The Toolkit provides an application programming interface, or API, for Laserfiche. Using the Toolkit, you can create your own customized Laserfiche scripts and programs, integrate with third-party applications, and control the Laserfiche client itself. Version 8.0 of the Toolkit provides an updated version of Laserfiche Server Objects and Document Processor to allow integrators to take advantage of all of the new functionality in Laserfiche 8, as well as providing a way to access real-time notifications from the Server. It offers powerful object-oriented API, with several components that enable you to automate a variety of Laserfiche-related tasks.

Don’t forget that the Code Library has sample applications and supplemental information to help you create and customize your own Toolkit applications. You can review code posted by Laserfiche staff, users and resellers – and even post your own. And if you need more information, at the Toolkit Forum you can post questions and get answers directly from the Laserfiche developers, resellers and integrators.

I am very excited about Audit Trail. It will not only allow us to track who is doing what in Laserfiche, but also to add the watermarks to the printed and e-mailed documents that we have been needing desperately. As a District Attorney’s office, having the correct information on the document (like when it was printed) can be very helpful when you’re going to produce documents for discovery.

I now have a new goal. That is to learn SQL 2005 Reports so I can actually write reports for the Audit Trail…Always something new to learn.

Suzanne Brean

Linn County District Attorney’s Office

Linn County, Oregon

It took only a summer for Geneos to develop its document management system, consolidating records from more than 60 locations into one central repository. As Geneos implemented straight-through processing, the firm eliminated faxing altogether and greatly reduced printing and mailing costs and audit preparation time. The firm’s key players gained enough confidence in their electronic system to hold their first document destruction session, doing away with 250,000 pages of paper.

Geneos Wealth Management offers estate planning, investment advice, time management systems and financial planning. With such diverse roles and an eye toward retail rather than institutional bank arrangements, Geneos needs to store, share, search and reference hundreds of thousands of client documents. In addition, the firm’s relationship to its representatives means joint ownership of the majority of their records, requiring access from multiple locations by various individuals.

Geneos management understood the significance of eliminating as much paper as possible from day-to-day operations with a compliant, electronic document management system. Decision makers saw that the time spent physically searching through paper records and shipping or faxing them from location to location could be better spent delivering financial services.

Any solution would need to keep up with the influx of as many as 60,000 paper documents per week with the ability to securely scan, share, store and route them for approval. It would also have to make documents accessible from the main office in Denver, the 61 OSJ branch offices in 24 states, and 400 representative and affiliated investment advisors across the country.

Geneos management looked briefly at simple scanning solutions, but these were inadequate. Geneos needed an economical way to have its clients scan into a centralized solution while complying with SEC regulations for a clear audit trail. One branch had been using Laserfiche and introduced the product to the home office. “We made the decision to go in the middle of May,” says Dean Rager, CIO. “By September our system was in place in over 50 offices. It was very quick.”

Geneos started using Laserfiche to allow all the branch offices to ensure compliance while scanning their documents into one central repository. Rager notes the enthusiasm field representatives have shown for Laserfiche. “They love it,” he says. So far, Geneos has scanned in over 100 gigabytes of data, keeping up with the 60,000 new documents that come in each week.

System Administrator Sean O’Reilly notes, “We have made Laserfiche an indispensable component of our day-to-day operations.”

Using Laserfiche has enabled Geneos to link its remote offices, and the results have been dramatic. Remote offices can instantly send documents requiring overnight approval to the home office. “Before,” says O’Reilly, “documents were scattered all over the place in e-mail attachments and snail mail packages.”

“At our last NASD audit,” says CIO Rager, “we provided auditors with 80,000 pages of documents—six months’ worth of correspondence—on one CD. In years past, we had to box and send them. It took about an hour to gather the 80,000 pages and create the CD. Before it meant weeks and weeks of staff time.”

Implementing straight-through processing has brought Geneos an added benefit—the decommissioning of some old, very noisy dot matrix printers. “Now everything that came through those printers is accessible through a simple search in Laserfiche,” says O’Reilly.

