“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

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint could do many great things for our organization, DoD 5015.2-certified records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM solution it selected had a seamless SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

• Robust records management functionality.
• The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.
• Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.
• Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on documents, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

“Laserfiche has dramatically reduced the flow of paper throughout the organization,” says Ellis. “It’s opened up space for new offices and enabled us to tear down an entire warehouse for profitable use!”

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Operational Efficiency

With Laserfiche in place, the Port Authority has started using it to streamline business processes. First on the list? The RFP and vendor selection process.

The Port Authority was established in 1952 as a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the purpose of stimulating commerce in the ports of the Commonwealth, promoting the shipment of goods and cargoes through the ports, improving the navigable tidal waters within the Commonwealth, and in general to perform any act or function which may be useful in developing, improving or increasing the commerce of the ports of the Commonwealth. As such, it contracts with dozens of vendors each year.

In the past, the RFP and vendor selection process was manual and paper-based:

• Proposals were submitted in hard copy and photocopies for each member of the selection committee.
• After a contract had been finalized, paper copies were made for the Contracts and Finance Departments, and also distributed to the contract administrators.
• Because copies of the contracts documents weren’t centralized, it was difficult to locate the most current version of any given contract or amendment.

With the help of Unity ECM, the Port Authority’s Laserfiche reseller, the organization has transformed the entire process as follows:

• Proposals are submitted electronically and automatically routed into SharePoint.
• Proposals are posted to a workspace in SharePoint for contract evaluation, scoring, changes and selection.
• Once the collaboration phase is finished and the contract is finalized, it is automatically pulled into Laserfiche, where it is retained according to contract retention schedules.
• From SharePoint, users can access the contract by clicking on a URL that takes them directly to the document stored in Laserfiche. The URL placeholder in SharePoint ensures that the data is synchronized between the two systems, simplifying version control.
• When searching for a contract, users run a search in SharePoint that seamlessly provides results from both the Laserfiche and SharePoint repositories.

“Even employees who aren’t technologically inclined appreciate the efficiency of our new process,” says Ellis. “In general, having real-time information available in a central location has been one of the most important process improvements our organization has received as a benefit of this project.”

Overcoming Implementation Hurdles

One implementation hurdle that Ellis hopes to help other people avoid when integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint has to do with Kerberos, a network authentication protocol that, according to Ellis, is “widely used but poorly documented.”

The Laserfiche/SharePoint integration tools are optimally designed for a single-server deployment, but according to Ellis, the Port Authority “has Laserfiche and SharePoint set up on a multi-server farm that consists of five different servers: the Laserfiche Application Server, Laserfiche SQL Server, SharePoint (MOSS) Server, SharePoint SQL Server and a server for Laserfiche Web Access. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we didn’t realize that—because we have multiple servers—the integration wouldn’t work without a great deal of manual configuration and without using Kerberos. We had a few frustrating days before we figured that out.

“In the end,” she adds, “we had to enlist a senior network administrator to assist us by adding the SPNs on the domain controllers, since adding them to the Laserfiche or SharePoint servers doesn’t solve the issue.

“My two big pieces of advice for other organizations that want to deploy the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration are to get to know your Active Directory and SharePoint experts really well (if you’re not either one) and use the Laserfiche Support Site. Read those Knowledge Base articles!”

Even the hassle surrounding the Kerberos issue, however, didn’t dampen Ellis’ enthusiasm for Laserfiche. “If I had to do it all over again the same way, I’d do it all over again, hands-down,” she says. “Both our users and our executives are impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration affords the organization. Putting a secure, centralized and powerful Laserfiche repository behind SharePoint has given everybody much better access to the information they need to do their jobs well.”

“In today’s economic and regulatory environment, having a well-planned approach to governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is essential,” explained Kimberly Samuelson, Director of Government Strategy at Laserfiche. “With DoD 5015.2-certified records management functionality, Laserfiche ECM serves as a foundational component of GRC, allowing records managers to drive better business outcomes.”

Laserfiche automates records and document management to ensure the standardization and reliability of information assets. Laserfiche Records Management Edition is a DoD 5015.2-certified solution that enables records managers to create a secure file plan and manage retention schedules without interfering with any department’s line of business.

Laserfiche will be on hand at booth #432 throughout the event to demonstrate its agile ECM and records management solutions and hand out the new white paper on GRC.

About Laserfiche
Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 28,000 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 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® and Run Smarter® are registered trademarks of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

Laserfiche first obtained DoD 5015.2 certification for its software in 2003. With the joint certification, Laserfiche now works with SharePoint 2010 to provide a unified business collaboration platform with comprehensive enterprise content management (ECM) functionality.

“In today’s competitive global market, public and private organizations around the world use the DoD 5015.2 standard to help them identify records management solutions that facilitate compliance with strict recordkeeping requirements,” said Sean Tang, director of international business at Laserfiche. “Our integration with SharePoint 2010 gives customers a proven, agile way to quickly improve information governance.”

The joint certification with SharePoint 2010 reflects a commitment from Laserfiche to develop agile ECM solutions designed to support customers who need:

• Transparent records management.
• Turnkey transactional content management.
• Complete document capture and imaging functionality.

At GITEX, Laserfiche will also demonstrate how Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management (BPM) tool included in the Laserfiche ECM suite, enables organizations to create custom workflows that automatically perform specific tasks based on activity occurring in Laserfiche as well as other applications such as GIS, ERP, CRM and more.

“Technology leaders across the Middle East have improved operational efficiency by including Laserfiche Workflow in their overall ECM strategy,” said Nizar Ghannam, COO of BMB Group, a business technology advisor and Laserfiche distributor based in Lebanon. “With its support for the Arabic language, Laserfiche ECM is the top choice for Middle Eastern companies of all sizes.”

GITEX attracts more than 130,000 visitors from more than 60 countries. Laserfiche will be exhibiting in Hall 7 (booth #E7-10) with BMB sal (Lebanon); a number of Laserfiche VARs will also be present in the booth, including ISB (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), ITQAN (Qatar), Kuwait United Company for Copies & Computer Services (Kuwait), Mazroui and Partners (UAE), PIXEL Digital (UAE) and TAFEEL IT Co (KSA).

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—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—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 react quickly to changing conditions. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

As the global distributor, Laserfiche International (LFI) distributes Laserfiche software through an international network of distributors and value-added resellers (VARs) who tailor solutions to clients’ individual needs.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

During the session, Laserfiche Compliance Director Jeffrey Green will discuss how agile ECM technology will help financial advisors adapt to the sweeping regulatory changes outlined in the Dodd-Frank Act, including:

• More state oversight for advisors with less than $100 AUM.
• Increased scrutiny from the SEC for larger advisory firms.
• Increased supervision from FINRA.

“The regulatory changes that financial advisors are facing in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Act’s passage amount to two main things: More frequent audits and more detailed reporting,” said Green. “Without a solid electronic records management strategy in place, advisors’ costs are going to increase and their productivity is going to go down.”

Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) systems include imaging capabilities that enable advisory firms to eliminate paper waste; records management automation that lowers the cost of compliance; powerful security features that protect confidential client information; comprehensive auditing and reporting capabilities that monitor all system activity; and workflow functionality that enables advisors to automate standard business processes.

“Laserfiche ECM systems have been proven to improve compliance, efficiency and profitability at advisory firms across the country,” said Green. “In the face of Dodd-Frank’s regulatory overhaul, it will be the advisors who proactively invest in technology to improve the efficiency of their compliance programs and everyday operations who will realize a disproportionate share of the growth.”

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—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system gives financial advisors the ability to simplify regulatory compliance, improve profitability and limit exposure to civil and criminal liability. It allows advisors to prepare for audits more easily and ensure compliance with multiple state, SEC and FINRA regulations—all while accelerating business processes and making staff more efficient.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Laserfiche has done the hard work to achieve DoD 5015.2 certification with a solution built on the SharePoint platform,” said Dan Craytor, Chief Architect for Microsoft’s Department of Defense business. “By combining Laserfiche with SharePoint 2010, customers can use a rich and agile platform for collaboration and content management.”

Laserfiche works together with SharePoint 2010 to provide a unified business collaboration platform with comprehensive enterprise content management (ECM) functionality. The joint certification reflects a commitment from both Microsoft Corp. and Laserfiche to work together to provide customers with a cutting-edge solution that offers:

• DoD 5015.2-certified records management.
• Complete document capture and imaging functionality.
• Turnkey transactional content management.
• Simplified workflow design with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation.
• Accelerated deployment of SharePoint sites.

“A rock-solid records management strategy that simplifies compliance and ensures security of information is essential for success in today’s market,” said Brian LaPointe, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at Laserfiche. “Our joint, DoD 5015.2-certified solution allows organizations and agencies to leverage the strengths of both Laserfiche and SharePoint 2010.”

“In recent years, Federal, state and local government entities have recognized the significance of such standards as DoD 5015.2,” said Craytor. “As Microsoft’s first partner to achieve this joint certification with SharePoint 2010, we are very enthusiastic about the new opportunities this opens up for government customers of all sizes.”

The DoD 5015.2 standard sets forth core functionality requirements for records management software used by the Department of Defense and its components. Endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration, it is also used as a benchmark by many other federal, state and local government entities, in addition to numerous public and private corporations.

About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—have used Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers centralized 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 on Microsoft technologies to simplify system administration, supports the Microsoft SQL Server platform and combines with Microsoft Office applications and with SharePoint.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners

• Providing in-home services to help homebound older people live in their own homes as long as possible.
• Helping active older people stay fit, healthy and involved through senior center programs and volunteer opportunities.
• Providing family caregivers the resources and support they need to maintain their own lives while caring for older loved ones.

But with 19,000 clients, CareLink was contending with a challenge of its own: filing, storing and accessing customer charts and other documentation in a timely and efficient manner.

Paper’s Pain Points

According to Luke Mattingly, CareLink’s chief operation officer, the agency employs 740 employees, with many of them providing home-based customer care. Some of these field employees live and work nearly 100 miles away from CareLink’s main office, which made filing and accessing customer charts a time-consuming and difficult task—one that took away from the face-to-face time they could spend with customers.

“Our employees are kind and compassionate people who entered this field in order to help senior citizens,” says Mattingly, “not spend hours filing and retrieving reports.”

In addition to staff productivity concerns, CareLink’s paper-based processes also caused delays when it came to funding. As a nonprofit, the agency receives funding from a variety of sources, including:

• Medicaid.
• Federal awards.
• State assistance.
• Private insurance companies.
• Personal donations.
• Private individuals (fee for service).

“We have thousands of customer charts and documents related to a variety of funding sources, and we get audited by third parties in conjunction with their funding requirements,” explains Mattingly. “Paper is just not conducive to quick and easy audits, particularly in the document collection phase.”

Electing to Go Electronic

In 2006, CareLink decided that enough was enough: the agency needed to find a solution that would allow it to do away with paper records and manage electronic content instead.

After evaluating several systems, CareLink found that “Laserfiche had the features and operational capabilities we were looking for, including excellent security, comprehensive records management and ease of use.” Plus, adds Mattingly, “Laserfiche was offered by Datamax Micro, one of our long-time, trusted vendors, and we knew that we could count on them to implement the system according to our needs.”

