The first-ever online regional user group attracted nearly 30 attendees from the New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey areas eager to learn more about Laserfiche—and how to start their own local user groups.

It couldn’t have come at a better time, says Ruth McGrath, database developer/analyst for the City of Northampton, MA MIS Department.

“With money so tight in my city, training is at a standstill, and Laserfiche is new to us. A user group is going to fill a gap that may have otherwise caused the entire program to grind to a halt,” McGrath says, noting that she’s already working on starting her own chapter. “I’m the sole IT person in Northampton working on all facets of Laserfiche from installation and training to system administration,” she explains. “I want to make sure my users are as involved as possible and I foresee the user group as being a great tool in that effort.”

The idea to host a virtual regional user group was inspired in part by the success of regional user groups in Virginia, as well as the very real need to get training and share best practices when budgets have been cut and staff need to do more with less. As McGrath puts it, “Like my city clerk says, ‘With Laserfiche, I really will be able to do the work of five people with just three.’”

The virtual user group included an Avante demonstration by Laserfiche staff to show how Workflow can reduce the costs of manual business processes, and do so in a way that simplifies purchasing, administering and supporting the system.

The Quick Fields video tutorials located on the Laserfiche Support Site

The Q&A session that followed turned into an ad hoc tour of the Laserfiche Support Site to track down specific issues and reference video tutorials. McGrath, for instance, had trouble entering a pattern matching expression setting up a Quick Fields session. Between being able to refer to video tutorials and compare notes with other users who’d run into the same problem, she found her answer: “I had square brackets instead of round,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s really good to have someone to bounce my code against.”

McGrath says as an IT person, she’d like to be able to interact online with other administrators in the future. But right now, she sees how valuable a local group will be. “I can see if something needs training, we can set up training and offer it to our whole user group,” she says.

Did you know you can download the Gilroy case study from the Support Site's "Case Study" section?

“I’m hoping my users are going to hear little things and get ideas,” she adds. McGrath says a Planning Department staff member has already sent her a link to a past Laserfiche GME about Gilroy, CA, where staff are using an integration between the bank’s check-scanning utility and Laserfiche to process checks —ultimately reducing bank fees by 56% and eliminating three days of “float” time—and wondered if they could do the same. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to set all this up?’” she jokes, “But really, the more our users pick up, the more they’re going to get invested in using Laserfiche and the more they’re going to take away from it.”

The next meeting of the Northeastern Virtual User Group is scheduled for March 2nd. Membership is open to all Laserfiche users located in the Northeastern United States (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont). Join now.

If you’re interested in joining a Laserfiche User Group in your area, please post on the Laserfiche User Group Forum on the Laserfiche Support Site.

Adds Patrick Sanchez, Business System Support Analyst for the City of San Bernardino, CA, Water Department, “I’ve been going to different workshops for about four years and I get as much out of four or five hours of a Laserfiche meeting than I do from a couple of days at other kinds of seminars.”

So whether you seek information to enhance your own skills, want to share your expertise or just want to tell the world how much you love Laserfiche, visit the Support Site User Group Forum today and get started with a User Group!

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then we were looking at a new program, new processes and new documents for this Housing Affordability Grant program. Applicants send in a signed application with a copy of their federal return, which we must retain. When they are entered in the database designed for this process, a “cover sheet” is printed and placed on top. Since the cover sheet is the same format for all the documents, it was an easy Quick Fields fit. But we didn’t want to have to try to OCR the name and other data into the Laserfiche document template, because it’s already available in the program’s database and user entry or even OCR entry would potentially lead to errors and repairing. 100% accuracy could be achieved only by using the database data. So, we have Quick Fields OCR the parcel number and go get the name and other information from the database based on the parcel number match! So simple and yet, without the right tool, a complex programmatic issue!

More to come very soon about a Virginia Statewide User Group Seminar Dec 1st in Chesterfield, VA. Stay tuned ….

• Laserfiche Luminary and Laserfiche User Group Leader Rosalind Collins shared news from the Central VA User Group, including information about their upcoming September 30th meeting.
• Laserfiche Luminary and Laserfiche User Group Leader Alondo McClees of the Hampton Roads, VA, User Group shared what happened at their August 20th meeting. Alondo also shared a link to their User Group Website, for anyone outside of the area who’s interested in what’s going on!
• Laserfiche Presales Supervisor Pieter Nauta discussed what happened when the Laserfiche Institute hit the road for Regional Training in Ghana, West Africa.
• Laserfiche Account Manager Morgan Wheeler shared news from the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association Annual Convention – an event typified by the state’s new slogan, “Live Like You Mean It!”
• Don’t forget you can get new blog entries – along with all the articles posted on the News Portal – delivered directly to your e-mail account by signing up for e-mail updates.

