there. That makes for a very active citizenry.

“Sometimes it’s a very hot political climate – voter turnout can be as high as 80%,” explains Malmstrom. “The community is so hands-on. We get so many requests for records. Some citizens would call everyday. We wanted something to simplify all their requests for records.”

When BC first implemented Laserfiche a decade ago, the town’s reasons for needing an electronic document management system were as simple as they were familiar. “By 1999, everything was in disarray,” remembers Records Clerk Teena Pickens. “Our filing cabinets were made of cardboard. It was a disaster.”

Malmstrom’s predecessor Vicki Mayes (now BC’s City Manager) looked to the neighboring city of Henderson, which had also been researching document management solutions. Mayes researched other systems, but in July 2001, chose Laserfiche based on two simple factors: “Because of the cost and it fit our needs,” relays Pickens. The age of the cardboard filing cabinet drew to a close and a new era began.

Boulder City implemented its new system, wisely, in phases.

City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom

“We started in-house, so it was easier for us,” Pickens remembers. “The permanent records were the first. We started with resolutions. As far as setting up folders, I thought about how it was going to be easiest for people other than myself to find what they were looking for. We set up a ‘Resolutions’ folder, then the different committees—‘Planning,’ ‘Redevelopment,’ etc. Then by years.”

“It was a lot of trial and error,” Malmstrom admits.

Buy-in from other departments was gradual but steady.

“We started in the City Clerk’s office and then moved on to other departments and got them comfortable with using the system. People in general can be resistant to change. It’s a learning process,” she admits. “The more department heads see the benefits, the more departments come on board,” she says proudly. “The whole city’s using WebLink now—the police, personnel—everybody.”

Says Malmstrom, “Once people get the hang of it, Laserfiche is easier to use than Windows. It just takes a while to adjust.”

Boulder City may be a small town, but it covers a large area, including the El Dorado Valley, home to the city’s “Energy Zone,” which is devoted to developing solar power– and where development is closely watched by the public. “People are very interested in anything that happens and they want to be able to research it,” says Pickens.

“The BC Landfill is another hot topic,” adds Malmstrom. “That’s an understatement,” Pickens laughs.

Records Manager Teena Pickens and Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm

“We had people who wanted to see land sales,” adds Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm. “We had enough calls from citizens where it made sense to make them available.” BC had been using WebLink internally since 2001, but by 2006, the addition of a security firewall allowed access to the public. But with public access came the need to file Boulder City’s land sales to make them, well, more accessible. Explains Krumm, “We came up with a system where the agreements were apart from resolutions and ordinances.”

Citizen buy-in has been near-unanimous. “The concerns and complaints have been few,” Krumm says. “If you know what you’re looking for you can find it in the folder structure.”

But, she says, that’s only because a lot of care went into setting up those folders.

“You have to think about how you want to set-up folder structures. If you don’t make it easy, you’re going to get more calls,” warns Krumm.

One thing’s for sure, fulfilling requests is easier. “When we have a request for a contract in the energy zone, you can be on the phone attaching it to an e-mail and sending it—as opposed to getting up walking down the hall, finding the file, going through 150 pages, locating the pages, copying them and then sending them out.”

The most recent addition to the Boulder City Laserfiche family, has also been the most resource-saving: Agenda Manager.

“I’d been asking for Agenda Manager for years,” Malmstrom sighs. When a 2005 primary election budget wound up unspent, Malmstrom requested the funds go to purchasing Agenda Manager.

The results in her office were instantaneous. “Instead of printing out 23 500-page packets, people just look up agenda packets online,” she says. “It just condenses paper and time.”

The rest of the city has followed suit, slowly but surely. “It takes a while to adjust to change, but once you get used to [using Agenda Manager], it makes everything much easier, especially if there are a lot of last-minute changes,” offers Pickens. “I can’t even imagine what we’d do without it.”

Next up for Boulder City is the introduction of Quick Fields as part of its latest acquisition—Laserfiche Records Management Edition, due early next year.

“We’re continuing to evolve,” says Malmstrom.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is one of the things makes Boulder City truly unique among the state’s neon-cityscapes: “We’re the only city in Nevada that doesn’t have gambling,” she explains.

But doesn’t mean Boulder City doesn’t know how to have a good time.

“We’re actually small enough that we can still shut down the streets for community events,” offers Malmstrom. It sounds so idyllic, you imagine someone could be passing out milk and cookies at these community events. “More like beer and margaritas,” she laughs.

“I lived in the Kootenay-Columbia area from grade six until high school,” says Fraser, now Enterprise Solutions Manager at IKON. “I attended five schools in the area. The teachers and the school system were great. My most influential teacher was my grade seven teacher, Mr. Truant. I owe him a lot. I wish I could see him again and thank him for helping me immensely through a difficult year where I attended three different schools.”

This devotion to supporting educators led IKON to help school districts throughout British Columbia digitize their paper records and speed their workflows. School District No. 20 (SD20), located in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, serves a number of communities throughout the province. Thanks to IKON, it’s also discovered the benefits of Laserfiche.

When SD20 began looking for a digital document management solution, it was to maximize their extremely limited storage space. “Our biggest concern was too much paper,” says Greg Luterbach, Director of HR and IT for SD20. “The volume of paper was consuming more space than we had. It was very time-consuming to track things down, which made it difficult to respond to requests in a timely manner because we couldn’t access information quickly.”

The school district had identified three departments where the Laserfiche solution would provide nearly immediate benefits: the accounts payable department, the human resources department and Board operations. In the accounts payable department, lack of physical storage space was a concern, as was access to previous invoices for issues like warranty coverage. The storage and access to personnel files for both active and inactive employees was cumbersome. Payroll clerks needed to retrieve files from off-site storage on a regular basis, but due to the time and effort required to actually locate the file, this task became low-priority. In addition, there was an identified need to be able to search through Board agendas and minutes for previous data and decisions.

Laserfiche serves as a centralized repository for both hard copy and electronic documents, enabling space savings, a faster retrieval time and the ability to share files electronically among district employees. Christine Barrett, Solutions Consultant at IKON, believes that preparation and planning were key to the implementation’s success. “By doing the work up front, the implementation plan was fairly straightforward and we were able to meet the project’s objectives and timeframe,” she says. “Most people don’t realize that the time you spend planning and preparing in the beginning is the key to a smooth and stress-free implementation.”

Luterbach agrees with Barrett’s assessment. “The implementation went very well,” he remembers. “IKON did the backfile scanning for our HR records, while we just scanned day-forward records in the payroll and Board operations. Staff had some initial concerns regarding the time it took to digitize and profile documents in the system, but it didn’t take long for people to realize the benefits of accessing information from their desks.

“There was a nearly instant payback,” he continues. “I’d say it only took weeks for us to see a difference.”

In the human resources department, SD20 leveraged key Laserfiche features to minimize manual indexing of active employee files. With a simple data extract, the IKON implementation team pulled a list of key index fields like employee names and identification numbers from the school district software, which were used to create cover sheets with all the index fields SD20 required for employee file retrieval. The implementation team scanned the files with the matching cover sheets, which electronically pulled the files into the Laserfiche repository. Quick Fields™ and Zone OCR automatically indexed and stored the files, minimizing the time and effort required for digital archival.

Now, instead of having to get files from off-site storage or attempt to answer queries from memory, staff simply open a digital copy of the paperwork they need right on their desktop computers. “The best thing is that we’re much more confident in our answers to questions,” Luterbach says. “We can answer most questions while people are waiting, saving the time it would have taken to locate the information and then call them back. Now, we base our answers on facts. We just open up Laserfiche, click Search, find the document and answer the question. Our efficiency is up, and our confidence is, too.”