How ECM Helps

Implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution has transformed the way CareLink handles customer information in a number of ways:

• Electronic customer charts increase employee efficiency. With Laserfiche, field employees no longer have to travel to the main office to retrieve and file customer charts, which greatly enhances their efficiency. They simply access Laserfiche via a Citrix connection and find and file electronic records in the Laserfiche repository. According to Mattingly, this ability to capture documents in the field saves significant staff time. With distributed capture, CareLink has created a five-day filing rule that ensures data is uploaded to Laserfiche on a regular basis. This keeps charts current and protects against the possibility of losing files due to local hard drive failures.
• Automated filing process increases organizational efficiency. Using Laserfiche Quick Fields and Workflow, CareLink has created a quick and easy way to capture, index and auto-file documents in its Laserfiche repository. “Quick Fields captures our customer charts, saves them to the correct location and extracts index field data from specific areas of our forms in order to pre-fill our templates. Workflow further enhances the process by automatically populating template data based on folder name/designation. The automated filing process has been marvelous at eliminating manual data entry and saving staff time,” Mattingly reveals.
• Enhanced security eases HIPAA concerns. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, customer charts were kept in a large file room where it was impossible to be 100% sure that personnel only had access to the records of their assigned customers. In addition, staff sometimes forgot to record when a file was removed for review. “The granular security controls in Laserfiche eliminate the possibility that employees can view customer files they’re not supposed to see,” says the COO. “The system also provides an audit trail so that administrators can easily see all the activity that’s taken place on any given file.”
• Easier access to information eases audits. “In conjunction with our funding requirements, CareLink is audited by third parties on a regular basis,” Mattingly explains. “Laserfiche sped up the process of retrieving documents when those entities show up unannounced.” The system has also simplified internal audits that are designed to ensure that various departments and individual employees are completing an appropriate amount of work. “With Laserfiche’s advanced search capabilities, we can quickly determine the number of documents filed by any employee or department during a given date range. This has been very helpful and saves us a lot of time,” Mattingly says.

But customer charting isn’t the only area of agency operations that has been enhanced by ECM. Finance uses Laserfiche to manage financial documents, check registers and payables invoices. The fundraising department uses it to keep track of content such as proposals and thank you letters. HR uses it to control personnel files, time sheets and employee training files. In addition, the repository also houses organizational policies and procedures, letters, correspondence and individual employee files.

“Laserfiche started out as a solution for electronic charting but it’s grown to encompass so much more,” Mattingly says.

Return on Investment

According to Mattingly, Laserfiche has enabled CareLink to cut its paper consumption in half. Over the past three years, paper savings and the reduction of off-site storage costs have completely covered the cost of purchasing the system. “Over the next seven years,” Mattingly states, “eliminating off-site storage entirely will offset the annual maintenance fees for Laserfiche.”

Mattingly reminds us, however, not to forget about the cost savings associated with the efficiency gains CareLink has gained through its use of Laserfiche: “We estimate a 40% efficiency gain for audits, for example, and our field staff has absolutely seen a productivity boost. Although we haven’t assigned these gains a dollar value, this is where the real savings lie.”

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.

Recognizing the Value of Agility Early On

When CIO Richard “Dick” Aldridge joined Charles County’s IT department 10 years ago he brought a career-long belief in the value of IT-driven initiatives with him. He started by transitioning his staff from procedural RPG programming to object-oriented programming, buying his staff textbooks and leading self-study courses. “I knew we could be more than a green screen county running AS400,” he says. By 2001, IT staff had written their own program for residents to pay water bills and property taxes online.

To Aldridge, it wasn’t the “how?” that mattered, but the “why?” The answer was “Agility.” “Agility is something we have done since day one with our Website,” Aldridge says. “Businesses and constituents want to see how you’re spending their tax money, so when we increase the level of service and convenience we can offer, they benefit from that agility.”

Last year, for instance, this proactive approach resulted in a 350+ mile I-Net fiber-optic network built in conjunction with a local cable TV provider. I-Net not only gives 102 county locations high-speed internet access, it saves Charles County $250,000 a year by eliminating T1 lines and centralized servers, freeing up staff and space.

Discovering the Need for Data Governance

Against this backdrop of IT-driven initiatives, Aldridge saw the county had a growing problem with its enterprise risk management strategy – or lack thereof.

In a presentation to administrators at the Maryland Association of Counties, Aldridge spelled out the problem: “The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley regulations initially served as a wake-up call for formalized document retention policies to meet compliance requirements. But regulatory demands and the number of documents produced daily continue to grow. So a solid document management process is a necessity.”

Aldridge explains: “I actually started selling the idea of a document management system early – I mean really early – back in 2003. We didn’t have to see the lawsuits to know the prospects were there.”

In the meantime, the county’s exponential population growth – from 32,000 to 150,000 in the last 20 years – increasingly made paper-based processes a problem. A series of disasters from 2002-2004, including a tornado, a fire, and hurricane, highlighted the need for a content management system. “We lost a building with a ton of paperwork that people had filed to get housing. Then the county commissioners themselves realized they could have lost their minutes, which they’re supposed to keep forever,” Aldridge says.

“Our basic discovery was that we just had a tremendous amount of paper,” he adds.

Documents were discovered in old service stations, even water towers. There were horror stories of staff members who, while searching for documents, were bitten by paper mites. While waiting for their annual audit, the Accounting Department would find its hallways clogged with boxes of invoices and AR documents. Aldridge was frustrated. “It just irritated me for all our technology, this was happening every year.”

Back in 2005, Aldridge had actually brought a content management solution before the County Commissioners (“We didn’t know about Laserfiche yet,” he says). “I knew my staff could use it, but I could not get buy in,” he says. “People just did not want to let go of their paper.” Cost was an even bigger issue, he says: when the commissioners saw the mid-six-figure price tag, they clutched their pocketbooks almost as tightly as their paper.

Getting Buy-In: The Bake-off That was No Cakewalk

With the 2007 election of new County Commissioners came the opportunity for Aldridge to re-visit its need for enterprise-wide document management. This time, Aldridge and his staff formed a likewise enterprise-wide committee from all eight county departments. “This went a long way to ensure user buy-in,” he says.

Then the real work began: comprehensive, day-long presentations by each vendor using county documents and processes to show exactly how their solution would be used. “We called it ‘the bake-off’ because we didn’t want the vendors to describe their solution, we wanted to taste it,” says Aldridge.

Virginia based reseller Unity Business Systems presented Laserfiche to unanimous approval. “Laserfiche looked like the Windows environment we’re used to using, so our committee members understood what they were seeing,” explains IT Application Manager Evelyn Jacobson.

Besides its user-friendliness, Jacobson says the county purchased Laserfiche ECM both for its cost-effectiveness but also the fact that so many other municipalities were using it – including over 40 of her fellow Digital Cities and Counties winners. “The first thing all the commissioners and administrators asked was, ‘Where else is this being used?’ And being able to point to so many other municipalities like [nearby] Fairfax County who had gone through this same process and chosen it gave the commissioners an immediate confidence in Laserfiche.”

Planning an Information Management Strategy with an Eye Towards Interoperability

Aldridge’s vision for the new system was to get rid of its immediate paper problems, but do so in a way that mitigated future compliance risk:

• The county purchased Laserfiche Records Management Edition specifically for its ability to automate back-end records retention schedules in accordance with Maryland’s state archiving policies, while still allowing users the flexibility to search and access records easily. (Easily enough, in fact, that the county’s Accounting Chief will act as Records Manager until an RM position is created.)
• The Accounting Department now uses Quick Fields to automate capture of invoices and Laserfiche Workflow to automate AP processing. “It’s all done using barcodes now so there’s no manual entry any more – they love it,” Jacobson says. “Since its implementation, we’ve received weekly requests from Accounting to add additional users to the Laserfiche system.”
• Laserfiche implementation continues in the Planning and Growth Management department, as well as HR and  the Commissioners’ office.
• The county’s plan, says Jacobson, is to integrate Laserfiche with the county’s New World Systems public administration software in such a way that a Laserfiche button will allow staff to access documents and run reports from the current applications they’re already using. “Unity Business Systems did a really good job of showing us how Laserfiche would interface with our current systems,” she explains. “That was one of the things we liked about Laserfiche. Our technical staff can integrate it with our enterprise software as well as our internally developed Web applications. It’s very open, and we won’t have to pay for consulting every time we want to do something.”

What makes this even more noteworthy is that Charles County will do this, as it has with all its other IT-driven innovations, with a staff of just 22 – about half the staff other municipalities its size employ.

For Aldridge, the potential interoperability Laserfiche offers will become even more significant as the county rolls out its Transparency Web Portal this month as part of the County Commissioners’ transparency-in-government initiative, which was originated only last August. “We’re very Web-based – we don’t want to put applications on people’s computers,” Aldridge begins, noting the entire Transparency Web Portal itself took the county only a month to implement.

“One of the things we liked about Laserfiche was it offered a tremendous capability to put a button on our Transparency Web Portal. The vision is that we’re not only able to store the record and automatically apply retention to it, but we’ll be able to point people to the Transparency Web Portal so they can see where their tax money is being spent,” Aldridge says.

“I’ll use that to get number nine,” he laughs, confident in Charles County’s ability to keep winning Digital County awards again – and again. “The Transparency Web Portal will help us win eight next year – and then when we add Laserfiche to that, that’ll be nine,” he laughs. “Then I’m going to retire.”

“Our approach to technology has always been to be proactive, not reactive,” says Town Clerk Lisa Garcia.

Adopting Records Management

A decade ago, however, the Clerk’s Office just needed a better way to respond to records requests. “It was a very political time and we had more public records requests than we were used to,” Garcia remembers. “Our office would sometimes spend weeks going through ten years of minutes and resolutions by hand, reading each page, just to fill a single public records request.”

Garcia researched document management solutions and selected Laserfiche for its ability to organize scanned documents into a secure, easily searchable repository. The Clerk’s Office was soon answering requests that used to take days—sometimes weeks—almost immediately. Laserfiche became the go-to application for backing up, storing and retrieving copies of the town’s hard records.

In 2007, Garcia noticed an Arizona newspaper was investigating the municipal e-mail accounts of several counties and cities, exposing security and compliance breaches along the way. “We started seeing cases across the state where old e-mails had become a liability,” Garcia explains. She had reason to be concerned: All ten of Florence’s departments kept their correspondence and records in Outlook as e-mails.

Garcia saw the value of adopting a formal records management policy for e-mail correspondence and spurred a town-wide “E-mail Project” to initiate the purchase of the Laserfiche Records Management module. Garcia and her team worked with Linda Russell and Susan Mosby from reseller Doc United to set up records management in the town’s existing Laserfiche system, as well as create retention schedules to fit the town’s needs.

Data Governance: Making Information Useful

With data governance, data stewards like Garcia ensure that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t just ensure that the enterprise can become more efficient, but relates to an entirely new way of thinking about information. Technology can help in the process, but isn’t the entirety of the process, as data governance consists of four components: people, process, technology and risk management. But what’s clear, says Garcia, is that “Laserfiche is the foundation of all of it.”

To get the process underway, Garcia and the Clerk’s Office team began by setting up an E-mail Project Records Committee of stakeholders, including departmental managers, to ensure that the town’s Laserfiche records management system met enterprise needs. “We knew that the information in Laserfiche had to be useful to everyone,” she says, “so we made sure that everyone was involved from the beginning. That way we could make sure everyone’s needs were met.”