In addition to celebrating the retirement of the printers, Rager adds that Geneos has saved a great deal of time and money on faxing. Laserfiche is handling input from all three virtual print servers and all the firm’s virtual faxing. In the year or so since installation, Laserfiche has captured close to a million pages—enough to stretch 150 miles if laid end-to-end.

Geneos also appreciates Laserfiche’s open architecture, and IT staff have used the Integrator’s Toolkit™ to complete a number of integrations between their in-house applications and their document repository. IT staff have also worked with two major clearinghouses, National Financial and Pershing, to establish a system for submitting paperwork electronically.

“As a major broker-dealer, we route large amounts of documentation to the clearinghouses,” O’Reilly says. “We’ve established an electronic document link so that staff can quickly submit documents stored in Laserfiche to either house, simply by clicking a custom toolbar button. Our staff really appreciate the ability to send documents electronically rather than printing and mailing them, and this functionality has taken us a long way toward becoming a fully paperless firm.”

Rager doesn’t equivocate when discussing the installation of Laserfiche at Geneos: “This is the best damn thing we’ve ever done. Period.”

Processing the thousands of paper documents associated with these accounts, however, was limiting MDS’s productivity. “We needed a system to provide three key features: security, accessibility and accountability,” says Solutions Architect Matt Brown. “We also wanted to cut down on paper-related costs. We spent the better part of a decade looking for a system that could accomplish all these goals.”

MDS first experimented with a Web-based product in an attempt to eliminate paper documents and streamline work processes. “It did a very good job of storing and retrieving documents, but that was about the extent of its usefulness,” Brown says. “It proved difficult to administer. So we then built a second system ourselves, using Microsoft® SharePoint® as the foundation.”

This second solution provided a clear demonstration of the benefits of an enterprise-quality system. “We could see the possibilities, such as ease of retrieval, improved business intelligence and the efficiencies of automating work processes,” Brown explains. “However, SharePoint isn’t a document management system, so we were asking it to do something it wasn’t designed to handle.”

This experiment, however, helped staff envision an ideal solution. “Our immediate goal was to store billing records electronically, but our eventual goal was and still is a completely paperless workflow,” Brown says. “We needed to make sure that billing records were easily retrievable, that protected health information was secure and that we could account for all our documents, but we also needed a solution that was cost-effective and scalable.”

Laserfiche® fulfilled all these requirements—and more. Thanks to its open architecture, Laserfiche can serve as the document management back-end for many line-of-business applications, including Med/FM™, the application MDS uses to manage billing and claims processing. With help from their Laserfiche reseller, JPI Data Resource, MDS integrated the two systems so that staff can instantly access Laserfiche documents from within Med/FM. “That was the system’s number one selling point,” Brown notes.

After MDS selected Laserfiche, things moved quickly. “Installation was completed in less than a day, and training took less than a week,” Brown remembers. “We were able to initiate a completely paperless workflow for one of our clients by the week’s end. Then we started bringing our other clients online.”

MDS has two Laserfiche servers, one in each of their two divisional offices. Over 30 users in those locations—and in smaller offices throughout California—use the system daily to process billing documents submitted in both paper and electronic formats.

Some clients still send MDS paper billing documents, which must be processed manually. Staff scan those documents, separated by bar-coded index sheets, into Laserfiche. The Quick Fields™ Bar Code Plug-In™ reads the bar codes and automatically indexes the scanned files. “We simply attach the cover sheet to its corresponding billing record and Quick Fields does the rest,” Brown says. “Quick Fields fills in all the necessary document metadata—such as the patient’s name and identifying information—that is stored in the bar codes.”

When clients submit electronic documents, staff use the client’s daily log to create empty documents in the Laserfiche repository that serve as place holders for corresponding billing documents. Staff then use Snapshot™ to convert the electronic information into unalterable TIFF files and import them into Laserfiche, where they are matched up with the empty documents created earlier.

To further automate work processes, Workflow™ routes documents among the various departments that create the billable record and generate the final claim. If any information is missing, Workflow automatically routes the record to the appropriate department for further follow-up.

