“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.

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.

Avante’s individual user connections include Laserfiche document management, Workflow, Scanning, Snapshot and E-Mail, and an intuitive pricing structure makes it simple and affordable to add new features and functionality to your Laserfiche system. For a percentage of the price of your user licenses, you can add Web Access or Audit Trail, or for a fixed price, you can add Quick Fields, Plus or fully integrated, DoD 5015.2-certified records management. And when your system grows large enough, it’s simple to upgrade to Rio enterprise content management.

If you’ve been thinking about expanding the capabilities of your Laserfiche system, Avante may be the right fit for you. We’ll be taking orders for upgrades from Team and United systems as soon as Avante is released; for more information about upgrading, please contact your reseller.

To learn more about system components, or for answers to frequently asked questions, please visit the Avante Web site.

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.’”

“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.

When creating a retention schedule in the Laserfiche Administration console, select the Alternate Instructions tab, where you can define an external event and an alternate retention schedule (the alternate retention schedule must already be created).

During a record’s life-cycle, if you specify that an alternate event has taken place, Laserfiche will use the alternate retention schedule for the record in question.

To specify that an alternate event has taken place, select a record folder in the Laserfiche Client, select the Records drop-down item in the menu bar, and select Record Management. In the Record Management dialog box, select the Alt. Retention node, then click Set Event. Define a date for the event. This will trigger the alternate retention schedule to take effect.

Note: Setting an alternate event date changes a record’s final disposition eligibility, but has no effect on a record’s cutoff eligibility. You can define an alternate event date before a record is cutoff or after.

This example points to the overall flexibility that RME provides when dealing with records that have complex life-cycles.

“The ECM industry has been deluged with complex and difficult-to-implement systems that have been cobbled together from many different products,” said Laserfiche CEO Nien-Ling Wacker. “The time is right for an innovative solution that is easy to purchase, deploy and administer. Rio transcends product boundaries to unite document management, business process management and transparent records management in a single enterprise solution.”

With Rio, organizations simply purchase named user licenses which provide a full range of ECM functionality, including workflow automation, Web-based document management, audit trail tracking, optional DoD 5015.2-certified records management and powerful capture tools that unify content located in disparate systems and formats. Licenses range from $700 to $100 per user, based on the quantity purchased.

Rio also includes an unlimited number of Laserfiche servers and repositories, which organizations can use to support back ups, failover clusters, testing environments and multiple locations. To expand their systems, organizations simply purchase additional licenses, which eliminates long requisition processes and makes budgeting for an enterprise deployment much easier.

“We chose Rio because it really made sense,” said Frank Hagy, CIO of the Florida League of Cities. “Because we have locations in different parts of the state, Rio will help us streamline administration, add additional functionality and reduce our annual support costs. It’s a refreshing way to think about ECM.”

Rio is built on a Microsoft platform and uses Microsoft-standard tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and the .NET framework, to simplify system administration. Laserfiche Workflow, built on the Windows Workflow Foundation, helps organizations move beyond simple document routing to automate everyday tasks, optimize business processes and share information with a wide variety of applications. And a seamless integration with SharePoint^® enables users to work with both paper and electronic documents from a uniform, user-friendly interface.

“We design our products to make complex systems simpler,” said Wacker. “Rio provides what enterprises have been looking for—an intuitive, easy-to-use ECM system that builds on their existing Microsoft infrastructure.”

About Laserfiche

Laserfiche (www.laserfiche.com) creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, Laserfiche has helped more than 25,000 organizations—including state and local governments, financial services firms and healthcare organizations—streamline processes for managing documents, records and workflow.

“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.”

But after a 12 month review of 32 software packages, Michael Sundberg, Commonwealth’s Due Diligence Officer, recommended Laserfiche to CIO Ed Bell, and the solution has been working well ever since.

Laserfiche Winners Circle VAR Duplitron of Brockton, MA, invited Commonwealth to a seminar in suburban Boston eighteen months ago. Duplitron director Steve Woolner and his team impressed Sundberg immediately. After certifying Laserfiche as compliant with SEC regulations, and reviewing Duplitron’s credentials as an outstanding solution provider, Sundberg agreed that Laserfiche and Duplitron were the right team for Commonwealth.

“My responsibilities include overseeing Commonwealth’s Help Desk, so I know what products are well received in our offices from Maine to Hawaii,” Sundberg says. “Laserfiche was rated by consultant Gartner Group as the kind of product we wanted, and once we saw a demonstration and studied its cost-effectiveness, we decided the fit was right for us.”

Laserfiche enables investment professionals to scan, store and retrieve client records electronically, speeding customer service while remaining compliant with SEC and FDIC records management requirements. Using Laserfiche, financial planners can eliminate expensive filing cabinets and end frustrating searches for missing paper.

“Laserfiche enables our financial planners to communicate with the home office electronically and access client statements, confirmations and other critical paperwork on the Web,” Sundberg says. “This gives the planners more time to actually run their businesses and take care of customers, instead of handling clerical duties.”

Sundberg says Commonwealth advisers appreciate Laserfiche’s ease of use and its non-proprietary file formats, as well as its ability to work with standard scanners and PCs. He adds that competitors’ products required users to buy specialized equipment and save files in formats that might not be accessible in the future. He was also impressed with Duplitron’s plan for implementing the system.

“Ed Bell and Mike Sundberg are sophisticated IT professionals who wanted assurances that their field offices would get the same level of service as headquarters,” Woolner says. “Because Duplitron has developed strong business relationships and friendships with top Laserfiche VARs around the country, I’ve been able to assign installations and follow-up service to them, knowing they’ll be taken care of in the same way as if we have done them ourselves.”

Commonwealth, a six-time Investment Advisor “Broker-Dealer of the Year” winner, is recognized industry-wide for its use of advanced technology to improve customer service and make its independent financial planners more productive. Sundberg appreciates Laserfiche’s Integrators Toolkit, allowing him to tie Laserfiche into other Commonwealth applications.

Laserfiche has aggressively pursued the financial services market in recent years, recognizing that document imaging technology offers broker-dealers a number of key customer service and productivity differentiators. Thousands of financial planners are using Laserfiche worldwide, often from wireless laptops, as they work with clients in their offices and homes.

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.”

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the city clerk, staff quickly adopted the new system and began scanning documents into the Laserfiche repository. But the project lost momentum when the clerk retired. Many departments didn’t take the time to develop effective file structures in Laserfiche, and staff soon began adding documents to the repository without properly recording document metadata. As a result, they couldn’t make the best use of the Laserfiche search tools, and many departments continued to rely on their old, paper-based filing systems.