Ironically, that meant that Garcia herself had to look at what would make everyone as comfortable using Laserfiche as she was. “It took a lot of trial and error to craft a records management plan that was flexible,” she admits. “As the Town Clerk, I knew the code pursuant to the state’s record series and schedule. But Laurie Capek, our administrative assistant, actually pointed out that when she would look things up, she would go beyond the code and find a keyword,” Garcia explains. Accordingly, the town came up with its own system—“PW” for Public Works, “FIN” for Finance, etc. —that everyone could recognize and use. In fact, notes Capek, “This system sets up a level of transparency, even amongst ourselves.”

Under the town’s new records management plan, e-mails would only be kept for 90 days. Town staff then makes a determination based on training by the Clerk’s Office and the State Records Retention Manual if the document is required to be saved. Then, it’s simply moved into Laserfiche, where state-mandated retention schedules are applied.

The integration between Laserfiche and Outlook, where e-mails can be sent directly to the Laserfiche repository from Outlook and metadata can be auto-populated for imported Outlook e-mails, has been instrumental to the system’s effectiveness as a data governance and risk management tool. “My favorite thing about Laserfiche is its integration with Microsoft Outlook,” says IT Technician David Blincoe. “The attributes are easy to setup on an enterprise basis and the e-mail template can be used to easily save the metadata from each e-mail.”

Garcia says users like that this personalization means that they don’t have to change the way they’re used to working in Outlook. “The best thing about this is that, even from within Laserfiche, the document opens as an Outlook document; people can even send e-mails and they’re automatically saved in Laserfiche,” Garcia says. “The e-mail is now filed and stored with all the accessibility, functionality and ease of use that Laserfiche provides.”

The system has also proven itself easy to use, for users and IT alike. When a user deletes a document, it goes to the Recycle Bin, where Blincoe and Garcia can review it before deleting it permanently. If there are any questions or missing documents, Blincoe uses Audit Trail to track them down.

Ultimately, Blincoe is impressed with how easy Laserfiche is to administer. “Lisa and her staff really haven’t needed too much technical assistance,” he says.

The Avante Advantage

This year, Florence is implementing a Laserfiche Avante ECM/BPM solution, which will eventually equip each user with their own Laserfiche account, just as they already have their own Outlook e-mail account.

Garcia says she is looking forward to deploying Workflow business process management—included in the town’s new Avante system—to further automate contract management. “We’re already using Laserfiche to run reports to tell us when a contract is up for renewal,” she explains. “Now we’ll be able to have automatic e-mail notification when a contract is available.”

But even now, the benefits of using Laserfiche are many: Town-wide adoption of Laserfiche for records management ensures both compliance and transparency while it saves the Clerk’s Office staff time and resources. Across departments, paperwork has been reduced while continuity of operations is ensured. But really, Garcia, says, the lasting impact of Laserfiche is that the town has found a new and better way to work. The Planning Department, for instance, has already moved its files to Laserfiche. This saves storage costs, but also gives staff the ability to do their own research. “It’s a big deal to be able to just click on a contract from your desktop to see it, as opposed to how it used to be – submitting an internal request to us and having a five-day turnaround time while you waited for the hard copy,” Garcia says.

“Knowledge is power and we provide everyone with the same power. Better still, says Garcia, “We’re truly doing more with less. The Clerk’s Office has not had to hire more staff, and we’re providing tools so people can do their jobs better.”

Garcia says other smaller municipalities can learn from Florence’s example. “We would have loved to be the community that could go out and buy everything in one shot, but we started slow and showed the users what benefits they would receive through using Laserfiche and built on that foundation. Now both administration and elected officials feel confident investing in Laserfiche because our Clerk’s Office has such a proven track record,” she offers.

And Garcia and staff in Florence are always looking for new things to do with Laserfiche, even without a formal monitoring and evaluation plan. “We know what we’ve done so far, but we’re always looking at what else we can do, especially now that we have Workflow and we can begin automating more and more business processes,” Garcia says.

“Our motto is ‘Love Laserfiche.’ We want to make it so easy and convenient that people are so enthusiastic that they come to us with their ideas for how they can use it. That’s what our long term goal is—to have everyone as in love with Laserfiche as we are.”

But with state facilities in College Station, TX, a major USDA entomology research laboratory, and members of the department’s graduate faculty stationed in nine major agricultural areas in the state, sharing information efficiently had become problematic for department staff.

Beginning in 2004, different programs and departments within TAMU began investigating document management solutions in order to more efficiently and cost-effectively share information—not to mention save space. Ultimately, they chose a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) solution to securely store paper, implement business process management and eliminate file cabinets.

Currently, nearly 1,200 staff in 10 departments and divisions within TAMU use Laserfiche.

The Department of Entomology was introduced to ECM by Business Administrator Roberta Priesmeyer, who had read an article on document imaging during a business trip. She thought that an ECM system could help the department with administrative functions, and after learning about Laserfiche, she says that she couldn’t conceivably consider any other competitor due to the enormous difference in cost.

Laserfiche’s ease of use was a major selling point for the department; Priesmeyer reports that its user interface is simple to master, which increases staff adoption.

Once the system was installed, staff created a digital filing structure which replicated the department’s paper-based system. Before Laserfiche, department staff had difficulty finding documents if employees were unavailable, on vacation or had left. With Laserfiche, filing is standardized, so information retrieval is simple. Kathy Seaton, a staff member in the accounting department, previously had to return a vendor’s call after manually searching cabinets and folders. What previously took 30-45 minutes and several phone calls now takes 30 seconds and a single phone call.

IT Director Dr. Mark Wright believes that Laserfiche hasn’t just made life easier on the department head, but also for staff. “Staff really are happier as a result of their ability to increase productivity without expending more effort,” he says.

In addition, Laserfiche enables the department to adhere to their records retention schedule much more easily, something that was nearly impossible with paper. “It really helps us keep the auditors happy,” adds Wright.

With Laserfiche, researchers can easily access reprints that previously required them to spend up to half a day sifting through files to retrieve a single document. Laserfiche’s optical character recognition (OCR) capability and unified metadata model have allowed the department to virtually eliminate this necessary but inefficient use of time. Since 2007, peer review articles have increased by 11.7%, with total faculty publications increasing by 22.4%. In fact, Department of Entomology tenured and tenure track faculty rank #1 in term of peer-review publication output in the US (from data published by the Chronicles of Higher Education).

To further conserve space, the department plans to eventually add accounts for faculty members who each use 4-5 file cabinets to store their publications, to make researching even easier.

Due to the University’s Vision 2020 plan, the department has been hiring more professors, and Laserfiche is indirectly helping them reach this goal by freeing up office space formerly used for storage. Since implementing Laserfiche, the department has removed almost 40 file cabinets, creating enough space for a new office and laboratory.

The department expected to receive an initial ROI of $54,000, but actually achieved an ROI of $272,000. ROI is tracked in areas as varied as staff costs, the cost of lost files, consumables, storage, current and proposed purchases, and lease tax savings.

ROI mainly derives from savings on accounting staff ($7,385), professional staff ($4,865) and management positions ($10,597). The department also reclaimed nearly $1,000 in storage space and nearly $1,000 in monthly printing and distribution costs, for a total monthly savings of over $22,000.

In five years, the department estimates they will save nearly $1.4 million from their Laserfiche implementation.

“I love Laserfiche,” Priesmeyer says. “I’d fight anyone who tried to take it away from me. Choosing it is literally the best decision I’ve ever made.”

The Trusted Edge Intelligent Email Archive for Laserfiche combines enterprise-level power and scalability with a multitude of competitive features such as Microsoft Outlook/OWA and Lotus Notes integration for transparent mailbox management; .pst file archiving; message classification, tagging and annotation; file server and SharePoint intelligent archiving capabilities; and full audit and reporting.

“FileTek is proud to deliver the premiere e-mail and file archiving solution for Laserfiche by combining centrally-managed, policy-driven archive capabilities with the advanced information management features of Laserfiche,” said FileTek President Gary Szukalski.

Built on FileTek’s award-winning, comprehensive Trusted Edge information processing software, the Trusted Edge Intelligent Archive for Laserfiche supports e-mail platforms including Microsoft Exchange and IBM Notes Domino. In addition, the platform provides template archive policies for easy, out-of-the-box deployment. It also offers a browser-based policy management environment for tailoring policies to specific industries, markets and customers.

“This solution delivers outstanding value and provides unlimited scalability,” said Alex Wilson, director of the Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) program at Laserfiche. “In addition to the feature-rich storage management, records management and workflow features, we are now ahead of industry standards in providing a comprehensive archiving and indexing solution to meet customers’ needs.”

FileTek and Laserfiche will demonstrate the Trusted Edge Intelligent Email Archive for Laserfiche at the “Empower 2010” Laserfiche Institute Conference being held January 11-13 in Los Angeles, CA.

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 while 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.

“This certification, which involves rigorous testing, has become the de facto standard for records management applications,” said Tom Wayman, Laserfiche vice president of product strategy. “With our software’s expanded functionality, Laserfiche now has more certified components than any other vendor, offering our customers more choice, power and flexibility than any other solution on the market.”

The new certification includes integrated physical records management through Infolinx, which brings physical records management features such as barcode and RFID tracking, space management, inventory reconciliation and online requesting and transferring of records to Laserfiche.

“The need for transparency and accountability continues to drive the adoption of DoD 5015.2-certified records management systems across all industries,” said Wayman. “The extension of our certification to include physical records management is of great value to our customer base.”

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—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—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.

“Everyone contributed, everyone rose to their assignments and when someone asked the rest of the group for feedback, they got it and the end product ended up being even better,” says Laserfiche Luminary Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue for Charlottesville, VA, who helped organize the event. “I’ve never been in a group that had all those ingredients plus excellent communication, a singular focus of outcome and FUN all together!”

The enthusiasm with which attendees learned and participated in Q&A sessions showed both how much effort they had put into learning and practicing on their own, but also the power of being able to exchange the experience in a state with four major user groups. Sessions like “The Art of Searching,” presented by both Collins and 2009 Run Smarter winner the City of Norfolk’s Alondo McClees, “What’s New In 8.1?” presented by Laserfiche reseller and event sponsor Unity Business Systems’ John Lane (a natural compliment to Collins’ “Migration from 7 to 8” session) as well as “Online Forms,” in a joint presentation by e-Forms provider LincWare and Unity Business Systems, showed how far Laserfiche use and efficiency has come in Virginia.

Alondo McClees teaching a class during the statewide Virginia User Group meeting

Laserfiche Presales Engineer Steve Hackney’s workshops on “Laserfiche Administration and Security” and “Workflow” gave already-educated users that next level of insight and support to make present use and see future deployments as a necessary way of doing business, not just a luxury add-on. As part of the “Laserfiche RME” session, for instance, Debbie Wolff, Hampton Roads Records Manager, demonstrated how RME can be used effectively within a repository hosting multiple departments. “We had a good mix of users, most on 7.2, and some who have migrated to 8,” she says. “But I was personally approached by about six people afterwards who said they wanted to contact me to ask more questions.”

The fact that all this could be so much fun spoke to the open, inclusive atmosphere of the day, which itself culminated a year that saw the founding of the Hampton Roads User Group, which joined the Central Virginia, Richmond and Northern Virginia (NOVA) groups to regularly bring Laserfiche users together to listen, learn, lecture and, perhaps best of all, laugh.