While Laserfiche speeds up the entire collections process, it has specifically streamlined the process for submitting claims that require supporting documentation. “Before Laserfiche, there was a delay of several days, given that a staff member would have to physically locate the billing record, pull it and copy it,” Brown says. “Now, we can send claims out the same day. Employees simply pull the account up in Med/FM and press a function key, which automatically generates a search in Laserfiche for the patient’s billing record.

“These efficiencies have enabled us to shift job priorities from one department to another—or eliminate tasks altogether,” Brown continues. “Before, we needed a rather large staff just to manage all the paper. Our medical records department has been completely transformed. Now, they simply handle scanning and document printing for claims attachment.”

In addition, Laserfiche has given MDS greater oversight of business processes. “We use Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services to query the Laserfiche database, which provides us with a wealth of real-time data we didn’t previously have access to,” Brown says. “This data gives us greater awareness of our business processes, which helps improve decision-making.”

MDS’s clients benefit from this improved reporting as well. “The medical director at one of our client sites requests a monthly time study showing how many patients their physicians see each hour,” Brown says. “Before Laserfiche, this was a laborious process that required manually entering statistics into a spreadsheet. Now, we use Laserfiche to pull this information directly from the ER log and store it in the document template fields. Our reporting server queries this information and automatically generates and sends the report—with no user interaction required.”

In the future, MDS plans to completely eliminate paper from their billing processes. “We’re in the beginning stages of adding additional automation and integration with our billing management system that will eliminate manual demographic and charge entry. We also plan to implement a paperless workflow in our payment processing department,” Brown says. “We are constantly looking for new ways to extend our Laserfiche system with integration and customization—so we definitely appreciate the ability to purchase components separately and add new ones over time.”

Customizing MDS’s Laserfiche system comes easy to Brown, who values the flexibility of Laserfiche’s open architecture. “As a programmer, I appreciate the expansive features of the Integrator’s Toolkit™,” he says. “With the Toolkit, you can create additional functionality with just a little effort. I also enjoy interacting directly with Laserfiche Developers through the Laserfiche Institute Conference, the Support Site and the forums.”

Brown doesn’t hesitate in recommending Laserfiche to his peers. “I would unequivocally recommend it,” he says. “After years of evaluating just about every document management system there is—and there are a lot—none of them comes close to matching the breadth of features Laserfiche provides.

“Along with our medical billing system, Laserfiche is one of our core applications,” he continues. “We would be hard-pressed to function without it. Employees benefit from rapid access to the information they need to do their jobs, and management benefits from the peace of mind of knowing the documents that are integral to our operation are safe and secure. It’s a win all around.”

Prior to issuing an RFP, the county’s decision makers selected four departments—corrections, finance, human services and environmental services—to participate in a pilot document imaging program. They then assembled a committee that included staff from each department. “Because everyone would eventually use the system, we involved as many people as possible in the decision-making process,” Berg explains. “We wanted to approach the implementation from a county-wide perspective rather than an IT perspective.”

Working with a consultant, IT staff wrote an RFP for an enterprise document management solution. After evaluating the responses, the committee invited four vendors to demo their systems. “Laserfiche^® ranked the highest,” Grossmann remembers. “Staff said Laserfiche had features they could use, while the other systems were unnecessarily complicated.”

Staff in the pilot departments started scanning documents into Laserfiche in 2002, and Berg and Grossmann noticed immediate results. With Laserfiche, staff can retrieve documents in seconds, without leaving their desks. In addition, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module automatically routes documents among staff members, eliminating the need to physically carry file folders between desks or departments. Laserfiche even streamlines the audit process—now, auditors simply sit at a workstation and use the system’s search tools to find what they need, while staff go about their business.

Because the county uses a variety of primary business applications, integration also played a key role in the committee’s selection of Laserfiche. “From the outset, we knew that we needed a solution that could serve as the document management ‘back-end’ for our other applications, without requiring elaborate custom programming,” Grossmann says. With its open architecture and flexible API, Laserfiche fully met this need. “Our Laserfiche reseller, Crabtree Companies, did an excellent job of explaining what we could do with the system,” she adds. “They helped us get started, but we completed most of the integrations ourselves.”