In 2005, Bill Matson, the city’s records and elections coordinator, undertook an initiative to reorganize the city’s document repository and help staff use Laserfiche more effectively. As part of this process, he worked with departments to recreate their current filing structures in Laserfiche and to design document templates that would capture the most useful metadata. Thanks to Matson’s intervention, staff soon integrated Laserfiche into their everyday work processes, and the city significantly increased the return on its Laserfiche investment.

“I tell people that Laserfiche is a great system—you just have to make sure you’re using it correctly,” Matson says. “Unfortunately, we started scanning documents into the repository without taking the time to think about how we’d search for them later on. Ultimately, our own lack of foresight kept us from using Laserfiche to its full potential.

Since 1846, the Maid of the Mist has given visitors an up-close view of Niagara Falls.

“For example, one of our more mundane tasks is to maintain a library of press clippings that deal with city business. Prior to 2005, multiple people scanned these clippings into Laserfiche, resulting in duplicate files scattered across a number of folders. Worse, we didn’t capture consistent metadata—clippings about the city’s budget, for instance, were assigned a variety of subjects, from ‘Budget’ to ‘Finances’ to ‘Fiscal Information.’

“To correct these problems, we created a separate Laserfiche folder for press clippings, with subfolders for each year. We also designed a new template to capture key metadata, including the clipping’s date, type and subject. To ensure consistency, we provided staff with drop-down lists of types and subjects to choose from, rather than allowing them to enter free text. This uniformity has made searches easier—and a lot more accurate.”

Instant access to information helps staff throughout the city work more efficiently. Staff in the clerk’s office, for example, can quickly locate agreements, leases, correspondence and other documents dealing with important city business. Staff in the municipal works department can easily find the maps, schematics and engineering plans they need to improve and repair city infrastructure. And staff in the planning department can promptly retrieve zoning and other information in response to citizens’ requests.

Matson notes that the planning department includes some of the city’s most avid Laserfiche users, and he attributes their success to careful project planning. Over the years, he explains, staff had created around 20 document categories—such as “Zoning,” “Subdivisions” and “Tourism”—and they then organized documents within each category alphabetically. Prior to scanning documents into the repository, they recreated this file structure in Laserfiche. Because of this foresight, staff can locate documents simply by browsing to the relevant folder. They can also use Laserfiche to perform more elaborate searches, including full-text searches across large numbers of documents.

In addition to helping staff find information, Laserfiche helps them share it with citizens. “In the past, responding to information requests usually involved a trip to the records room,” Matson says. “Once we found the correct file, we had to take it apart, photocopy the relevant pages and then either mail or fax them to the requestor. Now, when someone calls with a request, I can locate the relevant documents in just a few seconds, and then e-mail the electronic files from within the Laserfiche repository. The citizen literally receives the documents before I hang up the phone.”

In many situations, however, citizens simply visit the city’s Website to find the documents they need. Using the WebLink™ module, the city’s Information Services staff provide the public with online access to a variety of documents stored in Laserfiche, including bylaws, council agendas and meeting minutes. Matson reports that requests for printed copies of these items have dropped significantly, while citizens have become better informed about issues the council members discuss.

Along with its Web publishing capabilities, Laserfiche includes a number of other features that benefit the city’s IS staff. Integration with Microsoft^® Active Directory^® simplifies security management and eliminates the need to create separate Laserfiche accounts for each user. Support for a variety of standard and specialized scanners enables departments to use their current hardware with Laserfiche. And a flexible application programming interface promotes rapid integration between Laserfiche and the other applications staff use every day.

“We first integrated Laserfiche with our Vadim^® accounts payable software,” says Dave Etherington, the city’s network services manager. “Because of this integration, staff can easily retrieve scanned invoices and other Laserfiche documents from within Vadim, eliminating the need to switch between systems or log in to multiple applications.”

Built in the early 1920’s, the Sir Adam Beck generating station still provides power to the city of Niagara Falls today.

From Etherington’s perspective, though, Laserfiche’s most useful features are also the most straightforward. “It gives us a great deal of control over who can access information, and it eliminates worries about lost documents and misplaced files,” he says. “It’s also a lot smarter to store documents on one server than in multiple file rooms. We back up all of our servers nightly, and we do an off-site backup of our entire Laserfiche repository once a week. If anything unexpected happens, we know we’ll be able to recover our information and get back to work.”

The city is currently in talks with its Laserfiche reseller, IKON Office Solutions, about implementing two additional Laserfiche modules: Agenda Manager™ and Records Management Edition™. Agenda Manager will help the city automate nearly every aspect of the agenda creation and distribution process, while the Records Management Edition will help staff more easily manage record retention schedules.

As he looks forward to installing these additional Laserfiche modules, Matson thinks about the lessons he and his colleagues have learned in the years since their first Laserfiche installation. “In hindsight, there are things we should have done differently,” he says. “But we’ve really turned things around, and I know we’ll continue to have success with Laserfiche in the future.”

With 50,000 residents and 13,000 utilities accounts to service, Gilroy’s 300 city staff members confronted a considerable challenge in providing timely service based on accurate information. Staff members’ far-too-frequent excursions to the file room were compromising service quality and consuming precious staff resources.

David Chulick, Gilroy’s director of information technology, explains the problem: “We needed a centralized document repository, so staff could quickly gather needed information. We also needed to maintain our records retention policies, some of which are very complex. But most of all, we needed an easy-to-use system that users could adopt quickly.”

Gilroy had already implemented Laserfiche in the city clerk’s office when Chulick arrived in January 2004. But under his leadership, new Laserfiche installations—and new business process improvements—are sprouting citywide. Gilroy has gone from one scanning station to nine, and its police, fire, human resources and community development departments all achieve remarkable results with Laserfiche. But it’s the finance department’s utility billing division that has realized the greatest transformation.

Before deploying Laserfiche, processing utility bill payments was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Clerks first separated checks and remittances, and then manually entered them into Gilroy’s financial system. After comparing the checks and remittance totals, they physically rubber-stamped each check and bundled them in stacks of 100 for courier pickup. “There was so much extra work,” Chulick notes. “50 percent of the time, some step of the process had a mistake, which was very labor-intensive to correct.”

Gilroy Gardens Theme Park is home to the famous “Circus Trees.”