The laughter this day came from creative team-building games infused throughout the day, encouraging attendees to interact and participate. Ad hoc teams shared bingo cards based on collective group experiences (“uses Workflow;” “bikes to work”) that were then eligible for prizes. For another game, users received playing cards for attending sessions; the more they asked questions and suggested topics, the more cards they received to make poker hands out of. The best—and worst—hands won prizes contributed by event sponsors Esker and Fujitsu.

Attendees thinking up creative uses for Laserfiche during lunchtime activities

The lunchtime activity was perhaps the most creative – and most effective. Teams imagined possible home-use scenarios for Laserfiche. One group favorite was using Laserfiche to keep track of underwear drawers, by first using PhotoDocs to input the image, then using template fields to keep track of which drawers held which underwear colors. The scenario also included retention schedules to keep track of when underwear wore out and even white-out redaction tools to cover stains.

“The activities were a way to facilitate that networking and get people talking with each other. We wanted to do something that provided value for our Laserfiche peers by providing opportunities to network across the state. And boy, it looks like we sure accomplished what we set out to do,” Collins adds. “I think I can speak for all who worked on putting this together in saying we imagine this community continuing to grow and going on long into our happy retirements!”

McClees concurs. “At the end of the event, we got an emphatic ‘Yes’ to the 3 questions we asked everyone: Did you have fun? Did you learn something new? Did you meet new people and build new relationships? Each time we receive this type of overwhelming feedback to our Laserfiche user group efforts, it continues to re-energize us and make us that much more excited about what we can do next. I never imagined this user group movement becoming so big so quickly, and I am eager to see it continue to blossom and grow.”

McClees, a Run Smarter Winner and Laserfiche Luminary, will be teaching a class at this year’s conference, “Growing Your Own User Group Network” (IS224). If you haven’t reserved your seat yet, or if you haven’t registered for the conference, register today here.

We’ve also extended our certification beyond electronic records management to include physical records management through integration with technology provided by Infolinx, a Laserfiche Professional Developer Program partner. The integration brings physical records management features such as barcode and RFID tracking, space management, inventory reconciliation and online requesting and transferring of records to Laserfiche.

You can learn more about records management at the 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference:

• AA207, “Best Practices for Laserfiche RME”
• AA208, “What’s New in Laserfiche 8.2 RME (DoD 5015.2 Ver. 3)”
• IS102, “Enterprise-Class Integrated Physical Records Management” (presented by Infolinx)
• LAB204, “Implementing the Records Management Edition”
• PO113, “Fundamentals of Records Management”

You won’t want to miss out, so if you haven’t registered yet, reserve your seat now.

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.”

Created in 1965, Head Start is the most successful national school readiness program in the United States. It provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. All told, nearly 25 million preschool-aged children have benefited from the program nationwide.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) operates the largest Head Start-State Preschool program in the country, contracting with 26 agencies that employ a staff of more than 3,000 people and serve more than 25,000 children—and their families—in the greater L.A. area each year alone. Of course, with that many clients comes all kinds of records: attendance tracking, child abuse and accident reporting, growth charts, fiscal reports and more. Organizing and ensuring fast access to them all was becoming a major problem.

Dealing with Data Silos

“Head Start has three units that monitor the services we provide and the agencies we contract with,” says Shirley Lee, an administrative analyst with LACOE. “In order to get a full picture of the agency, you need to be able to review content from all three units at once. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, each unit was its own data silo. It took a lot of time and effort to track down all of the information necessary to gain a 360 degree view of our operations.”

Head Start’s three monitoring units are:

• Program Review and Support (PRS). Manages program-related information from children and their families, health and social services, and personnel.
• Internal and External Affairs (IEA). Manages information related to enrollment and attendance, funding and program goals and objectives.
• Fiscal Operations and Support (FOS). Manages financial information and ensures that costs are necessary, allowable, reasonable and allocable.

According to Lee, centralizing the agency’s approach to data governance was a key driver for implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Other drivers included:

• Inadequate storage space. LACOE used massive quantities of paper to print out hardcopy records relating to the Head Start program. The file room was constantly overflowing, and employees were always on the lookout for additional storage space.
• Missing files. Inconsistent labeling, the lack of a file index, ineffective check-in/check-out procedures and uncontrolled access to the filing room led to a large number of lost and misplaced files, as well as concerns over information security.
• Decreased productivity. Staff members spent many hours storing, retrieving and searching for documents. Because records could not leave the file room, employees needed to photocopy any document they wished to review at their desks, consuming even more time and paper.

“We were all tired of running around to the various monitoring units looking for documents that were stored all over the place,” explains Lee. “Our old way of doing things made it difficult to get a comprehensive view of the program, ensure compliance with county requirements and guarantee document security.”

Giving Head Start a Leg Up

Laserfiche has helped LACOE’s Head Start-State Preschool program improve efficiency by digitizing student documentation. Using Laserfiche, the Head Start program now scans all paper documents and stores them, along with electronic content, in a central, secure Laserfiche repository.

According to Lee, the specific benefits Head Start has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche content management include:

1. Centralized, secure records management. Today, all records and content from the agency’s three monitoring units are stored electronically in the Laserfiche repository. With a single click, authorized employees can easily access all of the information they need from PRS, IEA and FOS to gain a complete, 360 degree view of the agency’s operations.
2. Storage savings. Without the need to save thousands of paper records, LACOE has decreased the size of its filing room so that it has more room for what really matters: better serving its students and their families. The old filing room now serves as a large conference room that can comfortably accommodate a greater number of attendees.
3. Fewer missing files. Laserfiche has eliminated many of the causes that led to lost or missing files, including inconsistent file naming, ineffective check-in/check-out procedures and uncontrolled access to the filing room. Drop-down lists ensure standardized file names, Audit Trail functionality enables LACOE employees to ensure that files have been scanned into the system and tracks who has worked with particular documents, and Laserfiche security limits access to authorized users.
4. More efficient employees. With the help of ECS Imaging, the agency’s Laserfiche reseller, LACOE employees use copiers to scan batch jobs into the system, where Quick Fields automatically indexes and files them into the appropriate Laserfiche folders. This has enabled easy scanning and instant search and retrieval from the comfort of each employee’s desk, saving time and effort.

“We thought we were just getting a repository to hold our electronic files, but Laserfiche is so much more,” says Lee. “Laserfiche content management is helping our whole agency become more organized and efficient. You will be amazed at what it can do for you!”

The way W. Alondo McClees, Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Systems Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of Revenue, explains it, he and his colleagues were just “filling a need” when he and users from three other Virginia municipalities (Fredericksburg, Hanover and Charlottesville) first initiated a statewide Laserfiche user group for their Commissioner of Revenue offices at a 2007 regional conference.

“After our initial meeting near Richmond, there were a few of us on the same page—like Bev Rosato [from Frederick County] and Amy Johnson [from Hanover],” McClees says. “It’s like that line in ‘Robots’: ‘See a need, fill a need’: ‘You’re using Laserfiche? We are too! Let’s try to get together,’” he recalls.

Laserfiche reseller Unity Business Systems (UBS) saw the value of establishing user groups throughout its service areas, and was soon helping with invite lists, as well as hosting quarterly conference calls between the user group leaders. “The calls let us provide updates on the happenings in our own user groups as well as feedback to UBS on what current and potential users of Laserfiche think about the product and its modules,” says McClees. “The user groups themselves give our reseller the opportunity to ask candid questions and get honest feedback from users who use the product in an everyday, real-world setting. We’ve been able to give immediate and direct feedback to both Laserfiche and UBS about proposed ideas, events and the software itself. This is something that any organization would be hard-pressed to acquire through an e-mail or phone call. It’s just a great platform to share ideas.”

Sharing great ideas, of course, is ultimately what user groups are all about—which has proven even more valuable to the Laserfiche-curious. “We’ve been able to include offices that are not using Laserfiche, but wanted to know more about its true impact in a real-world setting,” says McClees. “We get people asking for references because they hear about the user group.” He remembers a recent call from the Virginia Port Authority. “They asked us a lot about Laserfiche and how we’d been using it,” McClees remembers. He must have left a good impression; the Virginia Port Authority just last week announced its decision to choose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management system over 27 other vendors.

“What started out as a user group for a small niche of Virginia municipalities has grown to include every industry: medical, financial, legal, clerical, religious and others,” he says. “We’re not only seeing attendance from people who already have Laserfiche, but also from people who are curious about the software or who are getting ready to implement it and want to know what to expect.”

Norfolk itself, ironically enough, finds itself among the latter as it prepares to upgrade to Records Management Edition (RME) and version 8.1 this month.

“Seeing other folks using RME has helped us figure out what we need to do before it even gets here,” McClees says. “One thing we learned is that we don’t have to redo our folder structure—we can use shortcuts and still have people find documents. So it’s the best of both worlds: business as usual, but with that solid, secure records management.”

“Every time we see a demo, everything seems that much more accessible—it takes the fear out of it, because it’s not that different from what we’re already doing,” he adds.

But the value to the Laserfiche community as a whole, McClees says, is unique and beyond compare. “Users and organizations face two challenges when budgets are tight and people don’t have a lot of time to research new products,” he observes. “First, they’re jaded by bad experiences with other software, so they might miss out on the message of a product that could truly fit their needs. Secondly, there’s usually a poor network of support within and between organizations that are using similar products.”

With revenues falling short, conferences and training can be cut from a budget. Set against this backdrop, McClees notes, the Virginia user group phenomena becomes even more necessary and relevant to success stories, beginning with individuals, spreading to the group and then back to the organizations they serve.

“I can’t think of another software product that has a community attached to it. There are many enterprise-level products that have user groups, but they don’t seem to have a community,” McClees says. “When I talk to people at a Laserfiche user group, I’m talking to my friends. We all care about how each other’s organizations are succeeding. It’s more than people getting together talking about software. When people see what we are doing, they want to be a part of it.”

And perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the Virginia user groups and Hampton Roads in particular, is how much the user groups have become part of the greater Laserfiche culture. “We continue to share ideas such as partnering with Laserfiche to help create user group logos, acquire space on the Laserfiche forums area of the Support site, and update the entire Laserfiche community on our progress through the use of Luminary blog posts,” McClees says. “We also have a Hampton Roads User Group Google Site for the purpose of disseminating documents, updating our users on our upcoming events and activities, and to advertise what we do—without clogging e-mail boxes.”

But for McClees, Laserfiche’s true value comes not just from its community, but from its ease of support: “We’re in an industry with a steadily decreasing workforce. Government IT people are retiring and they’re not immediately being replaced due to budgetary constraints. So it’s really important that we don’t have to spend 50% of our time looking over our shoulders at an application. Being able to quickly go into the administration console to do auditing is a Laserfiche tool I really appreciate. The security is robust and important—for example, I lock down people’s ability to e-mail records that are restricted by Virginia code.

“I look at Laserfiche like it’s just one less thing I have to worry about, and that’s critical to me.”

Alex Wilson, PDP program director at Laserfiche, said, “With Infolinx as a Laserfiche PDP member, we can now integrate barcode- and RFID-tagged physical records into our premiere records management solution. This is of great value.”

Infolinx Managing Director Tim Butler said, “We’re extremely pleased to join Laserfiche. Our combined longevity, reputations and industry expertise hold the promise of providing for our clients a truly first-class enterprise records management solution.”

Having provided records management consultation and software services since 1987, Infolinx has extensive experience partnering with various solutions providers to implement strategic and scalable records management applications.