Staff has embraced the new system. “We really feel like we’re more efficient, more effective and more confident,” Luterbach says. “We have reliable access to information right from our desks, and that’s what we needed.”

Luterbach believes school districts of all sizes can benefit from a Laserfiche solution. “We’ve found our document management system to be highly effective,” he says. “We’ve been very happy as far as technology goes—the system has been rock-solid, and we’ve had good support from both IKON and Laserfiche in regards to any of our minor issues. The most important thing for school districts is instant access to information—and everyone benefits from that.”

When it comes to information access, Luterbach believes SD20’s Laserfiche system has been an overwhelmingly positive addition to the district office. “Laserfiche empowers people with click-convenient access to the information they need,” he says. “We’re really happy with it.”

That was Glens Falls Records Management Tech/City Historian Wayne Wright 11 years ago. When he thumbed through a Laserfiche brochure back then, he was thinking about the bulky bound volumes of birth, death and marriage certificates the City Clerk’s office staff wrestled with on top of the copier thirty to forty times each day. A decade later Laserfiche is helping most every aspect of Glens Falls government run more efficiently, largely through the single-minded effort of an administrator who just wanted to make a change.

“Wayne has been the man all along,” says Glens Falls City Clerk Robert Curtis. “Without him, probably

none of this work would have been done. Laserfiche has truly been a wonderful asset to this office, and Wayne has been the point man all along. Whether it’s securing the funding or keeping the database updated, Wayne is the one that puts it all together.”

Glens Falls is a city of about 15,000 residents located in Upstate New York’s hardscrabble Lower Adirondack Region, an area not known for investing in novel government technology. Still, when the city’s microfilm vendor showed Wright that Laserfiche brochure, he couldn’t help but think about that old copier.

“We were probably printing out about 1,200 certificates each month,” Wright says. “Every day you had to drag out those books, find the record, flip the books over, cram them onto the copier glass, and then hope you got a shot you could actually use. It got to where I hated doing it.”

So, Wright applied for—and was rejected for—a grant from the New York State Archives. At that time, the State Archives was concerned about the long-term prospects of what was still a novel technology. When the grant was turned down, Wright turned to the City’s Common Council and, with the City Clerk’s blessing, the Council approved a three-year lease-to-own purchase plan for a Laserfiche software license, scanner and computer.

With the city’s commitment to document imaging backing him, Wright applied for another Archives grant, only this time he specified the money was to be used only for back-scanning archived records. With a $12,800 state grant in hand, Glens Falls began scanning its vital records—and Wright began getting less of a workout at work.

A vendor was hired to do the back-scanning, leaving Wright free to begin creating the city’s first electronic historic archive. This was evening and weekend work for which Wright, as city historian, was paid a stipend augmented only by his love for the project. He traveled from city businesses to homes to government record rooms pulling out, copying and scanning documents, postcards, building plans and proclamations.

As he was reconstructing the city’s past, Wright was also building its future as one of the Northeast’s leading small cities in electronic document management storage, according to Bruce Cadman, regional sales representative for Rochester, NY-based, Laserfiche reseller General Code.

“Wayne has done an incredible job getting all sorts of documents into Laserfiche,” Cadman says. “He made it his personal mission to make a searchable database that can be much more easily accessed by everyone in City Hall.”

As Wright’s co-workers were getting to know Laserfiche better, so were the folks at the State Archives’ grant office. Glens Falls was awarded a $22,000 grant for its Laserfiche project a few years after the first, followed by a third grant for $32,000 and a fourth for $43,000.

Along the way, the city’s computer has been upgraded three times, a server was installed to store scanned images and the first scanner was replaced with a smaller and faster color unit. Glens Falls also upgraded from Laserfiche 5 to Laserfiche 7, which helped Wright to expand his database to incorporate other City Hall departments, according to General Code tech support engineer Brian Hoody.

Laserfiche streamlined the city’s scanning and storing operations, so Wright was able to expand the system’s scope. He used grant funding to start scanning city court indexes, personnel, cemetery and public works department documents, winning him friends outside the clerk’s office, nowhere more than in the building department where, again with the help of State Archives grants, Glens Falls has been aggressively scanning both new and old building plans.

It’s the latter that can be particularly useful to residents renovating an older home, building inspector John Ward says. Residents can even get copies of the municipal code and master plan on compact disc. Now, when residents want copies from the building department, Ward sends them over to see Wright, who pulls them out of Laserfiche within minutes, instead of hours.

“When Wayne showed me what he wanted to do with this system I thought it was great,” says Ward. “It’s been very, very helpful particularly with all the older buildings we have in Glens Falls.”

As the database has expanded, so has its sophistication. Laserfiche Snapshot instantly stores Microsoft Word files and other internal documents in Laserfiche. And scanned images are exported to the city’s microfilm vendor, who creates permanent microfilm copies of the records using a Kodak Archive Writer.

The last State Archives grant written by Wright was to scan records which had been microfilmed years before. The original records were destroyed after they were filmed, so using the film was the only way to add them to the Laserfiche database. Through the help of then Mayor LeRoy Akins, Jr., the funding was used to purchase a Canon microfilm scanner and pay two temporary employees to run the machine. This project was a great success and the City plans to share the microfilm scanner with other local governments when possible.

When Wright dons his City Historian hat, he has the ability to bring the Laserfiche historic records archive with him on CD. Doing field research with Laserfiche, Wright says, enables him to more easily separate the historic documents he already has from those he wants to add to the archive.

Still, there is much more Laserfiche could be doing for the city. The city bought Laserfiche Quick Fields but Wright still indexes documents individually after they are scanned. Hoody plans to work with Wright to install Quick Fields and make Wright’s job even more manageable.

Then there are Agenda Manager, Workflow, WebLink and Web Access, which are all firmly on Wright’s list of possible purchases. Mayor Akins died in August 2008 from cancer and council-wide elections are also slated for next year, so such purchases will likely be deferred, Curtis says.

Then there’s always the matter of finding the money, but that’s where Wright’s work as a State Archives grants writer comes in. Over the past few years, the granting agency has seen more and more benefits in funding electronic document management systems for small communities like Glens Falls, according to State Archives Director of Government Records Services Geof Huth.

“There have been plenty of grants submitted for Laserfiche, because it’s fairly popular with medium-sized governments,” Huth says. “The reason the State Archives is awarding more imaging grants is that more people are interested in document management—and that’s because of the work of people like Wayne.”

But Beahen’s department is saving trees and racking up awards—including one for Excellence in Innovation in Information Technology from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) just this year.

“Our peers are John Hopkins University, the San Diego Police Department, the Canadian Research Center and the Dutch National Police,” Beahen notes proudly. “And little old Elk River is up on the porch with the big dogs.”

Elk Rapids, home to 24,000 and located on the outskirts of greater Minneapolis, got up on that porch thanks to Beahen’s vision of giving his officers every technological advantage available—with Laserfiche playing a vital role in both that vision and that advantage.

When Beahen came to Elk River as assistant chief in 1998, the department was still using typewriters and carbon paper. “There were these two PC’s with a word processing program for transcription purposes,” he remembers. “We used a main frame computer that operated in DOS for our existing records system, which was purchased in 1984.”

Beahen immediately began upgrading the department’s technology, working after hours to install computers and build a network to get everyone on e-mail. Next up was finding an information storage system to use on the new network. “Everybody knew we needed it. It was more like who wanted to be the first one to get it out there,” he says. Beahen got it out there, and sixteen months later, Elk River was using Laserfiche.