Processing 6,000 checks per month using this error-prone method caused the city to hemorrhage time and money. Chulick was determined to stop the bleeding. The only problem? After a six-month search, Chulick found that no existing product could streamline check and remittance processing, increase accuracy and speed collections. So he decided to build one.

Working closely with DataNet Solutions, a Laserfiche reseller and Professional Developer Partner™, Chulick dreamed up the plans for an ideal solution. “The bank provided a check-scanning utility,” he says, “but it didn’t address remittances, which are half the transactional data. Other systems were cost-prohibitive, and couldn’t scale to meet our current and future needs.”

Chulick needed a product that would maintain “envelope integrity” by securely archiving scanned checks alongside their accompanying remittances as multi-page documents. After six months of development and beta-testing, he achieved the desired result: Checkmation™, an application that automatically scans and processes payments, then stores them in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Now, check processing still involves some manual labor: staff have to remove checks from their envelopes and feed them into scanners. But after that initial step, the system verifies—with over 90% accuracy—the customer’s bank account number, routing number, utility account number and amount paid. The program then compares that amount to the balance owed and marks discrepancies in red, so staff can quickly identify them during verification. To promote more responsive customer service, the program routes the scanned documents to the Laserfiche repository, then automatically creates WebLink™ shortcuts to them, which staff can easily access from the city’s financial system.

Whether as a seasoning, vegetable or ice cream flavor, freshly-harvested garlic dominates Gilroy’s epicurial landscape.

“When clerks need to resolve a billing issue, these documents are easy to find,” Chulick says. “Instead of three days’ worth of research, the clerks can spin their monitors around and show these documents directly to customers. The clerks don’t even realize that they’re retrieving them from Laserfiche—the integration is that seamless.

“When we finished implementation,” he adds, “the finance department was ecstatic. The clerks get upset on the rare occasions when the system is offline. ‘We don’t want to go back to the old way,’ they say.”

The efficiency gains from the new process are remarkable. But Chulick reveals an unintended perk: the city gets paid faster. “We send the bank a cash letter at 5 P.M. every business day,” he explains. “The bank converts the checks to an ACH payment, and the funds are available the next morning. Previously, there were two to three days of ‘float’ time.” Gilroy has also reduced bank fees by 56%, and Chulick suspects that, with paper handling costs increasing, these savings will climb even higher.

In addition to inefficient check processing, the utility billing division formerly faced a formidable challenge in following records retention policies. Every month, department staff filled up to six banker’s boxes with remittances, then transported them to a vault for safekeeping. To meet the two-year retention requirement for billing records, staff had to continuously manage almost 100 boxes of physical records. They’ve since forsaken the file vault in favor of scanning billing records into Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME).

Staff are currently migrating most of Gilroy’s other files into RME, too. With the HR department next on the slate, Chulick will rely on Audit Trail™ to monitor activity involving sensitive employee information. “There are so many regulations to follow—HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley—but if we do have a breach, we can go back and trace it,” he says.

So far, Laserfiche has played a vital role in the city’s mission of providing more agile, broader-reaching services. Thanks to WebLink, citizens can already retrieve agenda minutes and city ordinances online, and, in the coming months, the city will introduce twelve new online services, including crime reporting and payment of utility bills, permits, business licenses and other fees.

But the benefits won’t extend only to citizens. By accessing WebLink over Gilroy’s citywide Wi-Fi network, police officers will be able to retrieve case documents and audio files from the Laserfiche repository while in the field. And, when Gilroy integrates Laserfiche with its GIS system, the police and fire departments will be able to remotely retrieve aerial maps and other documents related to land parcels.

As one of California’s agricultural centers, Gilroy is somewhat predisposed to thinking green—and Laserfiche only promotes the city’s green initiatives. “Not printing five reams of paper per day has brought our paper and copying costs way down,” Chulick notes. Gilroy’s City Hall, already a certified green organization, will become even more eco-friendly when it achieves a paperless office with Laserfiche.

Although the system has only been in place a few years, Chulick remembers the time before Laserfiche as if it were a bygone era. “In the last four years, service has really blossomed. Laserfiche has helped our IT division deploy several cutting-edge technologies already, and I believe that in the coming year, our service offerings will rival those of any city of any size.”

The blue jay is one of over 180 animal species found in the greater Toronto area.

As Records Manager John Annunziello explains, accomplishing daily tasks prior to installing Laserfiche was often costly and time-consuming. Staff stored paper documents, such as agenda packets and meeting minutes, in color-coded, numerically-ordered folders, then used Lotus® Notes® to keep track of the folders. Meanwhile, the TRCA’s extensive photo library, used to create the posters, flyers and presentations that play a key role in the TRCA’s outreach initiatives, took up so much space that it had to be stored off-site. Besides taking up physical storage space, Annunziello notes, the paper-based system had many other drawbacks.

“Our previous system didn’t manage our structured and unstructured data,” he says. “All the photos in our library were stored on CDs in a satellite office. Staff had to go there, search through binders of photo thumbnails to locate the right CD, then burn the image to another CD or e-mail it to the staff member requesting it. It often took days to get a photograph.”

“Although a totally paperless office is not possible, it’s always our goal to conserve resources whenever possible. Laserfiche is a major part of that initiative.”

John Annunziello
Records Manager

With an eye towards managing all its information, regardless of medium, the TRCA began searching for a digital document management solution. A four-member committee sent out an RFP, seeking DoD 5015.2-certified solutions to ensure information security. They judged the eight respondents on a variety of criteria, including ease-of-use, scalability and reliability. Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ was the clear winner, not only for its features, but also for its comprehensive support system.

“We wanted to deal locally,” Annunziello explains, noting the importance of having support close-at-hand. “Our local reseller, IKON Office Solutions, put together an excellent response to our RFP, providing a point-by-point answer to each of our questions. They also showed the best understanding of our document and records management needs.”

After the TRCA installed Laserfiche, staff quickly began scanning thousands of paper documents into the Laserfiche repository. In addition to archiving permanent records, such as deeds and agreements, they completed a back-file scanning project going back one year. Thanks to Laserfiche’s OCR capabilities, all these documents are full-text searchable.

Besides the ease and convenience of digital search, Annunziello notes the many other benefits Laserfiche has brought. “We’ve achieved peace of mind regarding our 2,300+ scanned deeds. Backup copies are available should the original be lost or destroyed. We also have our minutes from the past 50 years stored electronically.

“Laserfiche has helped us cut down on our paper use, too” he continues. “Previously, if staff wanted a copy of an agenda item, they had to produce extra copies—sometimes up to 100 pages—of the entire agenda. Now, staff can access Laserfiche to find the specific two or three pages they need.”