Infolinx System Solutions is a leading provider of enterprise physical records management software, professional business services and information management consulting products to a broad range of commercial and government clients worldwide. Infolinx solutions and services manage critical business documents from point of creation through final disposition, offering customers reduced risk and improved operational efficiencies with a verifiable return on investment. Infolinx maintains clients within all major business segments and the public sector. Visit the Infolinx website for additional information.

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche®creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state, and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—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 fosters active collaboration among clients, resellers and third-party software developers through our Professional Developer Partnership™ program. On the Laserfiche Marketplace, you’ll find detailed descriptions of the integrations, configurations, plug-ins and Web tools created by our PDP members.

Laserfiche is a registered trademark of Compulink Management Center, Inc.

“Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) reduces costs, improves accountability and enhances security,” said Margaret Anderson, Certified Records Manager for Collin County, Texas.

Laserfiche transparent records management enables records managers to manage multiple software applications, multiple departments’ information requirements and multiple records series and retention schedules without raising costs or disrupting everyday work processes.

Laserfiche Senior Vice President Chris Wacker added, “Laserfiche RME improves adherence to a records management plan with the functionality users appreciate, uniting document management and DoD 5015.2-certified records management in a single platform.”

Collin County’s Anderson will be presenting a session titled, “Implementing an Electronic Document & Records Management Project” on Friday, October 16, to help participants assess the document management needs of their organizations and teach best practice tips for simplifying records management implementations. She will also outline the critical steps for planning the implementation and integration of an electronic records system.

“My goal is to highlight not only the importance of planning and project management, the involvement of customer departments and how people are impacted by new technology, but also to share some of the lessons learned over the last three years,” said Anderson.

For more information, please go to: http://www.laserfiche.com/landing/ARMA2009.html.

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche® creates simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 27,000 organizations worldwide—including government agencies, healthcare organizations, and Fortune 1000 companies—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 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.

Not that she wants to reinvent the wheel. “The Medical School has been collecting student and resident records for many years,” she says, “and has developed a workable filing method. Rather than change something that works well for them, I created the Laserfiche system to follow their method.”

The structure mirrors the filing hierarchy and classification codes that were already in place, so that staff can easily find information.

“At first employees were resistant to change,” says Baccardax, “and could not see the value of having scanned documents. But when they realized the Laserfiche serves as a backup should documents be destroyed, they no longer worried about losing paper documents. Once employees saw how easy Laserfiche was to use and that it could be tailored to reflect their workable filing system, the word spread to other employees. Now new departments are taking interest in getting their documents scanned.”

Baccardax has paid attention to developing best practices as well, right down to scanning methods. She experimented with different colored paper and ink to clearly demonstrate the difference in clarity to users and help them develop good scanning techniques. She also determined what would be sacrificed in speed and storage space when scanning in color. The school found that black-and-white scanning was clearer and faster and, because the school pays for nightly backup and color files take up more disk space, much more cost-effective.

Laserfiche gives staff speedy access to records, which comes in handy when, for example, an MD applies for a job in a hospital setting and the school needs to verify her records. “Before we used Laserfiche it could take a lot of time to fill verification requests,” Baccardax recalls. We would have to find the material in the file folder or retrieve it from off-site storage. With Laserfiche, the employee can quickly find the student or resident records to fill the hospital’s request. We scan the verification information so it can be used again for future requests.”

Using Laserfiche has helped the school clarify just which information is vital and who is responsible for it. “As a result,” notes Baccardax, “the departments were able to clear a great number of paper documents, which made their filing much more manageable and freed up a lot of storage space.

“For new employees,” she continues, “it clarified the role each employee had with respect to information gathering. It also opened the communication lines among departments sharing information by addressing the grey areas concerning who is responsible for what information. It elucidates where the information stopped and started between departments. And employees became more aware of the amount of information that an organization actually obtains during the course of the day.”

The school also takes inventory of its records to see which ones are crucial. Baccardax notes, “After careful review with record inventory, we realized that a small percentage of information is actually vital. While record inventory may seem like a time consuming task, it is actually a time saver because it reduces the need to scan redundant information.”

Laserfiche was particularly useful for the school when the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection of Privacy Act. (FOIPOP) was extended to universities in Nova Scotia. Says Baccardax, “Certain types of information could not be shared unless approved by an authorized person. Laserfiche enables you to set the access rights so that information is available only to authorized staff. In addition, the Laserfiche redaction option serves as a useful tool to black out any information that cannot be shared with unauthorized personnel.”

Baccardax notes the ease with which she compiles the information she needs. She has set up a search function, for example, to help her record the number of pages the school has scanned in for the month. She can import it into an Excel spreadsheet and run reports to calculate the numbers.

Future plans include moving to a Web-based system, to get each department scanning in its own records and easing the workload on current scanning staff. “First, we must have the policies and procedures in place for each department. Upon departmental approval, the plan is to select and train an employee who can act as custodian of the departmental information. Once training is completed, our next phase will be to have each department to scan its own documents. Our scanner will then have more time to complete archival records and rush jobs.”

When asked what tips she’d give to other universities, Baccardax replies, “Educate, educate, educate. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of educating the employee about how to make the best use of paper and electronic documents, so they can achieve good quality images in a timely matter. Removal of staples, paper clips, tapes, consciousness of types of color pens and markers being used, color or photo copy papers—all play a role in the quality and speed of scanning.

“Get approval and commitment from higher level before proceeding with records management,” she adds. “Upon approval, create a Records Management Committee to include one person from each of the appointed departments, an archivist, and a lawyer. Each will offer insights that will enhance the Laserfiche system.”

So when City Clerk Diane Hermann-Brown says staying on top of Sun Prairie’s mounting paperwork was a city-wide problem, she literally means city-wide. “With all of our various departments that are off-site, it wasn’t just an issue of the time involved to retrieve the documents, but the time and resources involved in sending a clear, clean copy to the requesting party,” she says. “From the start our vision was to have a records management system where people could search, retrieve and print their own copies without ever leaving their work station.”

Hermann-Brown was inspired by a trip to an International Institute of Municipal Clerks conference—“that triggered the spark,” she says—to start investigating digital records management systems. After three years of requests, funding was approved in 2005. In early 2006, Laserfiche was chosen after reseller Cities Digital, Inc., outlined a three-phase implementation that first addressed simple search and retrieval needs.

The immediate goal, says Cities Digital’s Jessica Welsch, was to get the City Clerk’s, City Administrator’s and City Attorney’s offices, as well as the Planning and Finance departments, up and running with Laserfiche. At the same time, Cities Digital worked with city staff to implement best practices and efficiency-building techniques into their Laserfiche use. “We knew we were asking people to let go of their paper and work a little differently than they were used to,” says Welsch. “It’s easy for us to tell them their jobs were going to get easier, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t creating any new work for them by asking them to learn the software.”

From Hermann-Brown’s vantage point, the city’s new Laserfiche system had to meet three main goals:

1. Automate document management while maintaining a system of records management.
2. Meet compliance requirements regarding retention schedules with state auditors and regulators.
3. Scale to meet both the city’s growing number of users and extended uses of Laserfiche’s capabilities.

The first point presented an initial challenge: How to standardize the file folder structure and naming convention that would satisfy all the records requests that would come in through the Clerk’s Office? Hermann-Brown spent a lot of time meeting with department heads, then talking to staff that would be using the system. Next, a test group of users reviewed the various naming conventions that were used by the departments. “We had a lot of boxes,” Hermann-Brown laughs.

A consensus was going to be hard to come by, so Hermann-Brown says she put her foot down and a small group of Department Heads made the final decision on the naming conventions. The naming conventions would not only standardize records, but word processing documents as well, which, with so many different departments used to doing things their own way for so long, created resistance. “Sometimes you have to just make a decision which is in the best interest of all departments,” she says. “People had to change, but it wound up making things easier for them. Now that they’re using it, they see how it makes sense, because they can find things on their own—they don’t have to call up people in other departments when they’re searching for documents. In the end, it saves them a lot of time.” Establishing central control went a long way to enabling more productive departmental flexibility, she adds.

This was especially beneficial to the Finance Department. In fact, owing to the range of documents the department scanned (receipts, bills, check stubs), the standardized naming convention and document types enabled the advanced capture capabilities of Quick Fields to automate much of the hand-keying and filing that staff used to labor over. Now, finance staff prints all of its reports from its General Ledger to Laserfiche and scans all of their Accounts Payable documents, while staff from other departments can retrieve their own past invoices, payment checks and other documents, instead of requesting them from Finance staff.

Just in the Finance Department alone, six three-drawer filling cabinets were sent packing, which freed up office space for additional personnel, which the department was able to hire, thanks to the savings from more efficient use of work hours. Now, finance staff can access vendor invoices immediately. It’s a vast improvement over a process that used to involve manual retrieval of records kept in a dark, disorganized basement.

City Auditors likewise have seen the added value of immediate and searchable access to documents and supporting paperwork. Auditors had to be sure the new software would integrate securely with their growing applications (they are currently in the middle of a MUNIS deployment). “Before any implementation of software in the Finance Department, we had to get it approved by our Auditors,” explains Jan Thomas, Deputy City Treasurer. Cities Digital had extensive experience with successful Laserfiche integrations, and after deployment, a backlog conversion added Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivables documents, banking statements, and financial records dating back to 2005 into Laserfiche.

The City’s 2007 audit was the first to use Laserfiche. “Oh did the auditors love it! Because we’d been scanning in our information from day one, we were able to audit our AP, AR, banking statements and financial records right from Laserfiche,” says Thomas.

The second phase of the city-wide deployment was to implement Agenda Manager in the Clerk’s, Planning and Finance departments to automate and simplify the multi-departmental, often multi-headache-inducing management of weekly and monthly meetings. Welsch and her Cities Digital team worked with the City to create role-based training documents that made it easy to get users performing their functions in Agenda Manager’s powerful interdepartmental workflow and agenda preparation and publishing tools.

“Agendas are very time-consuming, especially when you have four levels of approval like we do,” Hermann-Brown says. “We have ‘Agenda Fridays’ and we used to have to try to track people down on Friday afternoon to approve items and make changes. Now an administrator can be in a meeting, get an e-mail notification and send comments via e-mail to the individual preparing the agenda. Especially in a municipality our size, with so many layers of approval, it really saves a lot of time and effort not having to walk these big packets of paper around trying to find people.”

Hermann-Brown had a chance to preview the upcoming release of Agenda Manager 8 at this year’s IIMC conference. “It’s more user friendly and has more helpful features and processing options, which will make it a lot more advantageous and efficient for our users,” she says, referring to, among other new features, Agenda Manager 8’s new in-place document editing and enhanced notification capabilities. “It’s good to see that Laserfiche is still evolving Agenda Manager to meet the changing job and changing job requirements of our users.”

Hermann-Brown is cautious but optimistic about the coming year. “How are we going to respond to the needs of staff and public when it’s hard to convince the city council to spend money on technology when budget funding will be very challenging—even when what’s needed to improve service might cost the taxpayers some money?” she asks. “Residents have higher expectations for a responsive government then they did 10 years ago, but they also do not want to see spending increased.”

With Laserfiche, she feels her local government is responding to the residents needs efficiently, as well as being financially accountable. And thanks to Laserfiche, everyone’s needs are being met.

As Roz Vinson, Police Records and Information Manager puts it, “I’m short 10 bodies – that’s where we are right now. Where can I work smarter? If we only have to touch something once, that’s progress.”