Would you like to contribute to the Luminary Blog? It’s a great way to share your experiences with the rest of the Laserfiche community. Contact Melissa Henley at melissa.henley@laserfiche.com for more information.

Training will cover electronic records, both scanned documents as well as other electronically stored records (such as databases, Word files, Excel, etc). Retention and destruction requirements and using the retention schedules will all be included as well.

One of our members, Corey Smith, from the Library of Virginia, has provided some information that provides excellent background and will help everyone attending come prepared with specific, pertinent questions.

Corey says:

“As your primary interest is with electronic records that are scanned and in a database, I would like to mention that records follow the same retention period regardless of format. Caveats come into play as retention periods differ and some records may not be the best candidate for a particular format. For example, a record with a 50 yr retention would not be recommended to kept on a CD. The life expectancy of a CD is only 20 yrs. Because of this, anything with a permanent retention or with a long retention would not be recommended for a CD format.

“On our LVA Website, you can access our updated Electronic Records Guidelines that can hopefully provide some additional information for your benefit.

“To give you an idea of what’s considered personal identifying information, under section “C” of 18.2-186.3 in the Code of Virginia, it defines certain types of personal identifying information.”

If you’re in the Central Virginia area, we hope to see you at our User Group meeting!

Our Agenda:

• Welcome/introductions
• Group business & info
• Lightning Talks (Mini-Success Stories) – each person has up to 3 minutes to talk about something cool they learned or did with Laserfiche recently
• Library of Virginia presentation, followed by questions from attendees

For directions to the meeting, visit the Albemarle Website. Of course refreshments will be provided!

In typical fashion, the meeting provided those 3 key elements to the success of everything: food, folks, and fun. But in the midst of all of this frivolity, a lot of information was shared, too.

Debbie Wolff started the meeting out with a discussion on budget-saving/cost-cutting measures which can be realized through business process optimizations. This discussion led to some ideas about ways the group could discuss this topic regularly, including through our established user group Website.

We then moved on to a permitting demonstration by Jonathan Kim, a Presales Engineer with Laserfiche. His Web demonstration consisted of walking us through the process of applying for a permit to install a new water heater, from citizen, to government, and back again, using Laserfiche Workflow to automate the process. What a great advantage it was for both Laserfiche and our User Group to have someone on the west coast do a demonstration for us on the east coast without having to go through airport security!

We wrapped the meeting up with some updates from one of our local value-added resellers, Unity Business Systems, as well as some updates on what was “going on” at Laserfiche by way of Melissa Henley, lead marketing writer at Laserfiche as well as one of our user group’s strongest cheerleaders.

The great attendance and positive response at the meeting, as well as an exciting agenda for our next gathering have all signs pointing towards a bright future.

All aboard!

“It’s all about the ROI,” says Laserfiche Luminary Alondo McClees, co-chairperson of the newly-formed Hampton Roads Laserfiche User Group (HRLUG) and Technology Systems Coordinator, City of Norfolk Commissioner of the Revenue.

The HRLUG hosted its first quarterly meeting in February, which inspired McClees’ co-chairperson Debbie Wolff, Records Manager for the City of Hampton, to share her tips for little efficiencies. “My goal for this year is to continue to help people change the way that they work by changing how they think about their work,” Wolff explains. “Laserfiche is fundamental in that.”

Alondo McClees, co-chairperson of the Hampton Roads Laserfiche User Group (HRLUG)

McClees, who offered his own recap of the HRLUG’s first quarterly meeting in the Laserfiche Luminaries Blog, says user groups are as much a chance to give back to the user community as to learn from it.

“There’s a lot of expertise in the room when you get 60 people together,” he says. “It can actually be very humbling. I think, ‘Wow, we’ve really done a lot [using Laserfiche] in four years and there are people here who rolled it out last week. The efficiencies back then apply even more now.”

He credits the user group with focusing his time management– even when he doesn’t think he has the time. “It forces me to make it a priority.” He’s looking forward to next month’s Q2 meeting and an RME demo from reseller UBS. “I’m not an expert at all [at RME] but having it at the meeting makes me spend that time doing the research.”

Keeping Up the Conversation

Users aren’t the only ones benefiting from user groups; resellers learn as well. “The meeting before last we spent a lot of time covering best practices in a PowerPoint,” says Bob Cody of Datanet Solutions, which hosted the San Bernardino Laserfiche User Group last month. “We had the audience fill out a questionnaire and they told us they wanted more demonstrations, so this time we only had 13 slides – then three hours of live software demos.”