Located in the county seat of Mankato, the Blue Earth County courthouse was built in 1886.

One of the county’s most visible integrations is between Laserfiche and MUNIS^®, which the finance department uses to manage accounts payable. When the department receives an invoice, staff enter information—such as the invoice’s date, number and amount—in MUNIS. At the click of a button, they then open the Laserfiche scanning interface within MUNIS and scan the document into the Laserfiche repository. Thanks to the tight integration between the two systems, Laserfiche automatically pulls relevant document metadata from MUNIS and uses this information to index the scanned image file.

Retrieving a scanned document is equally quick. Staff simply locate the invoice record in MUNIS, then click a button to retrieve it from Laserfiche. Because the integration is so seamless, a lot of users don’t even realize that documents are stored in another system.

For Berg, the MUNIS integration truly exemplifies how Laserfiche has helped the county improve internal work processes. “In the past, retrieving an invoice would literally take days,” he says. “First, I’d log in to our financial application and look up the invoice’s number. I’d then have to call the finance department and submit my request. When staff in that department had time, they’d locate the original invoice, make a photocopy and put it in the interoffice mail.”

Because this process was so slow, Berg began photocopying every invoice he received, so he’d have it for future reference. “I was storing thousands of invoices in my office, and each year the pile would grow higher and higher,” he says. “Using Laserfiche, I can literally find any invoice I need in a matter of seconds, and my office is a lot less cluttered.”

Reducing paper clutter also translates into additional cost savings for the county, because departments can make better use of available space. By scanning its case files into Laserfiche, the corrections department, for example, has eliminated the need for a records room altogether. The 900 square foot space previously needed to house paper now serves as an office for four staff members.

Currently, fourteen of the county’s fifteen departments use Laserfiche, and the county’s repository holds more than six million documents. Using the Integrator’s Toolkit™, IT staff have integrated Laserfiche with several other systems, including the county’s Unisys^® mainframe and the Fidlar^® system it uses to manage property records. These integrations have proven so successful that, as part of the RFP process, the county now requires software vendors to confirm that their applications integrate with Laserfiche.

IT staff have several initiatives planned for the year ahead, including an integration between Laserfiche and the county’s GIS application. They also plan to use the WebLink™ module to provide citizens with online access to a variety of documents, from agendas and meeting minutes to property, birth and death records. They’ll also continue one of their most successful programs—hiring developmentally disabled residents to scan archived documents into the Laserfiche repository.

When asked about the lessons she and her colleagues learned during the implementation process, Grossmann emphasizes the importance of active communication between IT staff and the system’s users. “We definitely had to manage users’ expectations,” she says. “Our probation officers, for example, didn’t want to give up their paper files—we literally had to take them away. But once we showed them how the new system worked, they clearly saw its benefits.

“Thanks to an integration between Laserfiche and our court services tracking system, the officers can access scanned documents with a single click. And they no longer have to carry armloads of case files around. Instead, they simply take their laptops into the field and, using VPN, they connect to the Laserfiche repository and call up any document they need.”

The Kennedy Bridge is one of the few surviving wrought iron bridges in Minnesota.

Other users, she continues, tried to recreate their old work processes in Laserfiche, which often prevented them from making the best use of the system’s tools. “In our corrections department, for instance, the paper files were so thick that they included section dividers, and staff were in the habit of locating a particular form by looking in ‘Section Four’ or ‘Section Six.’

“As part of the process of scanning these files, users attempted to recreate this familiar filing structure in Laserfiche. We had to step in and explain that electronic section dividers or subfolders weren’t necessary, because the system’s search tools would help them quickly find what they need, without having to manually navigate through a complex folder structure.

“We even had a few users who thought that managing documents electronically would add to their workload, or that they’d have to hire additional staff to do all the scanning,” Grossmann concludes. “When we heard this, we simply pointed to our pilot program and all the success we had. Far from adding to anyone’s workload, Laserfiche has provided staff with much faster access to information, leaving them with more time to help the county’s citizens.”