Beahen immediately saw Laserfiche’s potential. “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,” he says. “We just wanted to make it that simple.”

But before that could happen, two things had to be contended with: old paper files and an outdated database.

“We open between 24,000 and 25,000 files a year—and that takes up a whole storage room,” Beahen explains. “A file for something like a DUI might have 30 or 40 documents, and things get lost. Arson and burglary files, when you consider all the statements and photos, can easily be eight or nine hundred pages. If you’re working a homicide case, you might be adding reports every day.”

For officers who had to testify at court, that meant printing out and distributing seven or more copies of the file to judges, attorneys and detectives, which resulted in both a lot of paper and a lot of transportation costs.

“The county attorney’s eight miles away, the city attorney’s 12 miles away, nobody’s right there in the same building,” Beahen says. “Now, we’re slowly but surely scanning previous years’ case records. When we first started, we had to find case records. Now, once we’ve get them, we scan them. The whole transaction takes less than half a day,” Beahen says proudly. “We’ve been completely paperless since April of 2007.”

Then there was the challenge of maximizing Laserfiche’s potential by replacing Elk River’s outmoded database.

“Our old system was proprietary, so we could only use Laserfiche for storage,” Beahen says. “One of our goals was to find a new records system that would allow us to accept data from the Laserfiche-scanned documents that could be attached directly to the record as media.”

Being able to scan and attach is actually what attracted him to Laserfiche in the first place.

“That’s one of the big reasons why we selected it. With Laserfiche, you just scan all the odds and ends in the same file. We used to have to create all these PDFs and then attach them. Now, Laserfiche interacts directly with our existing records system and scans everything—4×8s, half-sheets, full-sheets—into the same case number,” he says.

But not everyone made the paperless switch as enthusiastically.

“Sometimes the judges and courts just need that paper in front of them, because they’re used to that. But we’ve met with them and they’re now convinced that this is the future. They’ve directed everyone in their offices to work toward a paperless system for everything,” Beahen says. “The tickets we write are already being sent in electronically. Now they’re looking at e-filing complaints and all court orders.

“What wins them over is I can be on the phone with them and tell them ‘I’m going to send it electronically.’ And then, while I’m on the phone, I’ll say ‘Open your e-mail and hit print.’ The speed and efficiency wins over all the doubters.”

What’s won Beahen over is the sheer range of benefits from using a paperless system.

“Last year we saved over $17,000 just in paper costs,” he begins. “Plus, it’s green. There are more energy and resources savings than people might think. Out of my yearly budget that doesn’t seem that significant, but with budget cuts and the actual man hours you’re saving, it adds up.”

Then there’s the technical edge his officers enjoy.

“We’re talking real-time investigative tools at the officer’s fingertips,” Beahen offers. “We’re not a very high-crime area, but we do see our share of property crimes. Like breaking into construction sites and stealing copper. Now we can have an officer on the scene who’s found a guy with cutting tools in his trunk. And we may have a case a month earlier where we have a picture of the shoes used in that crime. The officer can immediately view the picture of the shoes and see if it matches,” Beahen explains. “In the old days, someone had to drive all the way back and look up the file—that is, if they had access to it.

“When you think of giving every officer every piece of information in the car instantly, that’s huge. If we have it, they have it.”

Elk River’s high-tech transition has been almost total: in addition to using Quick Fields and Web Link, the ERPD uses Crimereports.com to provide a link to its service calls and interfaces using an electronic roll-call page.

Still, some old habits die hard. “We were so used to having to put staples through everything,” Beahen jokes. “The biggest headache of using our Laserfiche system is taking everything we had stapled together apart so we could scan it in.”

Not that his successors will have to do that. They might not even need to know what a stapler is.

“We have a new generation of officers that can text with one hand while they talk on the cell and still use the radio,” he observes. “We were moving some old equipment this younger guy saw one of the old typewriters from when I first got here in 1998, and he was asking, ‘What’s this?’”

According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Okotoks “can fairly call itself the greenest community in Canada, maybe the world,” as it is one of the first municipalities to establish growth targets balancing infrastructure development and environmental conservation. And true to its motto of “Historic Past, Sustainable Future,” Okotoks has received national and international recognition for its environmental initiatives, so it’s no surprise they turned to Laserfiche to reduce paper consumption.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Rachelle Meredith describe her Laserfiche success in her own words.

When the Town consolidated three administration buildings into one, the Safety Codes department, which encompasses building inspection services, began investigating scanning solutions. When the Town’s records manager was taking a course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, the instructor commented that Laserfiche provided “top-notch products and services for public and private corporations,” says Rachelle Meredith, corporate records administrator.

After researching Laserfiche, the records manager then invited a representative from Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions to conduct a demonstration. After issuing an RFP, the Town selected Laserfiche, primarily for its records management functionality, OCR capabilities and the Agenda Manager and WebLink modules.

“We love Records Management Edition’s versatility. Its ease of use was very important to us, both to gain staff buy-in and work effortlessly in our busy environment,” Meredith says.

Initially the Safety Codes assistant and manager began scanning all new building and development permit applications into Laserfiche. These applications often contain more than 300 pages, ranging from architectural drawings for housing and commercial buildings and all their associated electrical and plumbing permits to individual applications for decks and other home additions.

As Okotoks entered into its prime building season and the number of permits submitted began to climb, the effectiveness of implementing Laserfiche became quickly apparent. “The immediate benefits were obvious,” remarks Meredith. “When we saw how we saved time locating current information, we began to realize how Laserfiche would benefit our external customers as the project continued. It was a great motivation to keep going.”

At this point, Safety Codes has added more than 3,000 records to their system, saving money on paper supplies and reducing impact on the environment. “Staff really noticed the difference,” Meredith comments. “Time savings was one advantage, because finding information was so much easier. Documents were immediately accessible to safety code officers when they were out in the field, and they had access to accurate, up-to-date information that helped them make better decisions.”

And now the benefits of Laserfiche have extended to builders, professional contractors and homeowners applying for permits. “Safety Codes staff can now e-mail approved documentation back to the applicant, as well as receive initial applications by e-mail, which can be dropped straight into the records management system,” Meredith says. “This saves builders time and money, because they don’t have to come to the office to drop off or collect documentation. Instead, they receive an immediate response.”

External clients aren’t the only ones noticing the difference—other departments are recognizing the benefits of Laserfiche too. In fact, Safety Codes staff, including manager Rob Mueller, assistant Diane Scott and support staff member Ann Williams, were recently nominated for a prestigious annual corporate award, based on the effects other departments have realized from the Laserfiche system. “This is a coveted award, because peers from all 22 business units nominate and select the highest performing team,” explains Meredith. “Safety Codes was recognized for their creative approach, which was encouraging.”

In fact, the Assessment Services department has identified several key tasks that have become much more efficient since Safety Codes implemented Laserfiche. “Off-site trips to locate records have been reduced significantly because staff can instantly review documentation to identify if there’s been a history relating to a certain parcel of land. Also, copier wear-and-tear has been eliminated because they no longer have to piece together copies to recreate 24”x36” drawings,” Meredith says.

“Moreover, staff has easy access to permits correspondence and information, making it easier for assessors to identify any deficiencies or problems in blueprints and written inspection details,” she adds. “More importantly, staff can use Laserfiche’s zoom tools to enlarge numbers on blueprints, so they can read details electronically. It makes their lives so much easier.”

Based on the success in the Safety Codes department, Okotoks expanded Laserfiche to their Cemeteries/Open Spaces department. “Cemeteries is a legislated service that requires us to manage cemetery records ‘in perpetuity,’ which essentially means forever,” Meredith says. “So it was critical that this project was done correctly, right from the very start.”