For Cody and his clients, user group meetings are a way to address individual concerns in a group setting. “We can answer specific questions without getting into the deep weeds. Even if people are relatively new to using Laserfiche, they still appreciate that the question was asked. They can all learn something.”

One such user is Patrick Sanchez, Business System Support Analyst for the City of San Bernardino Water Department. He left the March meeting with a fresh understanding of how to set up his HR folders. “We had the folders listed by each employee. Then I saw how you could just do it by the letter of the alphabet. So instead of 266 folders, you have 26. It keeps a much clearer folder structure.”

He found the group atmosphere inspiring, he says. “It gives me a perspective to how other people are using their system. Your creativity’s really your limit.”

When asked why users should attend user groups, Sanchez offers two reasons.

“First, if you want your system to do something and you don’t quite know how, just ask. Even though you might be able to figure it out on your own, you’ll get the best possible answer,” he says. “The second reason to go is just to see the advances in the next version [of Laserfiche]. I know with 8.0 people were like ‘Ooooh,’ but it’s been out for a year, it’s stable and it works.”

He adds, “I’ve been going to different workshops for about four years and I get as much out of four or five hours of a Laserfiche meeting than I do from a couple of days at other kinds of seminars.”

Laserfiche-User-Group-In-A-Presentation Inspires Laserfiche-User-Group-In-A-Bag

So, how do you start a user group? Laserfiche Luminary Rosalind Collins, Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville, VA, offered an ad hoc how-to manual with her “City of Charlottesville: Forming and Leading a Laserfiche User Group” presentation at this year’s Conference (which is available, along with all the other conference presentations, on the Laserfiche Support Site). The message: have food, have focus and have fun. Adds Collins, “Especially at your first meeting, keep a record of who attended and be sure you get new people’s names and e-mail addresses.”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville and the leader of the Charlottesville User Group.

She’s especially looking forward to “lunch-n-learns” about Laserfiche 8 that reseller UBS has planned, as well as a “Searching Tips & Tricks” presentation at her next user group meeting next month. “Everybody wants to know more about searching – from template to text, easy to advanced, so I’m working with UBS to put that together.”

Collins was a shining light in the formation of her Charlottesville User Group, and has been a major inspiration behind the forthcoming Laserfiche-User-Group-in-a-Bag for new user groups. So far the idea is to fill a snazzy Laserfiche laptop backpack with templates for meeting agendas, flyers and presentations, include nametags and other giveaways, and also provide a leader’s guide with tips, tricks and best practices for running your own user group. Keep reading the UserNews for information on when the User-Group-in-a-Bag will be available.

If you’re interested in contributing, or would like to get on the list to receive the User-Group-in-a-Bag when it’s released, please e-mail your contact information, ideas or suggestions to melissa.henley@laserfiche.com or hobey.echlin@laserfiche.com.

We’d also love to hear from you and so would the rest of the Laserfiche user community. You can share ideas, network with other User Group leaders or ask questions on the User Group Forum, located on the Support Site.

In spirit of the Laserfiche community, if you have something to offer, please do, and if you need anything from us, please ask.

Better still, I continue to get a steady stream of new requests from individuals interested in joining in next time, guaranteeing an even bigger affair when we meet again on May 7th at the same location.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to thank those who made this first event a successful one:

• Debbie Wolff from City of Hampton, who is serving as the co-chair of our group.
• Jan Stringer from International Cooperating Ministries in Hampton, who helped provide the goodies.
• John Lane from Unity Business Systems, our Value Added Reseller, who provided some of our freebies.
• Cameron Waite from the City of Norfolk, who helped with the minutes and note-taking.
• Rosalind Collins from the City of Charlottesville, who lent ideas about our possible group structure and logistics.
• Melissa Henley and Brian Lim from Laserfiche, who provided support and helped create our logo.

These are exciting times for us in Hampton Roads, and we look forward to these meetings as a cost-effective and beneficial way for us to share ideas, talk about best practices, and train each other.

Nien-Ling Wacker with Run Smarter Winners Kristin Nace and Bob Hensz of Texas A&M

“Yes, we can!”

That’s how Gary Agira, IT Manager for Uganda’s Ministry of Finance and Planning, concluded his 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference presentation, “Blazing the Trail for Document Management.”

Agira used the timely quote to detail successfully scanning and storing 10,000,000 pages of documents despite initial end-user resistance, government bureaucracy and even the unique problem of vermin lunching on paper files stored in rented warehouses. Agira’s story was humorous and poignant, emphasizing as it did that classic combination of pre-planning, faith, and follow-through to successfully manage, as he put it, “the horror of the heaps.”