Before installing Laserfiche, Alexandria archived its documents on paper and microfiche. With a rich history dating back to the eighteenth century, the city could ill afford to trust the aging system. Says Milligan, “We have all kinds of documentation dating back to the early 1900s. Our paper copies and microfiche were beginning to deteriorate. We didn’t want to update that technology—we needed an imaging system.”

With the goal of quickly responding to document requests from citizens, city councilors and staff, Milligan set out to implement an electronic document management system. She’d already heard a lot about document imaging from her colleagues, and she believed it was important to get a city-wide system in place that would enable all city departments to share documents.

Milligan already had a good idea of what was important to her in a document management system: “Good support and easy maintenance. I also wanted to ensure we could access the system over the Web and that it could support a Microsoft® .NET™ programming environment. Because we were going to import personnel files to conform to state-mandated retention dates, I knew we had to have security as tight as we could get it—down to the file level.”

Laserfiche security features made the product stand out over the others the committee considered. The ability to redact sensitive information such as Social Security numbers was a big plus for Milligan. “I also liked it because it took different media— paper, microfiche, aperture cards—in different sizes,” she recalls. “And Workflow™ was so easy to set up because it’s so familiar—it’s just like Windows® Explorer.”

Alexandria first installed Laserfiche in the fire and code departments, and it wasn’t long before other departments wanted Laserfiche for themselves. Says Milligan, “When the staff got a taste of it, they loved it. As with anything city-wide, it took a while to get them started, but once we did, we couldn’t stop them. It sells itself.”

Currently, both the accounting and treasury divisions of the finance department, as well as the planning and zoning, police personnel, city attorney, environmental services, transportation and IT departments use Laserfiche. Getting the support of the city was easy once staff noticed the improved work environment and saved storage space. Milligan estimates that it took a few weeks to get each initial installation up and running smoothly. And the results have been dramatic.

“We get a lot of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from citizens,” Milligan continues. “Instead of making all these copies, you can hit one button and print the documents, or e-mail them to citizens.”

“FOIA requests have short turnaround times,” says Supervisory Administrative Officer Virginia Clarke. “They usually require some action within 24 hours—at least to respond with the cost of reproduction. If we don’t meet the deadline, the city is subject to monetary penalties. When we had to go off-site to find the document, the 24 hours were gone. With Laserfiche, we can see how many documents we have and calculate the cost without leaving our desks.”

City Hall overlooks the Alexandria Farmer’s Market.

Searching through files was tough enough when things were properly filed, but misfiled documents were particularly aggravating. “Previously,” recalls Clarke, “if something was misfiled, it was a nightmare trying to find it. But Laserfiche corrected that problem. If something’s been misfiled, we can search for it in any number of ways, get the information we need and file it properly without missing a beat.”

Accounting Clerk Jan Pettey notes the boost in efficiency: “I scan all the AP and payroll documents,” she says. “We were looking for something that would make it easy to search for paid invoices —and we found it in Laserfiche. Now staff can go directly into Laserfiche instead of asking accounting to pull the originals and send copies. They have so many ways to search: by payment voucher, invoice, vendor number or document number. They really like it—we rarely get calls any more.”

Laserfiche has greatly improved efficiency for the IT fiscal analyst by eliminating backlog-related errors due to the huge volume of invoices. “We set up Workflow so that the second the invoices come in, they’re scanned and e-mailed directly to the person who has to approve them,” says Milligan. “Invoices get paid much faster, and they don’t get lost. And I can refer back to them easily to calculate how much I spent on a specific project.”

As Alexandria expands its system, Milligan is overseeing an increasing number of integrations with other applications. Alexandria has already integrated Laserfiche with the city’s real estate receivables software, and will soon do the same with its GIS and permitting programs. The city is also upgrading its treasury department’s collection system to automatically file checks upon scanning. Milligan largely relies on Quick Fields™ to streamline operations for departments using these integrations. “Because it automatically populates the data fields, it greatly reduces errors by filing documents in the right places,” she says.