The Cemeteries project was focused primarily on creating archival records, because, by their nature, cemetery records are historically important. Since Okotoks became a recognized municipality in 1904, cemetery recordkeeping has changed significantly, from a receipt of monies collected for the burial plot and an index card with the deceased’s name, to a file containing anywhere from 8-14 internal and external documents.

“From the minute we started this project we knew how convenient it would be to access information from our desktop computers,” explains Meredith. “Having current and correct information to provide to grieving relatives immediately is crucial.”

Cemetery Administrator Monica Caines began the project on a day-forward basis, scanning records as they were received and archiving records as they were pulled. After nearly two years, almost 4,700 records are now searchable through a customized template. In fact, the Cemeteries project proved so useful, Town staff next began scanning and indexing Open Spaces (parks) records. With a customized template to aid in indexing, users can instantly access documents regarding the Town’s parks, boulevards, landscaping and horticulture.

In early 2009, Okotoks residents and other Web users will be able to use WebLink to search current bylaws and more than 100 years’ worth of historical bylaws. The Town also plans to implement Workflow in the Safety Codes department, and eventually expand Workflow into finance and other departments to optimize their business processes.

In recognition of the Town’s success with Laserfiche, Okotoks is currently in the running for this year’s Run Smarter Awards. “Laserfiche is fairly new to western Canadian municipalities,” Meredith says. “We’ve had a lot of attention from other Town departments, and also from other municipalities. They want to know more about how Laserfiche is helping us meet our sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as how we’re using Laserfiche to work smarter, not longer.”

Despite recognition from inside and outside town limits, Okotoks continues to use Laserfiche for the primary reason it was purchased: to support a sustainable future for the town’s residents. “We really believed that Laserfiche was the best overall solution for our long-term needs,” Meredith says.

“We’re a rapidly growing community that has a solid reputation for being progressive and supporting an entrepreneurial, leading-edge culture,” she adds. “Laserfiche helps us as we strive to live and work in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Armed with laptops, compact discs and/or internet access, elected officials are working from electronic agendas that run the meetings that run local government. The technology eliminates mountains of paper, helps with organizing those meetings and—perhaps most important—puts much more information into the hands of the decisions makers as they make those decisions.

“I love it,” says Ramsey, NJ, Borough Clerk Meredith Bendian. “Now the mayor and council open their laptops, call up the agenda and click on the various links for each agenda item as they work their way through the meeting.”

The Ramsey clerk’s office started scanning and storing meeting minutes and other paperwork into a Laserfiche database in January. Ramsey Councilman Arthur Nalbandian heard that other New Jersey communities were using Laserfiche software to help run their municipal meetings, and suggested it might work in Ramsey.

It took two training sessions and over $20,000 in computer equipment— including 10 laptops—but in January the Ramsey Borough Council had its first paperless meeting. They’ve had 21 such meetings since.

“Our council is receiving it very well,” Bendian says. “It enables us to link to every document that has to do with whatever agenda item we’re working on. We put it all in there together with the agenda.”

Bendian builds the electronic agenda by scanning all the upcoming meeting business into Laserfiche, including agenda items requested by the various department heads and any internal supporting documentation those department heads may have submitted for those items. Public communications to the mayor and council are also scanned in.

All that is then burned onto a compact disc that’s handed out to the six council members, mayor and other council officials before the meeting. Before going paperless, all that was printed out and photocopied.

“You wouldn’t believe the number of copies of all these documents that we were making before each meeting,” Bendian says.

While the use of Laserfiche for paperless meetings is an extremely useful innovation, the benefits of Laserfiche can go much further, according to Greg Hart, Borough Administrator for nearby Franklin Lakes. Hart is a strong proponent of paperless meeting technology and has given demonstrations on the subject before the Municipal Clerks’ Association of New Jersey.

Hart introduced the Borough of Old Tappan to the paperless meeting before moving to his new job in Franklin Lakes. His first task at his new job was getting Franklin Lakes government departments scanning and storing their paperwork into a brand new Laserfiche system. Next, the Mayor and Council authorized $30,000 worth of computer hardware and software, including Laserfiche’s WebLink, which provides secure Web access to the Borough’s Laserfiche database.

Reflecting on his first paperless meeting in Old Tappan back in 2004, Hart says, “I’ll never forget it, because it was the most efficient meeting we’d had to date. The Mayor and Council benefit because they have ability to easily access information and, as a result, the governing body makes more informed decisions. Ultimately, they are able to govern more effectively and more efficiently.”

Bendian says she hopes one day soon to take Ramsey’s government operations in the same direction as Franklin Lakes. Hart believes it’s a logical extension of Ramsey’s current program. If Bendian is already scanning all those documents from the various department heads into her database to build each meeting agenda, Hart says, the next logical step is place those documents into a borough-wide Laserfiche system.

“If you’re going to go to paperless meeting and scanning all these documents into some sort of system you might as well have a document management system to organize it all,” he says. “Even if it’s only the documents for the paperless meetings. You start with the concept of the paperless meeting and it becomes an electronic document management system.”

Word of the paperless office is getting out to other New Jersey communities, in part due to Hart’s demonstrations before the Municipal Clerks Association. In Toms River, two council members are working from electronic agendas and the township plans on moving forward with full implementation, according to deputy clerk Alison Carlisle.

In Woodcliff Lake Councilman John Glaser also conducted a trial run using a laptop with both compact discs and internet access to the borough’s Laserfiche database. The trial went well and now he wants to get the rest of the council onboard.

“It’s obviously valuable for preparing for a meeting,” Glaser says. “We did some tweaking with it, but it looked good.”

There is always some customization involved Hart says, but often the hardest thing about transitioning to paperless meetings is winning over skeptical borough hall staff and elected officials. Closter Mayor Sophie Heymann says she’d like to bring paperless meetings to her borough but while staff have shown an interest, she suspects they are a little intimidated. She also wondered about security issues.

Those are understandable but unnecessary fears, both Bendian and Hart say. When working from CDs, the security concerns are no different than working from a paper agenda, and when working from the internet, everything is secured by password.

“I think the real reluctance of communities to embrace this technology depends on how computer savvy the staffers and elected officials are,” Bendian says. “All our council members are all computer literate, which helps. They were all on board for doing this right from the start.”

Hart says in the two communities he’s introduced to paperless meetings it’s been well worth the work.
“There is significant investment but the pay off is so much more than the input,” Hart says. “For us it was very user friendly, and the mayor and council adjusted very quickly. The important thing is that nobody is shuffling papers any more.”

The Westminster Fire Department began using digital data in 1985. Since most fire departments predate electronic data by decades if not centuries, the 1980s brought a wave of digitizing data to fire departments across the country. Fire departments generally use records management systems designed specifically for the firefighting field, although according to Chief Macaloney, there’s no particular consistency when it comes to vendors and most departments keep paper records as well.

“Ultimately, you end up with this mishmash of electronic data and paper data,” he says.

This combination of paper and electronic data proved fortunate for Westminster. “We had a catastrophic failure of our records management system software,” Macaloney remembers, “which caused us not to have any electronic data from the mid-eighties all the way through the year 2000.”

Since Westminster had always kept paper copies of their records, the department could retrieve the paper copies. But resuming digital data storage was a challenge. After the software failure, Westminster was ready to switch vendors and converting data from one system to another was complicated, even with two systems designed for fire departments. Changing over to another fire-response software system for records management would have required rewriting massive amounts of code, which would have been very expensive.