Tunnel: Vision.

Laserfiche helped Riverside PD escape "The Tunnel"

Before, however, “progress” just meant that you didn’t have to use a flashlight to find an old police report. The main Records Bureau housed 20 file cabinets while older reports were sent to what Vinson calls the “tunnel.” Boxes were literally stored in a locked tunnel where Records Specialists – flashlight in hand – searched for reports. “It became a running joke that people would leave a trail of bread crumbs for co-workers to find them if they didn’t return within a few hours.”
Complicating the storage and retrieval challenges were the security and retention requirements for the constant influx of paperwork:

• More than 100,000 pages accumulate each year due to high volume and long retention.
• Every day, nearly 300 new reports are filed.
• Homicide records are never destroyed. Other felonies have a 10-year retention; California’s three-strikes law mandates permanent retention for related records.
• Compliance with transparency demands of Freedom of Information Act, the California Public Records Act and court orders; Bureau staff must verify each requestor’s right to know before releasing sensitive documents.

Captain Blakely faced his own challenge. “We simply couldn’t afford to have officers off the streets long enough to pull together all of the details they might need,” he says. The push for electronic document management started in the mid-1990s with senior police officials who were very pro-technology.

In 1996, Riverside successfully appealed to the Federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services’ Making Officer Redeployment Effective (COPS MORE) program for funding. (If it sounds familiar, it is: last March the U.S. Department of Justice announced $1 billion of the Obama administration’s ARRA’s funds would be available for new COPS funding as well). Blakely put a do-more-with-less twist on it: officers would spend more time on the streets and less time waiting for records.

But before deploying the new system, Vinson worked for directly with Laserfiche developers to analyze key business processes.

Vinson insisted on two things before going live: an integration with Riverside’s CAD system to initiate creating reports in Laserfiche, and an auto-populater program that would automate scanning in supplemental reports. Vinson explains: “The CAD call’s the first source of information – the who, what, why and where. The dispatcher is the only one that ever has to enter that information.” The integrated solution creates an archival TIFF image of the CAD history, auto-populates index information from the CAD system and places it in the Laserfiche folder. That folder then becomes the primary holder of case information, including supplemental reports, toxicology reports, photo sheets, CLETS teletypes and more. “Imagine a homicide report with 60 documents, and every single one requiring someone to type in the same information,” she says. “That integration alone has literally saved me millions of keystrokes.”

Records Bureau staffers were the first authorized users to begin using Laserfiche in 2000. Besides saving the aforementioned millions of keystrokes, Vinson says they regained countless hours formerly used making copies of records for the Legal Department, the District Attorney and other law enforcement agencies.

It took a year of proven use before detectives were given access in 2001. “You just can’t afford to have computer programs down if you are a detective working a case,” Vinson explains. Since then, she says, “We’ve slowly increased the number of users, making sure we did sufficient training to prevent errors.” By 2006, that number was 250. “Now we have over 500 users,” she says, adding that there are now six unique law enforcement repositories–internal affairs, permits and subpoenas, an audio repository, the master reports repository, personnel and training, and special investigations.”

Along with expanded use came he need for expanded functionality. A 2003 integration stores digital audio recordings of interactions between police and the public in Laserfiche the same way the CAD system works. She’s starting to add video files, which the department’s current upgrade to Laserfiche 8 and Workflow 8 will facilitate, allowing workflow rules to be established to route all related documents to single files. “The vision is to have everything in one place,” she says. “We’re going to be able to merge audios and visuals. Workflow’s going be a big part of my life.”

An Evolving Vision of Innovation in Automation

Vinson is encouraged by the watermarking capabilities of Laserfiche 8 and Web Access 8 to uphold stringent security protocols. “Having the watermark embedded in the document is huge for me,” she says. “When I export [a document] to the DA, I can track back to where it came from with Audit Trail.”

Now every Records Bureau workstation is equipped with high speed scanners. “They’re part of the way we do business,” says Vinson. “We also have front counter scanners where staff can immediately scan driver’s licenses and any other documentation needed for either filing a report, releasing a vehicle, or obtaining a legal copy of a police report.”

Staff used to have to walk back to make a black and white copy and attach the copy to their documents for scanning by other staff members. “Now,” says Vinson, “the employee doesn’t leave a citizen at the counter unattended – which is back to that desire to only handle the paper once!” Riverside citizens can report a non-emergency crimes on-line, and since launching in 2008, the system has taken in 1600 reports. “This is the bulk of the types we take in in Records,” Vinson explains. It’s even more efficient now that it’s been integrated with Laserfiche. When the supervisor approves the non-emergency report, it automatically generates a TIFF image that Import Agent inputs to the Laserfiche case file “exactly like our CAD system does,” says Vinson. “That’s paperwork we aren’t going to have scan to process. We’re not even going to touch it.” She estimates this saves her staff the time it used to take to scan 35 reports a week. “I’m always looking for ways to enhance what I’ve got now,” Vinson says. “It’s inherent in my operation.” For 2010, that will mean integrating Laserfiche with CrimeView, where, as Vinson puts it, officers will “Click on a map, click on a dot, and pull up police reports.”

Blakely says it’s this kind of automation that ultimately better informs – and protects – officers in the field. “Thanks to our document management project, the reports are available – and they do read them. Knowing the full details, including descriptions of suspects, means that they are going to be more prepared and, therefore, safer.”

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

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

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

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

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

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

• Learn more about how enterprise content management drives a dynamic user experience at our new Webinar, “Collaborative Case Management for Government = ECM + BPM.” Reserve your seat here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.

“Laserfiche came into the county in 1995 as a single-user application to support my IT department,” Sobie recalls. Other departments were hesitant to see the value of scanning, but by 1997 Sobie was able to implement document imaging in the Construction Code Department to establish a digital archive of scanned building permits. By 2000, Sobie found what he needed: an internal Laserfiche champion in Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Sauter.

Sauter had a history of advocating increased communications between his office and the courts, and Sobie saw where Laserfiche could do just that. Sobie had already stepped up his own use of Laserfiche by having his administrative assistant scan all incoming mail for him to view online. The viability of this approach to working with documents led to a conversation with Sauter about going digital. “I saw it as more than a way to archive closed case files,” Sobie says. “I thought we could use it for active case files and sharing documents both inter- and intra-agency.”

Establishing a Laserfiche Expert

Sauter was interested – so much so that he wanted to get several scanners, presumably for several employees. But where Sauter had a use for Laserfiche, Sobie had a vision: “I advocated against multiple scanners on the grounds that we could develop an ‘expert’ within his office who would fully learn and understand how Laserfiche could benefit the office, today, and into the future.” Additionally, Sobie recognized that over time, less paper would be produced or submitted to Sauter’s office, thus reducing the need for scanning equipment. Sobie diplomatically met with concerned staffers to assure them this would be the most effective – and sustainable – route to go. “Eventually, Jeff agreed and we implemented a single scanner and began developing the expertise of an administrative staff member, Kimberly Gleason, who presently works in the PA’s office.”

In subsequent meetings with Sauter’s staff, the idea came up to view documents live in the courtrooms, which brought with it a need for wireless network access and laptops.

Sobie extended Laserfiche in the PA’s Office and brought it on-line with five laptops with wireless connections for about $24,000 – but has gotten quite an ROI in return.

“The $24,000 we spent to bring the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office on-line represents the costs to expand the system into the office. Earlier costs were not spread between any offices – just assigned to my IT department. However, the ROI with or without spreading these other costs has been significant,” Sobie says.

• Nine lateral filing cabinets of paper were reduced to one, which holds archived evidence on CDs.
• Office supply costs were cut by 34% - an annual savings of over $35,000.
• The office eliminated a part-time legal assistant position, saving $10,000 annually.
• The office also eliminated a budget request for an additional legal secretary, a savings of $50,000 annually.

The total savings? Over $95,000 annually in staffing and supply costs.

Archiving cases was one thing; relying on laptops for both preparation and court appearances was another. “Jeff experienced some resistance but he methodically promoted this new approach. On occasion, Sobie recalls, Sauter used the phrase, “There will be no old dogs here,” meaning, “Change your attitude and practices or move on.”

“Not everyone learns the same or at the same pace,” Sobie says. “This continues to be a challenge, but it’s unrelated to the easy-to-use Laserfiche interface.”

Working with the Lansing-based Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan (PAAM), Sobie helped Sauter create a system to link cases with PAAM’s online case-tracking systems. Attorney’s progress notes would be saved in the case-tracking system; legal assistants would scan and save any new documents in Laserfiche while linked to the case-tracking record and easily accessed through a keystroke.

After years of success, the more complicated a case becomes, the more Laserfiche makes sense to find, review and distribute documents. One of the early problems encountered after building out the wireless network was a weak connection causing attorneys to temporarily disconnect from the network while working in the court’s law library. The cause, ironically enough: the density of the paper-based books and documents stored in the room.

Sauter has seen many benefits since transforming how case files are established and maintained in his office. One noteworthy benefit is that discovery is now sent so swiftly, using Laserfiche and e-mail, defense attorneys often receive it before they get the actual notice of appointment from the court. In fact, Sauter has seen so many benefits from Laserfiche that he spends time speaking at industry conferences about paperless file management – and even hosts site visits from other prosecutors interested in eliminating their paper case files.

Next, Sobie plans to implement Laserfiche Records Management Edition, and possibly Workflow, to automate, manage and move documents through the County while establishing document retention policies. He’s also working to establish Laserfiche redundancy. “I believe mirroring the Laserfiche environment will significantly improve the process of recovering a document (or folder) that was inadvertently deleted,” he says. “Of course, the new Recycle Bin feature [of Laserfiche 8] helps to mitigate this problem but I also want maximum availability of documents stored in Laserfiche.”

Sobie loves the efficiency Laserfiche brings Eaton County, but when asked his three favorite things about Laserfiche, he doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“First, document and information sharing in a campus-style environment,” he says. “Second, the stability of the core Laserfiche application. And finally, the continuous product development.”

But the rapid growth of its renewable energy division in the last few years led to challenges managing its documents and records. “With each new energy project, we were increasing the number of relationships with private land owners, commercial suppliers, and government agencies,” explains Sean Malowney, a Senior Business Systems Analyst at the company. “This translated into a growing volume of invoices and contracts.”

Malowney led the company’s search for a robust but equally secure document and records management solution, one that would fulfill—indeed, reconcile—the company’s need for central, secured control over its records and documents, but still allow staff and administrators the local flexibility to be able to manage, automate and use them in their processes. The system would have to scan and store information according to the specific retention schedules and regulatory requirements endemic to an energy company. But to be used efficiently, it would also have to align with existing with line-of-business applications to complement how staff were already working. Malowney made a list of system requirements: work seamlessly with terminal services, offer Web-based client access, allow for writing custom workflow activities, accommodate an extensible SQL database and integrate with Microsoft® Windows® Active Directory security.

Malowney and his team chose Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) for its transparent, DoD 5015.2-certified records management platform, as well as Laserfiche Workflow for its .NET 3.0 framework, one that would enable seamless integration with the company’s existing line-of-business applications. “The DoD 5015.2 certification really underscored the records management credentials of the product,” says Malowney. “We felt confident that we would not encounter limitations in the software after implementation.” Plus, he adds, “Laserfiche not only satisfied our requirements, but was priced at a significant discount to the other solutions we looked at.”