Part of the TRCA’s outreach efforts includes citizen participation in local cleanup projects.

Taking advantage of Laserfiche’s integration capabilities, the TRCA configured Laserfiche to automatically replicate the organizational structure of their Lotus Notes-based system. Annunziello explains, “Opening a Notes record automatically creates a folder and populates template fields in Laserfiche. This enables us to immediately import information into Laserfiche without disrupting the way we work.”

Scanning paper documents and better organizing information might immediately spring to mind as benefits of digital document management. But the TRCA has enjoyed a somewhat-unintended perk in the form of its new digital photo library. As Annunziello explains, “The photo archive was an afterthought. Our marketing group has a full-time professional photographer who needed to manage her photos. We realized that we needed to create a photo library so staff could easily access corporate photographs.”

Using Laserfiche, and a bit of ingenuity, the TRCA created a digital in-house archive of its thousands of photos, ranging from pictures of local wildlife to aerial photos of waterfront projects. With the help of their reseller, staff developed a bulk utility to import multiple CDs’ worth of photos into Laserfiche, as well as downsample them for faster retrieval. “Now,” Annunziello says, “staff search for photos within categories in Laserfiche. Once they locate a photo, they can quickly insert it into their report or presentation. If an image is to be sent outside of our organization, it gets watermarked to signify that it’s TRCA property. Template information assigned to each photograph shows the location of the original CD, should we need a poster-size print. Now, the whole process takes minutes, instead of days.”

One of the thousands of images in the TRCA’s digital photo library.

That’s a far cry from a car ride to a satellite office—and the resultant fuel savings fall right in line with the TRCA’s mission. But ultimately, staff enjoy the greatest benefits in the form of time and effort savings. Annunziello explains, “In our original proposal for Laserfiche, we suggested that we could save most of our staff an hour a day by searching for records electronically as opposed to finding the paper copies. Although there’s no way to measure, many staff have definitely realized this kind of return.”

And while the TRCA has achieved tremendous benefits so far, they’re not stopping anytime soon. “Our goal is to digitize all our forms processing,” Annunziello says. A major part of this initiative is enabling online submittal of land-use and development proposals. Sound planning is critical to building new facilities while preserving local watershed ecosystems. With that in mind, the TRCA reviews building permit applications to ensure that developers follow environmentally-friendly policies before, during and after construction. Applications for new planning and development are all currently available online, and soon, prospective builders will be able to submit them for review online as well. “Then,” Annunziello says, ”staff will be able to access a form online or through our server, fill it out and route it through Laserfiche Workflow™ to its correct location.”

In the meantime, Annunziello has many current projects to attend to, such as refining the TRCA’s records series for implementation in Laserfiche Records Management Edition. The TRCA also plans to create an organizational knowledge base for internal reference purposes.

Given the TRCA’s success with Laserfiche so far, these goals seem well within reach. And of course, there’s the larger goal of preserving the local environment for future generations. Says Annunziello, “Although a totally paperless office is not possible, it’s always our goal to conserve resources whenever possible. Laserfiche is a major part of that initiative.”

We’re pleased to announce that Laserfiche 8 has received DoD 5015.2 certification. Because it involves such rigorous testing, 5015.2 certification serves as the de facto standard for records management applications, according to Laserfiche Software Release Manager Justin Pava.

The certification process included four days of testing by a staff member from the DoD’s Joint Interoperability Test Command. Pava explains that the testing process involved tasks that are not only part of records management but of document management in general, such as importing documents, working with metadata, and using the Audit Trail™ module. The tester also worked with some of the new functionality in Laserfiche 8, such as the new template field types.

“The testing process went very smoothly—the tester did not have any trouble figuring out how to use Laserfiche, and she asked very few questions,” Pava says. “In fact, she mentioned that this was one of the smoothest certifications she’s done—and she’s been performing these certification tests for more than ten years.

“The fact that Laserfiche meets the DoD’s standards for records storage, retention and destruction shows that Laserfiche offers a well-designed system that will help records managers in all industries do their jobs more effectively,” he continues. “Just as important, the certification marks an important milestone in the development of Laserfiche 8, because it shows that Laserfiche 8 is as intuitive and easy-to-use as earlier versions of the software, and can also stand up to rigorous testing.”

If you’d like to learn more about Laserfiche records management functionality, please visit the Records Management Section of our Website.

The DoD—along with a variety of other government agencies—will only purchase records management applications that meet the core functionality requirements outlined in standard 5015.2. Because this certification involves such rigorous testing, it has become the de facto standard for records management applications.

Laserfiche Software Release Manager, Justin Pava said, “According to the DoD, this was one of the smoothest and issue-free certifications that they have seen in years. The Development team put in quite a lot of work to meet this milestone, and we congratulate them for it!”

The testing process involved tasks that are not only part of records management but of document management in general, such as importing documents, working with metadata, and using the Audit Trail module. The test officer also worked with some of the new functionality in Laserfiche 8, such as independent template fields. “The testing process lasted for four days and went very smoothly,” said Pava. “The test officer had no problem figuring out how to use the system and asked very few questions.”

To gather information for her report, the test officer looked at a number of modules, including Workflow, Web Access, WebLink^™, Quick Fields^™ and Import Agent^™. Pava says the test officer was particularly impressed with the new version of Workflow and the numerous enhancements that Laserfiche has made over earlier versions.

According to Pava, the fact that Laserfiche meets the DoD’s standards for records storage, retention and destruction shows that Laserfiche has a well-designed, feature rich system that will help records managers in all industries do their jobs more effectively. “Just as important, the certification marks an important milestone in the development of Laserfiche 8, because it shows that Laserfiche 8 is as intuitive and easy-to-use as earlier versions of the software, yet can stand up to rigorous outside testing,” Pava said.

Laserfiche President & CEO, Nien-Ling Wacker said, “We have a great government user community and we are pleased to provide VARs with a competitive edge, and end users with more features and capabilities in line with our mission to help organizations run smarter, especially as technology evolves.”

About Laserfiche
Laserfiche^® (www.laserfiche.com) creates simple and elegant document management solutions that help organizations run smarter. Since 1987, more than 25,000 organizations—including numerous federal, state and local government agencies and departments—have used Laserfiche software to streamline processes for managing documents, records and workflow. By digitizing paper archives, Laserfiche enables users to instantly pinpoint the information they need, collaborate more effectively and complete daily tasks more efficiently. Secure Web access allows governments to easily share information with other agencies and with constituents, while comprehensive security options protect information from unauthorized access or release. Records management functionality also ensures compliance with a range of standards, including Department of Defense (DoD) standard 5015.2.