But “Yes We Can” could just as easily have been the motto of the whole Conference, marked as it was by the palpable presence of the Laserfiche community. “When we put our mind to it, we can accomplish anything,” said CEO Nien-Ling Wacker in her keynote address, pointing out that in the year since being introduced at last year’s Conference, the Laserfiche Luminaries program had evolved into a forum for 250-plus of Laserfiche’s most outspoken and committed users—including all of this year’s Run Smarter Winners—and had its own online presence, the Luminary Lantern.

Nien-Ling challenged the nearly one thousand users, resellers, developers and staff who attended the conference to “go enterprise wide,” as she put it, “to extend your success from your department to your whole organization.”

The Conference’s 107 labs, demos and presentations empowered the Laserfiche Community to do just that. Moshe Schneider, IT Project Manager for CMS (HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for the US Government), explored ideas for managing his national healthcare project, spread out over 10 regional sites and repositories with 1,500 users. “The labs were all excellent,” he said, “I’m especially interested in Laserfiche 7 to 8 migration. I got all the information I need to make this thing work.”

Attendees at the Wednesday general session

Teri Hern, Program Coordinator from the University of Western Ontario, was attending her first conference. She took the enterprise-wide challenge to heart. “Just hearing all the other ways people are using Laserfiche has been really helpful,” she said. “We’ve been learning about Workflow. We even want to make it possible with e-forms, so we can eliminate paper forms altogether.” Her department, she added, is in the midst of a backlog conversion project before a move to a smaller office space. She’s counting on Laserfiche to lessen the need for a storage room. “Space is at a premium for us right now.”

Hern’s sentiments echoed many users’ throughout the conference: the need to do more with less in the face of constricted budgets and greater demand for services.

Laserfiche products like Workflow and Quick Fields, as well the integrated solutions offered by Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership (PDP) members, all pointed toward the kinds of automation essential to improving efficiency and maximizing resources.

Key to extending user success enterprise-wide, Nien-Ling said in her keynote address, was to “be IT’s sweetheart” in 2009. She cited an Economist Intelligence Unit survey showing that, especially in challenging times, the IT department’s need for central control and users’ need for local flexibility can at first seem hard to reconcile, even though organizations ultimately benefit from both.

Nick Van Valkenburgh, management information analyst for the US Army Cargo Helicopters Project Management Office, agreed: “Nien-Ling hit the nail on the head when she was talking about how IT looks at the situation differently,” he said. “We’re going through that right now setting up our repositories.”

Communicating and inspiring solutions to shared problems was central to the success of the Conference, so much so that questions not directly answered in classes could be brought by Users to “Office Hours,” where Development, Support, User Education, and Presales staff could address specific areas with users one-on-one.

“The Office Hours room was a big success,” says Manager of User Education Tammy Kaehler. “During breaks between sessions, the room was nearly overflowing with Laserfiche users, resellers, developers, and support staff discussing a wide variety of topics. During the sessions themselves, we saw a steady stream of Laserfiche customers engaging in more detailed discussions about our products.

“One exchange stands out,” Kaehler adds. “A Laserfiche user with questions about how to set up complex security in her repository stopped by. She ended up talking with security experts who gave her at least two solutions for how to configure her system. I can tell you definitely that Office Hours will be back next year with even more to offer!”

Hot-button topics like enterprise content management, Workflow 8 and transparent records management were addressed not just in classes and labs, but, in a new twist, also by the keynote presentation on the final day of the conference. The Laserfiche Players offered a live-action depiction of the HR onboarding process, teamed with a software demonstration. In a humorous way, the demonstration showed how Laserfiche can help satisfy the needs of everyone involved in every phase of that most universal of business processes, hiring, while simplifying the duties of all involved, from sunny recruiters to more pragmatic records managers.

Kelvin Ono, Information Systems Analyst for the Prosecuting Attorney, County of Hawaii, was anxious to repeat the success of other Hawaiian municipal offices in the document-heavy legal environment. “We’re really looking into getting everyone comfortable and confident using Workflow,” he said. Even Agira, having conquered “the horror of the heaps,” was looking to what’s next. “We’re still in the infant stages of setting up workflow,” he said. “I’m looking forward to taking a lot of what I’ve learned back home with me.”

Attendees benefited from 107 classes at this year's conference

The power and scope of the Laserfiche community in action was most evident in Rosalind Collins’ class “Forming and Leading a Laserfiche User Group.” There, the Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue for the City of Charlottesville detailed the added value of forming user groups to share best practices, and offered insights and tips from her experience. Her two helpful hints for a successful user group meeting? “Have everyone come up with a clear, simple mission statement. And serve food—that way people will show up.”