“Transitioning systems wasn’t an issue for me,” he recalls, “because I decided to go out and secure Laserfiche to be my system for records storage and retrieval.”

Chief Macaloney, who had only a massive number of paper records to work with, knew he needed a common way to look at and retrieve data. “Before installing Laserfiche, I had no consistent way to retrieve information regarding any incident without someone telling me specifically the date and time that it happened,” he says. “When we lost our electronic data, we had no ability to look up public records and fulfill a public records request. Laserfiche provided a mechanism to scan the data, retain it, retrieve it, sort it and search it—and not just the records from 1985 forward, but everything. Now I can log into Laserfiche and pull up an incident in seconds.”

So far, the department has scanned in documents from 2002 to the present and is going back in time with the goal of scanning in all their paper records. To that end, Westminster has developed an innovative program that benefits the fire department and senior citizens alike. “In Massachusetts,” Macaloney says, “any city or town that chooses to adopt the provisions of the state law may reduce the tax levy on property for senior citizens who fall within certain income limits. We’ve utilized senior workers in the fire department in the past, but lately we’ve had them scanning in documents, under the direction of my administrative secretary. We record their work hours and send them to town hall and the town abates their taxes. The good news goes beyond our happiness with Laserfiche itself. We’ve been able to use this program to everyone’s benefit.”

Laserfiche also helps the fire department save money in an unexpected way—on envelopes and stamps. “Some of the documents we scan in are for ambulance transports. That information has to be sent to a billing company. We worked out an agreement with our billing company that when we scan in those documents, we FTP the data over to their site, so we no longer have to mail them the paper documents. So in addition to the good things you have about document management and retrieval, there are the secondary things that we didn’t anticipate, such as sending the electronic file for the billing company to process. We save time and the money we’d spend on envelopes and stamps. That’s a big gain right there.”

The fire department initiated the establishment of a network for the city, and built it, running the fiber-optic cable across the parking lot to city hall. Now firefighters in the field can call up documents on their laptops and read information pertinent to the fire sites. “That will become even more important in the future,” says Macaloney, “when we scan in documents such as permits that have never been electronic documents. The network is seamless. It ties alarm receiving to dispatch to records. And it sends an email to my cell phone notifying me of the alarm. Everything is retrievable through the network from the building or anywhere with access.”

It’s clear that Westminster’s technical innovations have far-ranging benefits for everyone from firefighters in the field to senior citizens working to abate their taxes. The technical savvy shown by this town of 8,000 proves that innovation isn’t the sole province of large municipalities. With the police department and town hall in line to integrate with the system, Laserfiche has been and will continue to be an integral part of the town’s success.

The soon-to-be-completed Burj Dubai will be the world's tallest building.

The City of Dubai already had an expansive—and expensive—document management system in place when the scanning project began. Given such an investment, why, then, would they purchase a brand-new Laserfiche system for the project? The answer is simple: Simplicity.

“The City of Dubai’s existing document management system is complex and not very user-friendly or easy to implement,” explains Mustafa Siddiqui, business solutions specialist for Pixel Digital Systems (PDS), the City of Dubai’s Laserfiche reseller. “We needed software that we could implement quickly, and that users could understand right away. We found all that in Laserfiche.”

Siddiqui credits BMB Sal, official Laserfiche supplier to the Middle East, for making the implementation so smooth. “We’ve had a great experience with BMB,” he says. “They responded immediately to our questions during the implementation.”

Installing Laserfiche proved fairly simple. Next came the real challenge: Creating a logical file structure for a diverse array of document types. Siddiqui and company are glad to have Laserfiche’s flexible templates to help them efficiently capture and index documents from multiple city departments. “We have to process documents for all the city’s departments—finance, human resources, building and accounting,” he says, “so the ability to quickly create and modify templates for all these document types is a major advantage.”

It’s not just multiple document types involved in the project. As Dubai becomes ever more multicultural, the need to accommodate documents in multiple languages increases. With 85 percent of documents in Arabic and the remaining 15 percent in English, the Laserfiche system’s strong multi-language support was essential to Dubai’s purchasing decision.

The City of Dubai’s central archive center follows International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Six Sigma quality control standards for archiving and storing documents. To preserve these standards, PDS have engineered a sophisticated quality control process using Laserfiche Workflow. Before they enter the Laserfiche repository, newly-scanned documents are routed to PDS staff for an initial quality check. The second step in the workflow involves template assignment and indexing. Finally, both PDS and municipal staff review processed documents before permanently archiving them. Thanks to Workflow, each step in this process is fully automated, saving time and resources throughout each stage of quality control.

Given Dubai’s surging population and related construction boom, the city deemed it critical to implement a scalable system to manage the sharp increase in incoming paperwork. “It’s definitely the right time for organizations in the Middle East to adopt an electronic document management system,” Siddiqui explains. “Organizations in this region face large amounts of paper coupled with reduced manpower and huge rental expenses.”

It’s somewhat serendipitous, then, that Laserfiche is so well-equipped to handle such growth. Recently, the City of Dubai expanded the current back-file conversion project to include another million pages, and PDS is bidding to for the opportunity to integrate Laserfiche with Dubai’s existing system to handle all day-forward scanning.

Members of the back-file conversion team at the project's kickoff meeting. From L to R: Amine Hakim Karrouche, Fareed Ahmed AbdulSattar, Stephen Macintosh, Tariq Ahmed Zarooni, Hussain Abdulla Fardan, Yousif Shams, Huda Ozair Mubarak, Khalil Hussain, Gurmeet Singh, Ibrahim Miligi, Mustafa Siddiqui, Manoj Ganapathy, Khurram Jamil.

“We plan to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s existing system, which will be used for storage,” Siddiqui says. But for everyday work, users will use the Laserfiche interface exclusively, because it’s so user-friendly.” In addition to greatly simplifying business process, the integration will strengthen the city’s IT infrastructure. “Laserfiche will help the City of Dubai increase the value of its existing investment by making it so much easier to use,” he adds.

While the plans for citywide expansion of the Laserfiche system are not yet finalized, if recent results are any indication, expect Laserfiche to become a key part of Dubai’s infrastructure. “We’re very happy to have been awarded a contract extension for the back-file conversion project,” Siddiqui says. “We look forward to continued success with Dubai, and hopefully, to new partnerships with other municipalities in the region.”

Before the clerk’s office installed Laserfiche, staff literally spent hours each day fulfilling information requests. “It was so time-consuming,” recalls City Clerk Lynn Mulhall. “Other city employees would come to our office to submit requests, and they’d have to wait at the counter while we went to the records room and searched for the relevant documents. We definitely needed a better way to share information with other departments.”

Records Administrator Janet LeBlanc puts it more succinctly. “I cringe when I think about how it used to be,” she says.

Mulhall and her colleagues found what they were looking for at an Arizona Municipal Clerks’ Association conference, where they spoke with a Laserfiche representative and saw the software in action. Using Laserfiche, they’d be able to digitize and index all their documents, eliminating almost all of their paper archives.

“We really didn’t look at anything else,” Mulhall remembers. “Laserfiche was the only known product to meet the needs of city clerks, and once we saw it, we really liked it.”

The clerk’s office installed Laserfiche in 2001, and staff began scanning agendas, meeting minutes and other documents into the Laserfiche repository. In 2002, LeBlanc started an initiative to move all the office’s documents into Laserfiche, and she began scanning records one series at a time. Because documents hadn’t been named consistently, LeBlanc focused on developing a template with drop-down fields recording the document type, how it was approved, and contract numbers and terms, among other information.