Implementation capitalized on the automated capture capabilities of the Laserfiche Quick Fields module for scanning invoices. “Our deployment strategy has been to convert the most structured departments, like Accounts Payable, first, going for quick wins with extremely high ROI,” Malowney explains. Now, when new invoices enter the system, e-mail notifications are automatically sent to the responsible parties for review. These notifications contain a summary of the metadata and a link back to the document via the Laserfiche Web Access module for approval.

Likewise, automating the life cycle of contracts is now both more transparent and secure. “We’re not limited to filing legal documents just alphabetically anymore,” Malowney explains. “We can use dozens of metadata fields, which allows grouping by counterparty, contract type, effective date, status, and so on, depending on who and how the information needs to be retrieved and used.” Standard SQL server reporting generates a monthly “contracts calendar” highlighting agreements that are about to expire. Additionally, Laserfiche’s integration with Active Directory enables the company’s helpdesk to make consistent—and precise—security decisions using the same tools that manage the rest of the organization.

“We seem to come up with new and clever uses for the software all the time,” says Malowney. “Now we have five departments managing records in Laserfiche, and this has made information much more accessible within the organization.”

Now Malowney is in the process of automating Iberdrola Renewables’ records management using Laserfiche RME’s full capabilities, with plans to bring the company’s audited systems into Laserfiche for regulatory compliance by year’s end. As the company’s website puts it, “Structure yields flexibility,” and Laserfiche RME has given Iberdrola Renewables a powerful balance of both.

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

Repositories and licenses cost money. So does scanning. How can we best use our existing resources?

Change your repository settings!

Changing your repository options, specifically the ‘logout automatically’ option, will prevent your users from becoming license hogs. That person who logs in and then leaves for lunch will be logged off automatically, freeing up a license for another user.

In Hampton, we’ve adopted a 1:5 user license ratio for both FX and RX licenses. Due to the fact that licenses are concurrent, we believe that it’s reasonable to expect that any user, particularly retrieve or read-only users, will access Laserfiche, find what they need and then exit the system.

What kind of scanning devices do you have available?

While scanners are “the” option when it comes to high quantity document capture, almost all types of copy machines have scanning capability and can easily scan to e-mail. Ask your IT Department or manufacturer representative to set the image to either tiff or pdf and add all users to the email setting.

Even if all of your office staff are not Laserfiche users, being able to copy/scan to e-mail prevents the proliferation of paper, which could be another significant cost savings for you.

Do all of your users know, understand and use Laserfiche’s e-mail utility?

This again will decrease the proliferation of paper in your office and to your clients or the public.

Are you fully utilizing your LSAP?

Your time is valuable to your employer and we all pay for software support. When you have questions, contact your reseller and employ their assistance with answers and best practices. You don’t have to figure it out on your own.

What’s in Laserfiche?

If Laserfiche has become the new dumping ground (in addition to your network, pc’s, and ancillary devices…) then your data – and your server – could use some basic management.

1. Purge your data; set up your Records Management Edition if you have it – practice good records management!
2. Check your folder structure.
3. Manage your volumes.
4. Use your Column Display wisely.

See Laserfiche’s “Performance Tuning for Laserfiche Systems” (available on the Support Site) for more information.

Please share your efficiencies! We all need insightful tips and tricks to maximize our resources.

The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.

In 1998, the State of Arizona had the forward-thinking idea to get all its counties on the same page with digital records management by creating the position of Records Manager. The first holder of this title in Mohave County was Steve Beller from the County Recorder’s office, who began the search for scanning software to contend with the mountain of paper the county had generated throughout the years.

Chuck Chlarson has served as Mohave County Records Manager since January 2005.

Beller chose Laserfiche for its flexibility and expandability, instead of the standard system the state had mandated for use in all the state’s courts. “Steve saw in Laserfiche all that he thought we needed or could grow into,” Chlarson recalls. “It was a case of ‘buy what you need now and expand when the need arises.’”

But though Beller had succeeded in finding Laserfiche, he hadn’t yet found a reseller that could offer the technical guidance to help the county follow through on its potential. It wasn’t until Beller’s successor Gordon Buchanan became Records Manager that Mohave County began its vital relationship with Laserfiche reseller DocUnited. Under the mentorship of “the girls from DocUnited,” as Chlarson affectionately terms co-owners Marta Hortel and Susan Mosby, the software was installed and plans for county-wide implementation were laid out.

Buchanan visited all the departments of the County to inform them of the install and of the need to begin scanning their permanent documents into the Laserfiche system. But the rest of the county wasn’t as ready to shift their paper filing paradigm to the scanner just yet, and Buchanan ran into resistance in virtually every department. “Gordon approached the departments with a new concept,” Chlarson says. “And at that point, it was just too new.”

By the time Buchanan retired in 2005 and Chlarson became Records Manager, Mohave County had just four scanning stations and seven viewing licenses.

Building from this small but vital start, Chlarson eventually succeeded in bringing Laserfiche to all the county’s departments (except its courts, which were still bound by state law to use its legacy system). “As the third person in the position, I had the value of learning from previous experiences—both good and bad,” he says. “It was a good jumping off point for me to get started dealing with the departments of the County. I was able to demonstrate scanning and how easy retrieval was with Laserfiche’s search functionality. Also, my boss, the Recorder, agreed to fund additional scanning stations and licenses, so we could start expanding our system.

“One of the advantages we found early in our relationship with Laserfiche and DocUnited was the ability to expand our system as needed,” Chlarson continues. “When new departments came on board, it was so simple to add additional scanning stations and more user licenses.”

Again, Chlarson points out how effective the support of “the girls from DocUnited” has been to the county’s success. “Marta and Susan were instrumental in the training and education program that we implemented after we added more users to our system. Their unwavering dedication and desire to drive the 200-plus miles up to Kingman [from Phoenix] was great. Frankly, we probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without them. They are everything a reseller is supposed to be!”

He also found that getting departments to actually buy in to the software itself by getting them fiscally invested in its upkeep ended up encouraging user buy in. “Two years ago, I required each Department pick up their fair share of the maintenance fees, which brought them more into the Laserfiche family,” Chlarson says. “Typically, the county’s budget process is well in advance of the fiscal year, and budgeting new items needs to be addressed very early in that process. Initially, we weren’t knowledgeable enough about this. Our boss, the Recorder, had been paying all the bills for Laserfiche, even as we added new scanners and users. In 2006, I finally got each department to pay their fair share of the bill, and now each is billed separately.”

The inter-departmental ownership encouraged broader use, and, of course, with more use comes more efficiency. Chlarson points to successful automations like the county HR department’s newly-termed records as well as the Medical Examiner’s shift to electronic recordkeeping. It wasn’t until last month’s elections, however, that the benefits of using Laserfiche became apparent. “Our real success was to scan and index all the 5”x8” paper voter registration forms so the Voter Registration Division could verify signatures from their desks rather than going to a storage room and pawing through years of forms hoping to get lucky. And with this last election period, it saved a tremendous amount of time for them.” He hesitates to limit discussion of the benefits realized to the bottom line on a balance sheet. “How do you put a dollar value on convenience? The time the Voter Registration folks saved in not having to finger through thousands of paper cards to just doing a name search on Laserfiche was immeasurable.”

Fueled by Mohave County’s steady but palpable success, Chlarson has become active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program, singing the praises of enterprise-wide electronic records management whenever he can, including at this year’s ARMA conference in Las Vegas.

“I’ve had the opportunity to testify to other counties and organizations about our experience with Laserfiche, and just how completely satisfied we were with the products,” he says. “As I talk with folks interested in scanning, the one thing most people see is the initial expense. I explain to them that all software has a pretty good price tag, but to look at what follow-up can they expect, and upgrades as they are fielded. I also stress the annual maintenance fees and what they include, at least for us.”

In the near future, Mohave County is planning an upgrade to Laserfiche 8.1. “Obviously, Records Management Edition (RME) will allow me to fix retention metadata directly to documents as they are scanned, and have schedules implanted to aid in the destruction of old material,” he offers. “We should be in great shape.”

But Chlarson is definitely looking forward to sharing his county’s success story in a presentation at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, taking place January 12-14 in Los Angeles, CA. “As you can tell, we are certainly pleased with Laserfiche, and not shy about telling people,” he laughs.

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”

Anderson found the ideal solution in Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME), which centralizes scanned paper and electronic records while automating records retention and destruction. “What I like about Laserfiche is that I can manage electronic documents, paper, microfilm and audio and video files enterprise-wide,” Anderson says.

Collin County’s journey to provide order to their paper-based legal system began with a two-year project in the district court clerk’s office, converting paper case files from 1846-2000 into archival images—a total of over ten million images.

Anderson then expanded the plan to manage archiving, retention and management of case files for the county court, integrating RME with the county’s CMS. RME provides back-end records retention for closed and inactive case files. “It’s very easy to use, and it helps us meet our goal of providing quality, cost-effective public service,” she notes.

Laserfiche also helps the district attorney’s office operate more efficiently. “We’ve scanned felony case files into Laserfiche, which has been great,” Anderson says. “Our old content manager didn’t have full-text search capability, and it didn’t manage records retention. With RME, it’s easy to manage retention periods, which can range from 25-50 years, and it’s simple to locate information.”

Anderson realized the value of the county’s Laserfiche system when a flood in May 2007 damaged nearly 1,000 boxes of records—many of them with no backup. “It’s clear how important Laserfiche is for business continuity,” she says. “Had those files been stored in Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have needed to worry when the flood waters started rising. People worry about computers crashing, but in reality, paper documents are much more likely to be destroyed than digital ones.”

Laserfiche also offers the flexibility Collin County needs to expand enterprise-wide—while still meeting each department’s unique needs. The county is implementing Laserfiche in the property tax department to digitally store copies of checks, stubs and letters received as part of the annual property tax receipting process. Planning for the next budget cycle includes integrating Laserfiche with SunGard® HTE in the auditor’s office to manage accounts payable documents. The development department also plans to integrate Laserfiche with its existing GIS application to manage septic system records. Eventually, most county records will be stored in Laserfiche and will be viewable over the Internet.

“I’ve been really pleased with the system,” Anderson says. “But what I’m most looking forward to is expanding our records retention plan to include electronic records—which will make us better prepared to comply with e-discovery orders.”

Anderson isn’t the only one who’s pleased. County staff have been so delighted that they’re spreading the word to other departments. “The response to Laserfiche has been so positive, that it’s been difficult to keep up with demand for new installations,” she says. “I’ve just had to start saying ‘No’ nicely—and tell them ‘You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.’”

“ARMA attendees are really serious about learning, so we scheduled our educational sessions to coincide with their breaks,” says Laserfiche Corporate Events Manager Tala Baltazar.

Laserfiche’s Dan O’Leary demonstrating the Laserfiche and SharePoint Integration to a packed house

At the Laserfiche booth, attendees got a chance to see the Laserfiche and SharePoint Integration first hand, experience demos of Laserfiche transparent records management tools and hear the success stories of Laserfiche users including the City of St. John, NB, Canada; the City of Sun Prairie, WI; St. Tammany Parish, LA; Eaton County, MI; the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority; and the City of Anaheim, CA.

And of course, thanks to the benefits of the Laserfiche community, seasoned users like Margaret Anderson of Collin County, TX, also spent time visiting with new users like first time attendee Kim Boehr of British Columbia’s Westbank First Nation.