“All the enhancements coming in Laserfiche 8—multi-value template fields, the Recycle Bin, the new Workflow interface—will greatly improve our existing work processes. I can’t wait to beta-test it.”

Michael Wells
Laserfiche Administrator

For IT maven and Laserfiche Administrator Michael Wells, the system is always evolving. He recalls the conversion from paper to document imaging. “The original motivation was to get rid of paper and to allow sharing of documents internally.” In 2001, the IT staff installed Laserfiche in five pilot departments. “All of those departments are still happy users,” says Wells.

Laserfiche has certainly simplified life for Kevin Payne, Chesterfield’s Acting Accounts Payable (AP) Manager.

“It’s made the biggest difference you could imagine. AP spends a lot of time going back to look at invoices for auditors, our own research or for other departments. It’s made our lives so much easier because we can access the invoices from our PCs–we don’t have to spend hours searching in the file room.”

Laserfiche has made Chesterfield’s HR team’s lives easier, too. Jeannie Harper, Chief of Administrative Services, loves Laserfiche’s search capability. And it’s not just a matter of time saved.

Harper uses Laserfiche when she looks into a personnel situation. “Our HR system is good, but it’s easier for me to get the information I need from Laserfiche. I can look at the personnel action form to see the signatures and the notes I made. All those supporting documents aren’t in the HR system.”

It’s hard to imagine tampering with such success, especially since the HR department had built into Laserfiche the complex security model it had labored to create on paper. HR staff relied on Laserfiche’s solid template fields and strict auditing to allow appropriate access to users.

A Virginia Historic Landmark, Magnolia Grange is a Federal-style plantation built in 1822.

But in 2005, they had to address an important component of records management: the retention cycle. That’s when Wells supervised the installation of RME, integrating the program with the county’s existing records management model.

Changing the way the county managed records was an ambitious project. Creating a new folder structure to serve new records-management needs would change everyday procedures, and meshing a new system with the established security structure seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

Chesterfield County found that combining RME with Workflow™ created an ideal solution. Staff used RME to manage the records retention schedule, assigning access restrictions and creating shared folders to replicate the existing security structure. Using Workflow, they then copied records to the shared folders.

The first step in migrating to the new system was to recode the application that created a template for empty records. Chesterfield’s IT department then created an application to copy existing records into RME using the new template. Finally, the team planned out a records series in RME.

To implement the process, the scanning staff froze all records additions and changes. The conversion application created and renamed files and copied the template data from the old system. Wells says that in the future, staff will develop techniques to flag new documents rather than freezing additions and changes.

Taking the turn at Richmond International Speedway.

Huge as the task seemed, after 30 days, staff had successfully migrated most of the records. Department liaisons and HR personnel who had used the old system barely noticed the interface had changed. And Chesterfield’s Scanning Coordinator Nancy Pearse has noticed an improvement in security.

“Nothing can be added or taken away—Laserfiche keeps everything where it’s supposed to be.” She especially appreciates the time saved with the automated retention schedule, because previously, she had to manually delete records.

Routing documents with Workflow has been an added benefit for Pearse. “We always know where documents are in the approval process. The e-mail piece has also been very useful for us—if someone needs a document, I can just e-mail it directly from Laserfiche.”

County employees can donate their leave time to seriously ill coworkers or those with illness in their families. Laserfiche Workflow has put an end to scrambling to meet deadlines for the leave donation program.

“HR scans the donation forms in, and the status field triggers the workflow,” says Jeannie Harper. “When payroll deducts the leave from the proper party and changes the status, Laserfiche sends a notification and moves the document to the appropriate folder, based on the fiscal year. It’s great because we typically get requests right at the deadline—with a paper system, we might not be able to make it.”

Harper expects retention schedules to change again. As will technology, no doubt. But Chesterfield County will be ready. Laserfiche Administrator Wells looks forward to more integrations in the future. And he’s off to a good start.

He points to the integration of AP with the overall accounting system as a particular success. Staff barcodes invoices and inputs the codes into the mainframe. When the invoices are scanned in, a batch job populates the template fields and moves the invoices to the proper location.

Wells has also integrated Laserfiche with the county planning department’s GIS system. When Planning installed Laserfiche, its GIS system already included hard links for each land parcel to PDF files on a shared network. “Our reseller and our engineering department devised a program that changes all those links to WebLink™ search links. Now, users click on a parcel to bring up a WebLink window with all the pertinent information.”

In the future, Wells envisions providing citizens with Web access to the most frequently requested documents. Currently, the county is adding more storage to prepare for future use of drive space. When asked how he measures the county’s success with Laserfiche, he asks, “You mean, other than the number of departments clamoring to be put on the system?” Kevin Payne puts it this way: “I would definitely say that this has been the best enhancement to any AP process that we’ve done—I’ve been here 5 years, but I’ve heard the same thing from people who have been here for 20 years. It’s a great product.”

Wells can look forward to even more success with the release of Laserfiche 8™. “All the enhancements coming in Laserfiche 8—multi-value template fields, the Recycle Bin, the new Workflow interface—will greatly improve our existing work processes. I can’t wait to beta-test it.”

Boats can be replaced. Lose your permit, and you lose fishing rights that can date back generations.

So, when the federal agency that issues those permits, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), needed a computer system to safely store them, it turned to the only company with the software to do the job, Laserfiche.

Not just any software. NMFS needed Laserfiche’s Records Management Edition, specially designed to keep those all-important permits current.

Federal commercial fishing permits can be worth millions of dollars each, depending on where the permit allows a fisherman to fish—some fishing spots are a lot better than others. If a permit expires and is not renewed on time, the rights to work those spots are opened up to a long line of fishermen itching to get their hands on them.

Legal battles over those jealously guarded permits have generated mountains of paperwork that date back to the 1800s. Keeping those records straight and up-to-date is top job at NMFS.

“Many government agencies have mandates for keeping their records up to date. RME is there to ease the compliance with those mandates.” said Laserfiche software engineer Andrew Schoonmaker. “It’s sort of an add-in for the Laserfiche server, but a very important add-in for many government agencies with document retention schedules.”

There are 1.5 million commercial fishing vessel permits —worth several billion dollars— that are on such schedules in NMFS offices across the country, according to John Montel, director of document management at General Dynamics Information Technologies in McLean, VA. A Laserfiche server armed with RME lets the authorized NMFS staffers know when a permit is up for renewal as reliably as an alarm clock.