“I really created it through trial and error,” she says. “But now it’s so easy. We can search by keyword to instantly locate the information we need.”

As LeBlanc added more documents to the Laserfiche repository, staff found it increasingly simple to locate information requested by other city departments. In fact, because they could e-mail documents from within Laserfiche, staff could fulfill many requests instantaneously.

As employees throughout the city became more comfortable with electronic documents, they began contacting the IT department to request access to Laserfiche. Rather than rolling the Laserfiche Client software out citywide, IT used WebLink to power a Web portal that provides staff with round-the-clock access to the Laserfiche repository.

“We held training sessions to show staff in other departments how to locate documents in Laserfiche,” LeBlanc says. “Because Laserfiche is so easy to use, everyone caught on quickly, and it’s definitely made us more productive. Our city manager, for example, absolutely loves it—he saves a lot of time by accessing contracts and other documents right from his desktop.”

In addition to making documents more accessible, Laserfiche has also helped the clerk’s office streamline everyday work processes. For example, before the office installed Laserfiche, preparing agenda packets was a tedious process that required hours of staff time. “We used to place the reports in black binders, which we’d then carry between people’s desks,” Mulhall remembers. “We had to create a Microsoft® Access® database to determine who had the binders, or even who’d seen them last.”

After creating the final agenda, staff had to assemble the packet by hand and create 40-50 photocopies. Last-minute additions required staff to photocopy more pages and append them to the end of each packet. “We certainly killed a lot of trees,” Mulhall notes.

Thanks to Laserfiche Agenda Manager, staff have dramatically cut the time, effort and copies required to distribute agendas and prepare minutes. Using Agenda Manager, staff members propose agenda items using a simple Web form. Agenda Manager then automatically routes proposed items, along with accompanying reports or other files, to the appropriate reviewers. Mulhall or one of her staff members can easily add approved items to the final agenda as well as remove or rearrange items to accommodate last-minute changes. Mulhall publishes and distributes the finalized agenda with the touch of a button, then posts it to the city’s Website.

“Our signers love it, and we all thought they’d resist,” Mulhall says. “They’re definitely ‘paper people,’ but not a single one has complained about it. In fact, they all tell us how great the system is.”

Goodyear uses Agenda Manager to manage over ten different types of meetings, so to help staff use it most effectively, the deputy clerk developed a how-to manual and several training classes. “As new people go live, either she or I go to their desk, give them the manual and walk them through preparing their first report,” says Mulhall. “It’s so easy to use that the questions we get are about how we prefer the report to be formatted, not how to use the product.”

The city has also integrated Agenda Manager with Granicus® to create and manage both meeting minutes and audio and video recordings of the proceedings. The video is indexed in real-time by each agenda item. “The public loves it,” Mulhall comments. “In fact, we all love it. If someone misses a meeting, they can watch it, click on an item and immediately access the staff report.

“In fact, it’s hard to tell what’s Agenda Manager and what’s Granicus, they’re so well-integrated,” she adds.

Goodyear now uses Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office, the municipal court, the city manager’s office and the engineering department, which has helped reduce copies of both paper and electronic documents city-wide. There has also been a marked decrease in internal records requests, because city staff can locate their own information. Staff have also managed to stay on top of an increased workload without hiring additional employees.

“We couldn’t do it without Laserfiche or Agenda Manager,” says Mulhall. “There would be no way we’d be able to do everything. Laserfiche has eliminated so much from our workload, it’s incredible.

“The change with Laserfiche is drastic enough that everyone has noticed,” she adds. “It’s a great tool that streamlines our work processes and makes us more productive on a daily basis. Laserfiche is truly something every city can benefit from.”

Like many eventual Laserfiche users, the City of Riverside found itself awash in paper and inefficiency. The city clerk’s office alone used multiple document management systems, which wasted time and resources and caused frequent needle-haystack incidents when staff looked for documents.

“Our system was organized, but also very cumbersome,” recalls City Clerk Colleen Nicol. “We used a data entry-intensive DOS-based program to index city council minutes and record file locations. An even older system identified file locations by topic, meaning staff had to make subjective judgments on where documents had been indexed.”

The time wasted on inefficient search and indexing snowballed into productivity bottlenecks. “The process of filing council meeting minutes took at least two weeks,” says Nicol, “which would be fine—except the city council holds weekly meetings. Inevitably, there were backlogs, which made locating yet-to-be-indexed documents very time-consuming. Before Laserfiche, we were three months behind in data entry and filing.”

Knowing that perpetuating these problematic processes would be detrimental to public service, in 2001, Riverside reviewed a number of potential solutions. Although the systems’ features were comparable, Laserfiche stood out, she says, due to its simplicity and flexibility. “We chose Laserfiche because it’s very user-friendly, and can handle departments of any size,” she explains. “It’s also very cost-effective, especially compared to competing products.”

Laserfiche’s searching power also stood out—literally. “Highlighted search results were another ‘must-have,’” Nicol adds. “We all take this feature for granted now, but Laserfiche was the only product to offer it at the time. It’s equally beneficial to all departments, saving time and frustration when reviewing large documents.”

Staff eagerly anticipated the Laserfiche installation, which Nicol attributes to their thorough understanding of the system’s benefits. “Support for Laserfiche was widespread,” she recalls. “IT, the city manager’s office and department representatives all took part in the selection process. Explaining the benefits to them in advance helped foster support and secure funding when we were ready for purchase and installation.”

Although it’s been many years since Riverside installed Laserfiche, Nicol still has fond memories of the implementation process. “Staff were eager to learn,” she says, “and the technical support we received from Laserfiche made the launch easy. We even had a visit from Laserfiche founder and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker.”

The pleasant installation experience was a harbinger of things to come. Staff began realizing the promised benefits quickly, starting with the bane of many a city clerk’s existence: the aforementioned city council agenda. The Agenda Manager module has completely transformed the agenda compilation and publishing processes. Rather than assembling and hand-delivering bulky paper copies of agenda items, staff members from various departments now submit council reports and attachments online. This has eliminated the routing of draft reports, as well as the confusion that can result from having multiple copies of the same document.

Publishing the agenda is equally smooth. Rather than making multiple paper copies, Nicol simply publishes the agenda online. This saves natural resources, and in the event that someone requests a paper copy, staff can easily submit the agenda for printing electronically instead of calling on their xerography skills. Nicol reports that publishing the weekly agenda using Agenda Manager has eliminated the need to perform quality control on agenda items, number pages by hand and deliver hard-copy agendas to the print shop. On agenda publishing days, all these tasks involved up to eight staff members—but now, one deputy city clerk can easily do it all.

A streamlined agenda process isn’t the only improvement in the clerk’s office. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, staff handled all research requests from other city departments and the public by mail, telephone or in person at city hall. Now, city departments—and thanks to WebLink, the public—can search city council history online, so they can do their own research immediately. Due in part to her efforts with Laserfiche, the International Institute of Municipal Clerks awarded Nicol the designation of Master Municipal Clerk in 2002.

Fueled by Nicol’s enthusiasm, Laserfiche devotion has percolated throughout the city, all the way to Steve Reneker, Riverside’s CIO. As Nicol recalls, Reneker didn’t initially believe that Laserfiche could deliver on his vision of citywide improvements. “At first, he wasn’t convinced that Laserfiche was an enterprise solution,” she says. “However, after looking into Laserfiche’s capabilities and potential for integration, he’s now embraced it as a city-standard solution and is working to take it enterprise-wide.”

In fact, Reneker has become such a champion of Laserfiche that he took the podium as the keynote speaker at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference. “Laserfiche has helped us maximize the value of our other technology investments,” Reneker said this past January. “By improving information access, we deliver better public service citywide.”