Milligan is about to roll out Laserfiche to the city clerk’s office, which has long posted past agenda packets and city council meeting minutes to the city’s Website as TIFF files. However, citizen demand to access them in PDF format led Milligan to try a couple of conversion methods, both of which were painfully slow. She was pleased to learn that a simple tweak with the Integrator’s Toolkit™ would enable Laserfiche to import TIFFs and export them out as PDFs all at once.

Alexandria currently has 387 licenses, and is gearing up to add more. Milligan is in the process of installing Laserfiche in the sheriff’s office, with plans to add the real estate asessment, housing and finance revenue departments. “We had to start with baby steps,” she says. “But soon we’ll be city-wide. I hope to get a site license soon to expand access even further. It’s just a great product.”

Milligan’s advice to other cities just starting implementation? Be prepared. “I suggest getting a technical team ready, because it could take off overnight. And when it does take off, you’re absolutely bombarded—I could keep six programmers busy right now.”

But she’s sure next year will be bigger and better, and she’ll have even more valuable advice. Meanwhile, Virginia Clarke sums up the sentiments of Alexandria’s staff: “It’s wonderful to be able to access our documents this way. It’s fantastic.”

Call it e-government, or simply call it a smart way to get things done. Here’s how Imaging Analyst Cliff Thomas and his colleagues at the City of Wichita got beyond the buzzwords and made it happen.

When the City of Wichita IT and Police Records staff met to discuss ways to streamline internal processes that would also improve public service, they agreed to begin with traffic accident reports. Thomas recalls, “We all said, ‘Why not put them online?’”

All Wichita citizens involved in an accident must submit copies of accident reports to the state Registry of Motor Vehicles and send the case numbers to their insurance companies. In turn, insurers request their own copies directly from the Wichita Police Department for use when settling claims.Prior to the launch of the online system, six to eight citizens came to the front counter of the Police Records Division each day to request copies of accident reports. They completed the request form and paid a convenience fee. Records staff told them that the report would be mailed within two weeks.

On average it took more than 20 minutes for a clerk to process each request, including searching for and photocopying each report. The division provided copies of all accident reports to insurance companies for a nominal fee. Delivering these services consumed 50 to 60 staff-hours each month.

Why not put accident reports online? That was just one good question among many. Others included how to link the payment application to the document management system, how to securely roll it out to the public and how to generate new revenue in the process.

In the initial phases of Wichita’s document management project, the City built a Laserfiche repository of more than 6.5 million searchable digital images, reclaiming hundreds of square feet of office space in the process. Currently, more than 5.5 million of those pages are imaged police records, including accident reports.

The City was already using Laserfiche WebLink to provide Web-based, thin-client document retrieval to authorized City staff. Integrating WebLink with a payment processing solution to enable online availability of accident reports seemed a natural progression toward greater electronic delivery of public services.

The remaining “big question,” says Thomas, “was whether we would be able to set up a payment system that could tell our document imaging system to release an imaged file.

“It turned out to be a relatively easy programming challenge, however, utilizing the Laserfiche Integrator’s Toolkit, especially since Laserfiche was already integrated with our public safety software program. Basically, we use the case number of the report to set everything in motion. It works beautifully.”

The new online accident report system eliminates human involvement with transactions and has reduced in-person accident report requests at the Police Records Division to a trickle. When a citizen does come to the front counter, records clerks use the online system to find and print requested reports in seconds.

By delivering an online service in which the public sees immediate value, Wichita is able to charge $16 for each report. Charges to insurance companies have increased from $2 to $16 per report. According to Thomas, because the insurers recognize the value in faster access, they don’t mind paying more for the ability to simply retrieve reports over the Web by case number.

“They love the new system,” says Thomas. “It saves them both man hours and messenger costs. On balance, they’re making out, too.”

Thomas concludes, “In my opinion, the reason we’re doing so well is because Laserfiche software allowed us to scale up. The scalability enabled us to get started, win over staff and figure out where we wanted to go. I think that is an ideal approach for any local government in which cost and staff acceptance are concerns.”