We’re happy to announce that Laserfiche WebLink 8 is now available.

Laserfiche WebLink is a user-friendly public portal site for providing Internet access to documents. It can be instantly configured to show searches and lists that quickly lead users to what they are looking for—and to display a visual style that matches your existing Website.
Full story »

Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.

So much so that in just three years, Saco has set a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well.

So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
Full story »

When we last heard from York County, PA, IS Department Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey, she shared how the York County court system had revolutionized its business processes since implementing Laserfiche in 2005.

Since then, York County has turned into a flagship case study into just how much Laserfiche can do for a community given the chance to grow wherever it’s implemented. As McCluskey puts it, “It’s evolving.”
Full story »

This tech tip is a preview of unreleased software. The details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the final release.

WebLink 8 introduces the new WebLink 8 Designer, which enables you to customize the look and feel of your WebLink site with an easy-to-use utility. You can customize the theme of your site, the Welcome Page, navigation buttons, the Document Viewer, how search results are displayed, and other search options without writing any code. This tech tip will be a preview of the Theme, Welcome Page, Navigation, Document Viewer, Search Results, and Search Options tabs of the WebLink Designer. Full story »

To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.
Full story »

Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

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

The Challenge

The strict oversight of the Isle of Man Government’s Financial Supervision Commission (FSC) means that independent financial advisers require a secure, enterprise-wide platform for tracking and managing both paper and electronic records. Proliferating work process documents, extensive audits and strict records-retention rules leave many financial services firms struggling to maintain productivity in a highly-competitive industry.

For Jon McGowan, managing director of MAC Financial, these challenges multiplied with his business’s increasing success. With three major acquisitions in three years, McGowan and his staff were dealing with more customers, more work and significantly more paper. They needed a solution that would not only organize their records, but would also assist them in following compliance directives. Whatever solution they chose had to have enterprise capabilities, be able to manage a large volume of documents and integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable fast, efficient and flexible client service.

It took less than half a day for MAC Financial to implement a Laserfiche solution, enabling instant document retrieval and freeing up an entire floor of office space. Now, MAC Financial runs more efficiently, saving time, money and staff resources while increasing revenue.
Full story »

Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win.

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

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

With the strict oversight of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), independent financial advisers in the UK require a robust platform for tracking and managing paper records. Rigorous audits and record-retention rules, along with numerous work-process documents, leave independent financial advisors drowning in a sea of paper.

Regal Independent Financial Services Director Neil James and his co-directors were fighting a losing battle against rapidly-filling file cabinets and spiraling storage costs, all the while facing the strict compliance and retention pressures of operating in a highly-regulated environment. With files of up to 250 pages, easy searching was a priority, and physical storage space was at a premium.
Full story »

In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
Full story »

Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

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

With its Democratic government firmly in place, South Africa has become one of the African nations with promising oil and natural gas reserves that are safe for legitimate exploration. The country has an estimated tens of trillion cubic feet of natural gas underneath its wildernesses—a resource that, properly tapped, could assist in nation building.

So the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (PASA) went on a global sales trip of sorts last year, trying to interest outside oil companies in the country’s natural gas reserves. PASA representatives visited Johannesburg, London, Houston, TX, and Long Beach, CA, and now the agency has plenty of potential investors applying for exploration acreage. The problem, however, was managing all the associated paperwork.
Full story »

In order to minimize budgetary costs for taxpayers, local governments are forever searching for more creative and efficient ways to streamline operations. Toward that end, Upper Deerfield Township has turned to document management software to build a government database that’s turning its government paperwork into electronic images and its government staff into some of the most productive in New Jersey, according to one expert who knows a little about local government.
Full story »

We’re proud to announce the eight organizations who will be receiving Run Smarter Awards at the 2009 Laserfiche Institute Conference.

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

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

Running smarter sometimes means pacing yourself.

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

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