Superior service and increased efficiency are alive and well in multiple city departments, including the police department, which securely stores audio and video files and case-related documents in Laserfiche. And by implementing Laserfiche in the finance department, Riverside has dramatically streamlined payment processing. But the city’s really looking forward to implementing Rio, the first packaged enterprise content management system from Laserfiche.

“With Rio, and with all our planned integrations, we’ll expand our Laserfiche user population two- or threefold,” Nicol says. Laserfiche’s industry-best Microsoft SharePoint integration will automate workflow and accelerate business processes. The finance department will integrate Laserfiche with its primary software to add functionality and simplify everyday tasks. And integration with the city’s GIS software will enable city staff and the public to access information related to land parcels online.

Having witnessed the benefits that technology can bring to city government firsthand, Nicol hopes to encourage other cities to achieve the same results. And what better way to inspire her peers than to serve as the vice president of the International Institute of Municipal Clerks? She’s on the ballot for the upcoming election, and, given her ability to move the City of Riverside forward, it’s easy to imagine her guiding other municipalities towards greater efficiency and improved public service.

In the meantime, however, this Laserfiche Luminary and her colleagues throughout the City of Riverside are content enjoying the benefits of their Laserfiche system. “Laserfiche has helped us improve our business processes, reduce staff frustration and provide better public service,” she says. “It’s an excellent product.”

We also presented several awards at the conference. Tina Ward Shuart of Cobleskill, NY, received the Achievement Award for her diligence in making Laserfiche a key part of the city’s business processes. Her office currently stores a wide variety of documents—from legislative board minutes to birth, marriage and death records—in Laserfiche, and she has plans to bring planning and zoning documents into the system as well.

Laserfiche CEO Nien-Ling Wacker presents an Achievement Award to Tina Ward Shuart.

“Laserfiche is a tremendous time-saver—searches that used to take minutes or even hours now take seconds,” she says. She also appreciates the fact that Laserfiche protects critical documents and records from damage or destruction, a topic on many clerks’ minds in the wake of recent flooding in the Midwest.

Another award recipient, Carol Jacobs of Ocean City, MD, says that Laserfiche has made her workday a lot easier—literally. “We used to store our minutes on microfiche, which is difficult to search and a real strain on the eyes,” she explains. “We appreciate how easy it is to find information in Laserfiche and how rapidly we can bring new documents into the system.”

Because staff in the clerk’s office have been so successful with Laserfiche, Ocean City plans to extend the system to additional departments, including planning and zoning and the fire marshal’s office. “I never pass up an opportunity to promote Laserfiche to the city manager and city council,” Jacobs notes. “I tell them that Laserfiche helps us serve the public a lot faster.”

Beverly Brown of Highland Beach, FL, sums up many clerks’ feelings when she talks about Laserfiche. “I use the system constantly—it’s an extremely valuable research tool. I also like the fact that it gives us so much control over which documents users can access. You don’t get that level of security when you’re dealing with file cabinets.”

Brown has belonged to the IIMC for more than three decades, and she’s noticed a few changes over the years. “The educational sessions are a lot more crowded than they used to be. Everyone has to keep up with the latest technology, and the conference is an excellent opportunity to learn about new systems.”

Attendees stop by the Laserfiche booth to say hello.

Brown also benefits from hearing the conference speakers share their firsthand experience. For example, at this year’s conference, she attended an emergency management session led by someone involved in the Hurricane Katrina clean-up efforts, and his comments led Brown to rethink aspects of her own disaster recovery plan. “He showed me that some items just aren’t as important as I thought they were,” she says.

Shuart, Jacobs and Brown all agree that the networking opportunities are one of the conference’s highlights. “When you sit down at lunch, the other people at the table ask where you’re from, what problems you’ve faced and how you’ve solved them,” Jacobs says. “This year, everyone was talking about tighter budgets and how to do more with your existing resources. Needless to say, Laserfiche plays a role in that discussion, because it significantly reduces the amount of time necessary to find and organize information.”

“At the conference, it’s always interesting to talk to other clerks who use Laserfiche, and to ask them about how they’ve set up their system,” Shuart adds. “I also take the time to stop by the booth to talk to Laserfiche staff, ask questions about the software and even pass along the occasional suggestion. I certainly wouldn’t know Laserfiche as well as I do if it weren’t for the IIMC.”

“My goal is to help municipal professionals answer some of these questions. I plan to share how to balance the IT demands of capturing records with the need to retrieve information quickly in response to internal and public requests,” he said. He also plans to discuss how agenda management, records management and auto-classification serve the needs of government agencies.

Laserfiche user Bill Matson, Records and Elections Coordinator for the City of Niagara Falls, will speak about how the city used Laserfiche to create a central location to store and manage information. Laserfiche’s flexible folder structure and unified metadata model helped the city to accommodate a variety of filing systems. He will also explain how Laserfiche has helped the city to share information with citizens. “In the past, responding to information requests usually involved a trip to the records room,” Matson said. “Once we found the correct file, we had to take it apart, photocopy the relevant pages and then either mail or fax them to the requestor. Now, when someone calls with a request, I can locate the relevant documents in just a few seconds, and then e-mail the electronic files from within Laserfiche. The citizen literally receives the documents before I hang up the phone.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, Laserfiche has helped more than 25,000 organizations—including state and local governments, financial services firms and healthcare providers —optimize business processes and reduce operating costs.

Laserfiche captures and indexes all your organization’s business content—from documents and faxes to e-mails and multimedia files—in a secure, central repository. A unified metadata model helps users classify information, while full-text search tools enable them to quickly find what they need. Laserfiche’s open architecture and flexible API promote rapid integration with other Web- and Windows-based applications, allowing users to capture, manage and distribute information in diverse working environments.

Laserfiche software is distributed by a worldwide network of value-added resellers, who have extensive experience creating enterprise content management solutions that meet clients’ specific business needs. In recognition of the outstanding training and support we provide our resellers, the Laserfiche VAR program has received a five-star rating from VARBusiness magazine.

“The philosophy behind many of our technology initiatives,” he explains, “is to present information on the Web, rather than face-to-face. Not only is it a whole lot less expensive, but it’s so much more convenient for citizens.”

Before implementing Laserfiche, completing everyday tasks was far from convenient. Jackson describes the working environment as “Paper, and lots of it. Our business processes were mostly manual and very costly, with regard to both lost productivity and excess paper consumption.”

Gaston County had another document management system in place when Jackson arrived, but it didn’t meet all of the organization’s business needs. “Our previous software lacked Web publishing and OCR capabilities,” he recalls, “and its architecture couldn’t scale to support our more ambitious initiatives or additional departments.”

Keeping in mind both present needs and future plans, Jackson authored an RFP, to which seven vendors responded. While two other solutions provided similar functionality to Laserfiche, none could match its cost-effectiveness. “Return on investment was probably our chief criterion,” he says. “Laserfiche offered the quickest ROI of all the potential solutions.”

It offered fast deployment as well. Within 6 weeks, the environmental health department had scanned paper records of over 55,000 septic system inspections dating back to 1955. Jackson gives much of the credit for Gaston County’s success to its Laserfiche reseller, One Source Document Solutions. “Our reseller has been great to work with, and they’re a great representative for Laserfiche as well,” he says.

The HR, finance and building inspection departments were also part of the pilot installation. “It was really a ‘first come, first served’ process,” Jackson says. “These departments really wanted to be the initial adopters of the new technology.”