But the folks over at the Southeast Regional Office of the NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL,where Montel installed Laserfiche with RME, had a more pressing concern: hurricanes. After Hurricane Katrina, they realized their offices would be underwater should such a storm visit them and that would create a tidal wave of problems.

General Dynamics installed Laserfiche with RME and the agency soon was scanning its permits into an electronic database hardwired to computers throughout the Southeast Region’s offices. Now staffers can instantly retrieve documents without leaving their desks.

“Katrina showed them that they had no real data recovery system in place and, with the value of these permits, there could have been a tremendous amount of litigation if those permits ended up underwater,” Montel said. “Now, with Laserfiche installed, everything they do is double-redundant. They can’t lose their records.”

This is a system the Southeast Regional Office of NMFS has searched long and hard for. Since 1996, the agency’s office has spent millions of dollars trying to install a records management system. First they tried Filenet, then Docushare, but neither system seemed to do the job, Montel said. After Katrina, those folks knew it was time to look elsewhere and fast.

General Dynamics was tapped for the job and in a week’s time a Laserfiche server with RME software was on the job. Scanning is now going full tilt and Laserfiche is working so well, there’s talk at the Southeast Regional Office of installing the system in NMFS regional offices nationwide, Montel said. Permits at the NMFS Southeast Regional Offices are now always up-to-date and instantly available for all authorized staff working right from their desktops.

“The staff doesn’t have to leave their desks to get these documents and they can respond quicker and handle more work at the same time,” Montel said. “Laserfiche is saving them a tremendous amount of time and agency response time for John Q. Public is much quicker, especially in relation to litigation cases.”

And the attorneys have taken note. General Dynamics is now at work installing Laserfiche for the lawyers at the NMFS Southeast offices. They, too, need instant access to the legal papers, charts and open-ocean surveys that fill the files of so many of the vessel permits NMFS holds and they can’t wait to get a Laserfiche system of their own, Montel said. And that will mean fishermen will be able to spend less time worrying about their permits and more time on their boats.

“A lot of people around NMFS see what we are doing and they are very interested,” Montel said. “It’s nice to see that after struggling for so long, NMFS sees that this technology can work and they don’t have to spend $10 million to make work. For me, it’s kind of nice to be able to say: ‘I told you so’.”

Common Clerk Pat Woods kicked off the search for a system to help him meet the legal obligations of his office, which include preparing council agendas, maintaining and protecting documents and making them available to the public. He was looking for an integrated, scalable software tool that would automate document management in the clerk’s office but still be easy to operate and manage.

Business Integration Specialist Cindy Blizzard was project manager for the search, which began in 2004 with a needs assessment. She wanted to make sure that the product the city chose met the needs of the whole organization, not just the clerk’s office. Blizzard formed a committee of eight, from various departments, to develop a Request For Proposals and evaluate the seven responses. “We first ranked the responses based on the quality of the submission, the capacity to meet city requirements and the qualifications and experience of the companies,” says Blizzard.

The search committee then narrowed the field of contenders to three and, after viewing product demos from the companies, unanimously agreed on Laserfiche®. Says Blizzard, “We liked Laserfiche for its ease of use, its search capabilities and the flexibility of the system, particularly its ability to handle all types of documents.”

Elizabeth Gormley, Assistant Common Clerk, served on the committee. “One of our criteria was experience with municipal government projects, and Laserfiche certainly fit the bill there.” Other pluses were the Agenda Manager™ component, easy accessibility of documents over the Web and local support from the city’s reseller.

In April of 2005, Saint John began implementing Laserfiche and by July it had imported most of its electronic documents. Installing Laserfiche Records Management Edition turned out to be a tremendous advantage for Corporate Records Manager David Burke, who began using it in 2006. “Here in New Brunswick,” notes Burke, “the Provincial Archivist mandates that municipalities manage their records across their lifecycles according to specific schedules. The schedules are mated to a hierarchical, subject-based hierarchy known as the Municipal Records Authority for New Brunswick (MRA).” With over 900 different records series linking to 72 unique retention schedules, the requirements can be complex.

“I just knew there had to be some way to automate the process of getting information from the MRA into Laserfiche,” Burke recalls. Initially, Burke found a colleague in Alberta to share code from a custom program to link a spreadsheet with a Microsoft® Access database. Burke then worked with the city’s ISS department to set up a folder structure.

“About that time I found out that Laserfiche was developing a utility called the Record Series Setup,” says Burke. “With the help of our reseller, I integrated the MRA and RME and it works and looks good! It sets up the whole system—pulls all the information we need from the spreadsheet we designed, creates the folder structure and then points to the appropriate retention schedules. That would have been I-don’t-know-how-many millions of key strokes and clicks to do manually. That tool was invaluable.”

Assistant Common Clerk Gormley echoes Burke’s enthusiasm for Laserfiche. Agenda Manager has saved her immeasurable time in preparing city council agenda packets. She’s seen the stress of the job shrink right along with the volume of paper it takes to organize and distribute agendas and supporting documents for the biweekly meetings.

Gormley remembers, “We used to prepare 34 kits per meeting—enough for the press, all the city commissioners, some of the staff and the 11 council members. And they were never less than two inches thick.” Now the number is 16 and falling. The press and most of the commissioners access the agenda kits online and now the council members are beginning to use their laptops to access them online as well.

“In terms of time saved,” says Gormley, “the photocopying aspect alone was about eight hours per meeting. And inevitably, when you’re dealing with that many documents, and each packet contained hundreds, you generate a lot of heat and the machine would break down. Then you’re pushing the clock and adding more stress. But with Laserfiche, it’s just a click of a button and your document is submitted. You can review it right at your desk and it’s already stored in Laserfiche so you eliminate a process there. Now, instead of calling us, both the public and our own staff find what they need online.”

Royal Charter

Saint John, New Brunswick

This Royal Charter from 1785 establishes Saint John as the oldest incorporated city in Canada.

The Laserfiche search function is an added bonus. Gormley recalls the exhaustive process of trying to find an item for a municipal councillor, staff member or citizen in the days before Laserfiche. “It’s not only the agendas we’d be searching, but supporting documents. In the old days we’d manually search the agendas to find out if an item was on council. Then we’d physically have to go into a room, search through a box and dig out the file, find the report, make a copy, replace the report and give the copy to whomever was looking for it. Now we just say ‘Click on this,’ and there’s a report. We save the walking and the looking—it’s just an incredible advantage.”