Anderson, who was a conference speaker, explained how Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) provides the records management backbone for the county’s case management system, used by the District Clerk, District Attorney and County Court at Law Clerk’s offices. She also discussed how RME has been expanded to other county departments such as Human Resources and Public Works.

Laserfiche’s Christian Talavera with Laserfiche user and conference speaker Margaret Anderson of Collin County, TX

Anderson, a Certified Records Manager, has 20 years of experience in records and information management. She taught basic records management at Brookhaven College, is a past president of the ARMA Dallas Chapter, served as ISG Government Sector Manager, and was an ARMA Southwest Region coordinator. She also presented at the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference.

“There was a great deal of interest in how we are implementing our system,” says Anderson. “It’s critical that the users be part of the planning process. Many attendees expressed frustration at having to implement a system without being part of it.”

User Cynthia Knox of the City of San Marcos, TX, stops by the booth to say hello

But Anderson wasn’t the only user spreading the word about Laserfiche. Chuck Chlarson of Mohave County, AZ, one of Laserfiche’s most enthusiastic advocates, spent his time inviting ARMA attendees over to the Laserfiche booth. “I always have a great time at the ARMA conferences stumping for Laserfiche,” he says.

So, why was Chlarson so inspired? “The thing I stress about Laserfiche is the ability for a user to be able to talk one-on-one with the software developers about glitches or things we would like to have in the next edition,” he explains. “This is very impressive to folks I’ve talked with.”

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth. We’ll see you at ARMA 2009!

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.”

“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.

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.”

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.”

Still have questions? Read our user success stories to discover how Laserfiche helps a variety of organizations—including the City of Bryan, TX, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and the US Army Cargo Helicopters Project Management Office—streamline records management processes and cut overhead costs.

“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.”

Part of a multinational financial services firm, Fortis Guernsey formed when four separate institutions—the Private Bank, Trust and Corporate Services, Private Client Services (tax advisory) and Investment Management departments—all moved into a new office building. Christina assumed the responsibility of consolidating each institution’s paperwork into a unified, enterprise-wide system. There was a catch, however: not only did each department have its own well-established business processes, but government and industry regulations dictated that each department’s documents be kept out of the others’ view.

As Christina explains, maintaining the separation between the four institutions while deploying an enterprise solution was no easy feat. “We needed a system that could meet everyone’s needs without shaking up their existing ways of working,” she says.

Fortis Guernsey looked at five different solutions to this complex challenge, but one stood out immediately from the rest. “We could easily see how we would be able to connect our existing systems to Laserfiche,” Christina says. “It’s like a bottomless pit—by which I mean that you can keep on expanding it.” Laserfiche’s intuitive interface didn’t hurt, either. “It’s Windows®-based, so it’s very easy to use.”

In many cases, optimizing business processes means carefully persuading management to invest in technology. But at Fortis Guernsey, obtaining staff buy-in was as essential, if not more so, than convincing decision makers of Laserfiche’s potential. Says Christina, “We anticipated resistance, because everyone likes to have their own paper files in their hands. That’s why we went to each department, asking, ‘How would you set it up? How will you be searching for files?’ We wanted staff to know that this was their system, not something shoved down their throats.”

To satisfy these diverse departmental needs, Christina adopted a somewhat unusual filing structure. Instead of indexing documents in an extensive folder tree, Fortis Guernsey employs a more freeform, template-based organization scheme. As Christina explains, “We didn’t want to create hundreds and hundreds of folders, but we didn’t want to retrieve hundreds of documents at once, either. To maintain each department’s existing workflow, we created templates that would allow staff to find files the way they normally would. But rather than creating templates for each document type, we created them for each department, with a file structure as a second layer.”

Each department’s template contains a number of fields, such as client name, account number and document type, by which staff can search for what they need. Thanks to a strictly-defined labeling system, staff can also use keywords to narrow their searches. And while it may be slightly unorthodox, this approach has been very successful, given that staff can find documents using Laserfiche’s search capabilities much more quickly than they could by navigating a rigid folder structure. And it helps with compliance, too. “It’s important that trust company staff, for example, can’t view banking documents. Template-specific security ensures that different departments can’t view each other’s documents,” Christina says.

To further streamline each department’s workflow, Fortis Guernsey has configured its billing system to upload each day’s transactional information directly into Laserfiche, where it’s indexed by client number. In addition, the banking department has integrated its primary software with Laserfiche, so clients can view their account documents securely over the Web.

As impressive as these efficiency gains is the marked decrease in paper-related costs. In the last two and a half years, staff have scanned nearly eight million images into the Laserfiche repository. “We’ve created a separate scanning bureau,” she says, “but we still see a tremendous cost savings because of reduced filing labor and storage space costs.” And that’s not to mention the 80 percent reduction in paper consumption.

Alongside business process improvements and cost savings, Fortis Guernsey appreciates Laserfiche’s contribution to its disaster recovery plan. “We’re required to resume operations within 24 hours of a disaster,” Christina says. “When we did a simulated disaster recovery, our mirrored Laserfiche server was back up and running straight away, and everyone went to Laserfiche first to recover information. Were we to experience a real disaster, life would go on, and our clients would be none the wiser.”

Next on the slate for Christina: Refining the Laserfiche installations in the HR and Risk departments. She’ll have to create new templates and access rights for more sensitive documents, and to preserve document integrity, these departments will scan their own documents, rather than using the scanning bureau. But by following the same development model she used with other departments, she says, these expansions will go quite smoothly. “It’s very easy to plan for implementation, because Laserfiche is a very adaptable system,” she notes.

Indeed, Laserfiche’s flexibility proved its worth when it came time to import data from Fortis Guernsey’s existing DOS-based systems. Staff now access these four million electronic documents, dating back to 1979, from the same intuitive interface they use to view scanned paper documents.

In addition to bringing new departments on board, Christina is set to embark on a major journey: migrating documents to Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME). As an international corporation, Fortis is subject to myriad records management mandates, and the retention periods for the many kinds of records it handles are diverse. Notes Christina, “Trust company records are especially complicated, because trusts can last for hundreds of years—but you can’t keep every piece of paper.”

Addressing these records management challenges will mean modifying the Laserfiche repository’s template-based organization. Christina wants to ensure a smooth transition to RME, such that staff don’t realize that documents are moving into records folders. Because the entire Laserfiche platform is highly customizable, she feels certain that she’ll achieve this goal of transparent records management.

Future plans not withstanding, Fortis Guernsey staff enjoy the benefits that Laserfiche has brought every day. In fact, Laserfiche has become part of the training program for new employees. “When new staff come on board,” Christina says, “Laserfiche is part of their initiation. It’s nice to show them something that they can get into straight away, with no intimidation. Laserfiche has become everyone’s everyday tool—it’s been absolutely fantastic.”

Nick Van Valkenburgh, information management analyst for CHPMO, is charged with maintaining order amongst the CHPMO’s files. It’s not enough to simply archive these documents, however. The US Army must comply not only with National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) regulations, but also with guidelines issued by the Army Records and Information Management System (ARIMS). But Van Valkenburgh doesn’t play the part of the put-upon records manager, for he has a powerful tool in his arsenal: a Laserfiche® digital document management system.

CHPMO’s journey to digital document management began rather unusually, and had nothing to do with increasing efficiency, streamlining workflow or complying with NARA, ARIMS or any other acronymic regulations. As Van Valkenburgh recalls, “It was what I call a ‘drive-by tasking.’ My boss walked by my desk one day and said, ‘Nick, buy a computer and a scanner and get rid of that paper. The fire marshal just cited us for having our filing cabinets blocking the aisles.’”

That simple directive kick-started a much bigger project than anyone could have imagined. These code-violating cabinets contained almost four million pages, and, because the Army is a federal agency, it had to implement a system with Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification. In addition, NARA recommends Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2-certified solutions for all federal agencies.

“We looked at 40 systems initially,” Van Valkenburgh says, “but we whittled it down to 10 based on which systems had JITC and DoD certifications and met our basic infrastructure compatibility requirements.” Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) not only met those two requirements, but also had the sophistication and security features needed to manage the myriad records series in Van Valkenburgh’s division. “We don’t destroy some records related to an aircraft until ten years after it stops flying,” he says. “RME was ideally suited to handle that kind of long-term records management.”

As powerful as RME is, it was its ease of use that really won Van Valkenburgh over. JITC reports include a complexity index, a count of mouse clicks and pop-up screens required to perform a number of standard functions. Laserfiche had the lowest number of clicks and screens by far, so CHPMO ordered a five-week pilot program. Laserfiche’s ease of installation was equally impressive. Notes Van Valkenburgh, “It took only 30 minutes to install all the servers. We thought we had done something wrong, so we uninstalled it. The second time, it only took 20 minutes. Everything worked right out of the box. It was really amazing.”

During the pilot deployment, Van Valkenburgh saw the project grow in scope to include electronic records, as well as scanned paper records. This new undertaking added another wrinkle to the system requirements. Any system he implemented had to serve the needs of the entire enterprise, not just his project office. What began as a 400-user implementation instantly ballooned to a potential of 4,000.

Owing to its non-mainframe, SQL-based architecture, Laserfiche integrated easily into CHPMO’s network environment. And its open architecture meant it would scale easily to accommodate the tenfold increase in staff. The simplicity and strength of the core Laserfiche platform were very important, but so was its modular construction. “We needed an all-in-one solution,” Van Valkenburgh says, ”not a bunch of software systems mashed together. And we wanted the capability to add workflow and Web-based components, even though we couldn’t implement these right away.”

Gradually, staff are scanning in the contents of CHPMO’s 150 filing cabinets. Laserfiche’s flexible search capabilities have made indexing the four million pages easier than anticipated. “Given Laserfiche’s searching power, there was no need to create a complex folder structure,” Van Valkenburgh says. “We don’t have to navigate through a document tree to get what we need. That’s really helped us streamline records management.”

Van Valkenburgh has many insights to share following such an involved installation. First, he stresses the importance of thorough planning. “Preparation can, and should, take more time than scanning,” he says. Likewise, quality control is absolutely critical. “If you don’t have any quality control measures, your repository has no credibility. We tried bringing in some electronic documents from our existing system, but it turned out that the original files were corrupted before they were transferred. Obstacles like that really illustrate the need for quality control.”

Having received excellent technical support, both from Laserfiche and from CHPMO’s reseller, Van Valkenburgh also believes that support should be a major criterion when evaluating document management solutions. “You’re going to have a lifetime relationship with these folks,” he says, “so make sure that you look carefully at the level of support you’ll be getting.” Having spoken at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, Van Valkenburgh wholeheartedly recommends that Laserfiche users continue their education by attending. “It’s absolutely priceless,” he says.

Of course, Laserfiche isn’t the sole focus at CHPMO. As Van Valkenburgh puts it, “CHPMO’s top priority is supporting our troops.” Thus, he currently has few resources at his disposal for in-house efficiency upgrades. But that doesn’t mean he’s scrapped his plans for expanding the Laserfiche system. He looks forward to implementing Workflow™, as well as integrating Laserfiche with other line-of-business applications.

Despite some initial skepticism over adopting a digital business model, Van Valkenburgh has noticed his staff becoming increasingly appreciative of the benefits Laserfiche has brought. And the word is spreading—staff from other divisions are asking him how they can implement Laserfiche, too. “I’ll tell you this much,” he says. “No one who’s made the switch to Laserfiche has had any regrets.”