In addition to these departmental champions, Laserfiche also found strong political support. Gaston County commissioners had recently passed a resolution enabling deployment of new e-government initiatives—many of which fell right into Laserfiche’s wheelhouse. “Our commissioners are very interested in using technology to reduce costs, so fortunately, we didn’t have major problems getting funding for our Laserfiche system,” Jackson says.

Deploying at the departmental level proved advantageous in convincing decision makers that Laserfiche would support their goals. “It allowed us to present concrete cost savings to commissioners,” Jackson recalls, “so they’d be on board with expanding the system. It also helped us persuade the few skeptical staff members that, when all is said and done, Laserfiche would make everyone’s jobs easier.”

Located on the banks of the Catawba River, the U.S. National Whitewater Center is the world's largest artificial whitewater river and an official U.S. Olympic Training Site.

It turned out that staff didn’t need much persuading at all. “The resistance to change has been far less than for other applications or new business processes,” he adds. “Employees all realize how tedious working with paper is, and that the opportunity to digitize will help them tremendously.”

Indeed, after just one year of using Laserfiche, staff and citizens have already realized many benefits. For example, Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) has greatly simplified the way staff work with records series. “It’s very easy to establish new records series in RME,” Jackson says, “and when it comes to managing them, staff simply scan documents in and let the system worry about the rest.”

Beyond sophisticated behind-the-scenes records management, staff greatly benefit from one of the most basic Laserfiche functions. “Laserfiche gives staff the ability to search in so many different ways,” Jackson notes. “For research and information requests, it’s really reduced the amount of information staff need to find what they’re looking for.”

In a recent case study, the building inspections department documented just how much more efficient they’ve become thanks to Laserfiche searching. With 6,000 building permits filed yearly, staff spent an estimated five hours per day filing and handling research calls. Because they can now index and retrieve documents automatically with Laserfiche, they’ve reduced the time spent answering those calls by 75%—saving almost half a man-year of work.

And that’s just in a single department. “We know that once we start deploying to larger departments, the savings will mount up into the millions of dollars,” Jackson says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche offers many advantages to Jackson and his staff. First and foremost among these is ease of administration. “We’re a Windows®-based shop, so we really appreciate the way Laserfiche integrates with Active Directory®. That made it really easy to fit Laserfiche into our operating environment.”

Because deployment was so smooth, Laserfiche delivered quickly on its promises. “Many solutions have the potential to increase productivity or lower costs,” he adds, “but are very difficult to set up. With Laserfiche, the upfront investment to attain these kinds of benefits is very low.”

With such rapid results, it wasn’t long before other departments were lining up to request their own Laserfiche systems—a common occurrence among new Laserfiche users. “Once other departments saw the benefits that the pilot departments were reaping, they came to IT and said ‘sign us up,’” Jackson remembers.

In response to these departmental demands, the 2008 Gaston County IT strategic plan includes a major expansion of their Laserfiche system. Planned enhancements include integrating Laserfiche with their redesigned GIS system, so that staff and citizens can retrieve parcel information and tax histories. The emergency medical services department will begin storing patient records and ambulance call histories within Laserfiche—which will help answer HIPAA compliance challenges. Meanwhile, the county attorney’s office will use the Workflow™ module to simplify the contract review process by automatically routing contracts for approval.

Workflow will also play a major role in some very sophisticated e-government applications. “We’re developing Web forms that will send information straight to Workflow,” Jackson says. “For example, employment applications submitted online will go straight to HR for initial screening, then on to hiring departments, who will route back the applications of individuals they want to interview or extend offers to.” Similar technology will enable citizens to submit permit applications and pay taxes online as well. And the building inspection department, one of the earliest adopters of Laserfiche, has become the first county department to go paperless, after receiving state approval for self-warranty in May 2008.

Internal business process improvements notwithstanding, the number-one goal of implementing Laserfiche was to improve citizen service. The citizens’ response? “They love it,” Jackson says. “Having building inspection reports online has been a major success. They can’t believe how much time they save. Previously, they had to call us, come into the office or travel to an inspection site. Now, they have on-demand access to all that information.”

Not bad for the first year. But Jackson is gearing up for bigger and better things. “I knew that digital document management would be a major asset, not only in the short term, but also further on down the road. I really anticipate that, within five years, Laserfiche will become as widely-used as e-mail.”

“I believe that Laserfiche really stands out to city governments because we help them ensure compliance with freedom of information legislation and open public records laws by offering products like WebLink, Web Access and Audit Trail,” Weinberg said. “Laserfiche software is built on the Microsoft® platform and integrates easily with the software city governments use every day. We also have a team of in-house experts who work with their IT departments and staff on an ongoing basis.”

Weinberg added that most of his municipal customers want the stability of an established document management vendor they can trust. Laserfiche has been a successful private company for more than 20 years. According to Forrester Research, Inc., Laserfiche takes a “less is more” approach and focuses on ease of use, eliminating file cabinets and, most importantly, affordability. In uncertain economic times, solutions that streamline business processes across the enterprise are quite appealing because of the short- and long-term cost savings they provide. Paperless alternatives are also popular because they contribute to “green” initiatives that focus on saving paper and reducing energy consumption.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche (www.laserfiche.com) creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, Laserfiche has helped more than 25,000 organizations — including state and local governments, financial services firms and healthcare providers — optimize business processes and reduce operating costs.

Laserfiche captures and indexes all your organization’s paperwork — from documents and faxes to e-mails and multimedia files — in a secure, central repository. A unified metadata model helps users classify information, while full-text search tools enable them to quickly find what they need. Laserfiche’s open architecture and flexible API promote rapid integration with other Web- and Windows-based applications, allowing users to capture, manage and distribute information in diverse working environments.

Laserfiche software is distributed by a worldwide network of value-added resellers, who have extensive experience creating enterprise content management solutions that meet clients’ specific business needs. In recognition of the outstanding training and support we provide our resellers, the Laserfiche VAR program has received a five-star rating from both VARBusiness and GovernmentVAR magazines.

One of the largest issues concerns ineligible voters coming to the polls. To keep voting fair and above board, it’s imperative to keep track of who can vote and who cannot, especially in elections where the difference between winning and losing could come down to just a few votes.

A number of issues could deny someone their vote. For example, they may not be registered in that particular county, they may have recently moved or they may have been convicted of a felony. These reasons are legitimate but aren’t always apparent to voters and polling station workers. In the past, these issues have caused contention, but in Lubbock County, these questions are now quickly answered by staff at the Voter Registration Office.

Dorothy Kennedy, Assistant Chief Deputy for Voter Registration in Lubbock, and her staff used Laserfiche to scan voter registration information so it could be easily indexed and searched. Armed with the voter’s name, registration officials can now perform a quick search to gather all the information they need.

That information is important to have, according to Cody Bettis of Lubbock-based VP Imaging, a Laserfiche reseller. Bettis adds that, because of the confusion, ineligible people could slip through the cracks and vote.

Previously, to answer inquiries, Kennedy had to search through storage rooms overflowing with voter registration cards, change of address forms and change of surname information. Considering that each of Lubbock County’s 154,000 registered voters could have 4 or 5 documents on file, it was often difficult to locate one particular document. “Voter registration takes up a lot of room,” Kennedy says.

Prospective voters would sometimes have to wait weeks to find out, from a judge, why they weren’t eligible to vote. On Election Day, many would be turned away from the polling booths with no explanation, except that their names weren’t on file. “Voter registration doesn’t follow you,” says Kennedy, who wants voters to be aware that it is up to the individual to keep the Voter Registration Office up-to-date on name and address changes. But thanks to Laserfiche, this information will now be at election officials’ fingertips on Election Day.