Collins also pointed out the helpfulness of Laserfiche staff, who set up a User Group Forum where user group leaders and members could share information. “It’s just an example of how supportive Laserfiche is of our efforts,” she said.

Attendees at Collins’ session ranged from a self-described “technologically illiterate” user inspired by the idea of learning from her peers to Laserfiche reseller Ken Woychesko of Ontario, Canada. “I want to know what it would entail if a user asks me to help them set up their own user group, so I can help them get started,” he said.

Even more direct with his reason for attending was the City of Anaheim’s Ron Smith, who was counting on user groups to do the heavy lifting as the City deploys Laserfiche to more departments. “We’re looking at a user group as a training resource during the next phase of our roll-out,” he said, echoing the conference’s twin themes: going enterprise-wide, but also doing more with less. Power Forward, indeed.

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

The problem Rosalind Collins faced as Charlottesville, VA’s Laserfiche Administrator was not unique.

As Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue, she championed the need for a document management solution that brought Laserfiche to Charlottesville in 2000. But after years of successfully streamlining business practices in her own office and others, she was frustrated more of the city departments weren’t realizing the cost and time savings she and her staff enjoyed. Collins faced a dilemma: did she throw up her hands in frustration or would she roll up her sleeves and do something about it?

The way she tells it, she did a little bit of both: She started her own regional Laserfiche User Group.

“Having ‘fought the fight’ for so many years in my organization to gain acceptance for the [Laserfiche] project–to expand it, to get funding, to add processes–I was weary,” she admits. “I decided to just keep my little piece going and not worry about anyone else. Then I attended last year’s Conference in Los Angeles. It was such a positive experience, it invigorated me. I thought, ‘If I can’t help my own organization, I can help others and I can learn from others and perhaps their experiences can help me move some things forward after all.’”

Growing up in a family active in theater and music gave Collins a strong belief in the power of community. “I learned early on that one person cannot accomplish nearly on their own what a community of like-minded people can do when they’re moving in the same direction. If you have a shared vision for the future and strong leadership to keep things moving, you can do amazing things.”

Thus inspired, Collins asked the city’s reseller, Unity Business Systems, for help. “UBS put me in touch with other users who were starting similar regional groups, and in fact took the lead in ensuring every region in the state had a user group contact and then coordinating a regular phone meeting between all of us,” she says. Collins took the lead and set-up and publicized their first meeting last fall. Collins jokes that the promise of free food may have enticed people to show up, but the knowledge sharing and mutual support kept them talking long after the hour ended.

“More than half of the group’s total members were able to attend, which is great for a first time out,” she says. “We very quickly agreed on a mission statement and what we expected to get from the group and how frequently we wanted to meet. That way we were all on the same page as far as the group’s role and the value to each other that we can bring.” Several attendees, she says, came away with answers to questions and real steps to take to alleviate problems and overcome obstacles. She was one of them.

“I got some very good advice for exporting Laserfiche to other departments and it’s already paid off! I am happy to report several departments looking at coming on board in the next two years,” she says. What was that advice? “A wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work – as opposed to telling them how it could work – because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds.

The irony being, of course, that she started the group to share her enthusiasm for Laserfiche that she felt hadn’t been as effective back home, only to wind up being inspired to direct that energy back toward home. But that, she says, is what community is all about. “Ultimately we are all a community,” she observes. “It’s a question of whether you nurture that spirit and communicate a vision that moves people.”

A self-proclaimed “Laserfiche evangelist,” Collins has been a very vocal member of the Laserfiche Luminaries community. Now she’s bringing her experience and insight to this year’s Conference as a featured speaker with her presentation “City of Charlottesville – Forming and Leading a Laserfiche User Group“ (Class IS110, scheduled for Wednesday January 14 at 10:45 am). Register here to attend.

“I’ll be sharing tips on having good meetings, how to keep the community thriving, pitfalls to avoid and a simple ‘start up’ checklist,” she says. “I hope to show people how easy it is to start a user group, so they’ll be inspired like I was. It may seem like a big job, but it doesn’t have to be and it can be so very helpful. The time you spend in setting it up and nurturing the group will pay off several-fold in the experiences, ideas and information you gain from the group.”

In fact, one of the things she’s looking forward to most about the Conference is something her fellow user groups encouraged her to do: “I had a meeting with the other regional leaders in Virginia and they actually empowered me to take some specific requests to Laserfiche staff and executives about how the company can support user groups,” Collins says. “I have some very specific and concrete ideas and requests to share.”