The sharp decrease in calls to the clerk’s office has impressed Blizzard, too. “Staff used to report spending significant time searching for information on the computers in their shared drives or paper copies in the storage rooms. Now city staff and the public can easily find information with Laserfiche WebLink™ without having to contact the Clerk’s staff.”

Burke applauds Laserfiche search capabilities, too. “I’ve digitized the past council minutes from 1785 to the present. After 1934 they’re all typewritten and searchable through optical character recognition. Citizens can view and search them on the Web and they really see the benefit because council meetings are where all the decisions get made.”

Burke is particularly proud of a research project he did for the Commissioner of Building and Inspection Services on the property rezoning. “It took me three days to generate a 100-page history of a particular set of conditions in the city over the past five years—and at that point I was new to the system. The commissioner was able to present the findings to council and they were able to make an informed decision. Forget how long it would have taken to do manually—I don’t even know if it would have been feasible with paper.”

The integration of MRA and RME is just the beginning for Saint John. Blizzard is enthusiastic about future integrations. She envisions integrating Laserfiche with the city’s GIS application as well as the city’s management software, SunGard® HTE. In fact, after reading about the successful integration of Laserfiche and HTE in the Laserfiche Global Municipal Exchange, staff in Saint John contacted city staff in Bryan, Texas to learn how they did it.

Saint John’s integration of Laserfiche with MRA breaks new ground for New Brunswick. Says Burke, “We’re the first municipality in the province and probably in Atlantic Canada to apply retention schedules to our electronic records. That’s huge. We’re sharing our work with other municipalities, letting them know about that whole integration of the MRA and RME, including the city of Moncton, another Laserfiche user. We’re looking forward to working together with other municipalities, so we can have a uniform, efficient records management system.”

Mary Lynne Strata

Bryan is extremely dedicated to preserving its history, rooted in the westward railroad expansion of the mid-nineteenth century -including city records dating back to 1889. A hundred years later, reflecting a century’s changes in local government, Bryan established a citywide records management system to retain, store and destroy records in compliance with state and federal law. But as the city grew, so did the piles of paper and storage space needed to maintain the system. When two records storage facilities reached maximum capacity, the city sought records management alternatives. In this issue, City Secretary Mary Lynne Stratta, Records Management Coordinator Jodi Chaney and Network Specialist Chris Martin share their experiences with a groundbreaking document management solution.

On the initiative of City Secretary Mary Lynne Stratta, Bryan began exploring digital solutions in 1999, forming a committee to consider various options. The goals were to reduce the costs of document storage and retrieval, transfer and store data from the city’s computer systems, provide online access to city documents and apply retention schedules to electronic records.

In July of 2000, the city issued an RFP. After reviewing four document management systems, the committee decided on Laserfiche because of its ease of use and rapid search and retrieval capabilities. The city soon found out for itself why Laserfiche had such a great reputation among other municipalities as a feature-rich, easy-to-use solution. In just a couple of years after implementation, Bryan would garner media praise with an innovative and award-winning approach to software integration.

Bryan had a detailed paper-records management system before it began using Laserfiche. However, the city wanted to boost efficiency and free up space by eliminating reliance on paper.

To follow city charter mandates, the city secretary needs to be the records management officer with a records management system that meets statewide criteria. Stratta took this responsibility very seriously. Preserving the history of the city , even in unforeseen circumstances, was one of her top concerns. “If a disaster struck,” says Stratta, “we needed to recreate our vital records to get our business going again. I thought that an imaging system was the way to go.”

Offering a way to access records online was equally important to Stratta. She saw the Web as a way to further democratize city government. “I wanted residents to be able to access ordinances, minutes and records that were clearly public that show the history of the city and the actions of their elected officials.”

The search committee looked at four different imaging systems and met with each company as well as officials from other Texas cities.”Laserfiche was the unanimous choice of the team,” says Stratta.

From the end user perspective, Laserfiche was the overwhelming choice. Says Stratta, “It was by far the most user friendly. And the search and retrieval function was head and shoulders above the rest. I also wanted to make sure that whatever system we chose was from a company that was reputable and was going to be around for a long time. Again, Laserfiche beat out the competition-by far. We were making a long-term commitment, and we knew that Laserfiche would be around for a long time.”

City Secretary Stratta has come a long way from her early days on the job. For her entire first year, over 17 years ago, she actually had to bring in her own computer because the city didn’t have one. At that time, Bryan stored paper records in enormous boxes in the basement of the former city hall building, and the only disaster recovery plan was to store birth and death records on microfilm.

Chris Martin

We continually achieve great return on our investment with Laserfiche.”

—Chris Martin
Network Specialist

Having led the path from sorting through volumes of paper stored in the basement of another building to instant access of electronic records from a desktop, Stratta has a unique perspective on the evolution of records management. Under her stewardship, the city became the first anywhere to deploy an integration module that connected Laserfiche to HTE-the software Bryan uses in all city departments to handle accounting, risk management, HR, permits and other city functions.

Bryan installed Laserfiche in seven city departments beginning with a pilot program in 2001. From the start, Bryan made city ordinances, city council meeting minutes, resolutions and agendas available to the public. Gradually upgrading and expanding the system, so by the end of 2005, Bryan had the latest version of Laserfiche installed in fifteen city departments.

Stratta adds, “That was a huge accomplishment. Previously, in order to access records, people used to have to go downstairs, get a key, go across the parking lot, walk down into the basement, dig for the record, and come back. And when they were finished with the records, they had to go through the same process to put them back. Now we can go into Laserfiche, call up a record, and email it directly. It really saved us a lot of time as well as space.”

The results also dramatically reduced paper and freed up a lot of office space. “We were able to do away with a complete storage center-about 1500 square feet,” says Records Management Coordinator Jodi Chaney.

Management Coordinator Chaney also notes that Laserfiche greatly simplifies disaster preparedness. “When Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita were headed our way, we were able to copy all our ordinances, minutes, and other critical documents onto CDs and put them in a safe deposit box.”

Perhaps, the greatest impact of Laserfiche has been the streamlining of the city worker’s day-to-day workload and the increased access to records by Bryan’s citizens. Customizing the system to work with HTE, the city’s accounting and management software, has been essential to Bryan’s success.

In 2006, building on its already cutting-edge solution, Bryan pioneered an HTE integration module that eliminated scripting and automated the process of pulling information from HTE to Laserfiche. The first of its kind, the installation allows users to open either program to access the other. “It really freed up our IT department,” says Stratta. “And the users love it.”

The city installed the integration module over a weekend with no interruption of service to the users. “We then moved onto training and installation on the client side,” says Martin. “Now that we have a process in place, we bring departments aboard quickly and smoothly. We continually achieve great returns on our investment in both applications, HTE and Laserfiche.”

In other government offices, the integration has likewise increased efficiency and streamlined workflow. “Integration has made the work a lot easier for departments like finance and HR,” says Martin. “It blended well with what they already do. Rather than waiting to scan checks or invoices into Laserfiche, they can do it right when they’re entering them into HTE. They don’t have to wait for scripts to run. The uptime and availability of the system is much greater.”

Overall the Laserfiche solution saves work, time and builds more transparency into city government. Chaney remembers the days before Laserfiche:

“We recently had an open-records request that involved a lot of information. Before Laserfiche, it would have taken at least a month to actually research the minutes and find out all the names of the contracts, easements and documents associated with this project. With Laserfiche, we were able to get a print-out of all the documents the first day. Even taking time to pull the documents that had not been scanned into Laserfiche, we were able to gather all the documents within six business days.”

Martin adds, “Another example is our Finance department. This was the first year that they had Laserfiche, and it made a real difference when the auditors were here. Instead of having the auditors go to physical file cabinets, they saved a lot of time with index searches, going directly through HTE. They actually finished a few days early.”

Network Specialist Martin’s job involves training new users to use Laserfiche. “The training is straightforward and simple,” he says. “People have an easy time understanding the product and how to use it-it’s very intuitive. It looks like the Microsoft^® Windows File System they already know. I usually train ten people at a time, and each session lasts about an hour. ”

Perhaps the greatest measure of success has been the satisfaction of Bryan residents. “The positive feedback we’ve had from citizens has just been incredible. For example, the other day I talked to a real estate agent who had been digging at the courthouse for days to find a document from 1922. I called it up using Laserfiche and emailed it to him in minutes. He was very impressed.”

Stratta is committed to providing great service to Bryan’s citizens and city departments. She thinks back to the days of rooting through boxes to find records. “We’ve come along way to get here.”

Anaheim City

The City of Anaheim Public Utilities Department ensures that citizens have water and power on demand. But the department’s antiquated filing system had made accessing important information decidedly less reliable. With over 16,000 project files, each containing a jumble of blueprints, wiring schematics, job-site Polaroids and hand-written notes, finding a particular file was often a laborious, time-consuming and ultimately fruitless pursuit.

Supervisor of Records Management Ron Smith joined the City of Anaheim in 1999 and was tasked with bringing the department’s records into the digital age. Smith inherited a tangled web of misfiled information. His first day on the job, he walked into the department’s records room to find 600 12- by 18-inch boxes stuffed with project files dating back to the 1800s.

Smith recalls how the hodgepodge of boxes and manila folders usually made finding a file a shot in the dark. “It was the black hole syndrome,” he says. “I’d pull these boxes out for the engineers and we couldn’t always find stuff for them. Our level of service was suffering horribly.”

The engineers were equally frustrated, given that they’d often have to go rummaging through those boxes with the record keepers before they could get started on the day’s workload. “We had all kinds of different files,” says Mahendra Garg, the principal engineer with the Anaheim electric utility. “They were all over the place.”

The records were mostly archived by project number, Smith says. Over the years, staffers would sometimes assign an old number to a new project, resulting in multiple files with the same project number. Finding records was a time-consuming process that often led down blind alleys when the wrong project was found under the right project number.

Smith knew he had to implement digital document management to begin his mission of modernization. Laserfiche was already in use in other city departments, which certainly helped with getting approval. In addition to its familiarity, Laserfiche could handle the myriad media that comprise each public utilities project.

“We needed to partner with the perfect company and we did with Laserfiche,” Smith says. “They had people who would sit down and work with us. When we found this system, we knew we had made a good choice.”

After sorting all of the department’s documents—from memos and work orders to maps and photos—into distinct groups, staff began scanning the items into the Laserfiche repository, electronically labeling each file by street name, job number and type of utility. Now, the city’s utility workers and civil engineers can quickly locate records using whatever information they have on hand, and then access those records directly from their desktops. Each label provides another avenue to find—in just seconds—that one document out of thousands needed to get the work crews on the road.

The engineers definitely appreciate the newfound convenience. “From what I’ve seen so far, it’s great,” says David Butera, an engineer in the water utility’s capital projects division. “Now, if we need to find something, we can just look it up on our computers. Or, if we want to copy something, we can just send it to the closest printer—we don’t have to go walking across the building.”

Besides providing immediate information access, Laserfiche has brought a number of additional benefits. Every public utilities project generates a common sub-set of records, such as construction drawings and work orders, that are key to supporting everyday business processes. Currently, staff scan these documents into Laserfiche individually, then route them to their appropriate destinations. Soon, they’ll use Quick Fields™ to process these common documents in batches, saving even more time.

Smith also reports that Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) greatly simplifies the management of retention cycles by automatically assigning the same retention period to all subfolders within a given parent folder. “This makes demonstrating compliance much easier, because we can show where all records are stored and maintained, and what their retention period is,” he says. “It ensures accountability to regulatory agencies, rate payers and, most importantly, to our staff members and city officials.”

RME has also become the centerpiece of an enterprise-wide records management platform, currently in the beta-testing stage. Using Workflow™ and Import Agent™, the system will automatically route completed construction drawings, providing staff with accurate, real-time updates to critical information. Smith envisions a not-too-distant future in which the details on every public utilities project, from the turn of a screw to a new baseball stadium, will be instantly and securely stored in Laserfiche.

The public utilities department has come a long way in the years since installing Laserfiche, and Smith plans to build on that success. In addition to the RME installation, he has plans to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s GIS system, which updates the city’s new Outage Management System. Smith says this will solve a major issue with routing finalized construction plans. “We need to import these documents into our GIS system in their native file format, and we can do that with Laserfiche,” he says. “The integration will significantly improve our business processes, as well as solve the long-standing problem of having real-time updates to our systems that depend on having electronic maps routed immediately upon completion.”

Given the department’s success with Laserfiche so far, it’s a good bet that this and other improvements will have a major positive impact on the quality of service Smith and his colleagues provide. In addition, Smith hopes that the spirit of innovation he’s helped instill will carry on to Anaheim’s future engineers and records managers. “We want to leave a legacy of improvement for future employees,” he says. “There are all kinds of theoreticals in working with records. But in the end, you have to be able to manage them.”