Building the Laserfiche^® Community

This issue of the User News focuses on strengthening the Laserfiche^® user community. Recognizing that advancing the use of our products through the exchange of ideas breeds innovation, we use our Product Focus to announce the launch of the PDP Marketplace—a vehicle to publicize innovative application of Laserfiche products—as a critical step in building that community. As solutions evolve to address common issues in municipalities, healthcare facilities, financial offices and other businesses, users benefit from the innovations and experience of other users across the country facing similar challenges.

We encourage our users to take advantage of every possible opportunity to strengthen their skills and benefit from the Laserfiche community, so in this issue we offer a training update from Laserfiche Institute director Jereb Cheatham.

The 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference is the Institute’s most ambitious project, making the insights of experts, VARS and other users available to the community while offering expanded hands-on training to accommodate more users. Cheatham also outlines an expanded training schedule for June and July.

We also offer three articles aimed at broadening the knowledge base of the Laserfiche community. By sharing concrete experiences that can be applied or adapted to common situations, our users provide critical insight into meeting daily challenges.

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Laserfiche Conference and Training Update

By Jereb Cheatham, Director, Laserfiche Institute

2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference:

The 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference will coincide with the release of Laserfiche 8. In order to launch our biggest release ever at our biggest conference ever, we’re planning a single conference and expect to bring more than 1,000 members of the extended Laserfiche community together at one time. While most people are excited about the new features and functionality Laserfiche 8 will offer, there’s inevitably some concern about migrating to a new platform. To mitigate this concern, we’re significantly expanding our hands-on lab sessions and improving the way information is presented in all sessions. To accommodate the anticipated demand, we’re increasing lab capacity to 50 students, but we’re adding large flat screen monitors for every 3 laptops to make it much easier to follow along with the presenter. In the presentation sessions, we’re using four plasma screens in place of a single projector so there won’t be a bad seat in the room. We’re already planning the sessions to make sure customers who come to the conference find answers to all their questions about using, configuring and migrating to Laserfiche 8.

2007 Regional and Advanced Training:

The Institute has expanded its training initiatives this year, based on feedback from customers at the conference in January. We’re continuing to offer User and Administrator training throughout the country and we’ve introduced Advanced Training at the Laserfiche Training Center in Long Beach. Advanced Training offers customers the chance to increase their knowledge on specific subjects and holding the classes in Long Beach means the classes are taught by experts. The advanced training classes are a full day and we offer five different courses in a week so customers can make the best use of the trip. We offer pretty aggressive discounts to customers who register for multiple classes in a week. We’re also bringing the Institute on the road by partnering with Laserfiche resellers to offer our hands-on training at the user conferences they sponsor. The net effect of these initiatives is that we’re able to offer more classes in more locations, which should translate into more customers getting the training they’ve been asking for.

Training classes scheduled for the near future include:

More information about the classes offered by the Laserfiche Institute can be found at: http://www.laserfiche.com/support/index.html.

Laserfiche Document Management Brings Robertet, Inc. Up to Speed

Sometimes, a little innovation can go a long way. That’s the case with a recent Laserfiche installation with one of the world’s oldest makers of fragrances and flavors, Robertet.

The 150-year old firm needed some way to readily access some very important papers it kept in notebooks at its US headquarters. Many of its operations were completely computerized, but not information in the notebooks, which held safety specifications about the materials they buy to make perfumes smell sweeter and soft drinks taste better.

According to federal guidelines, those documents, called material safety data sheets, had to be stored for some 30 years and Robertet wanted a safer way to store them. The company also wanted an easy way to store new material safety data sheets that came into the offices from time to time, and it wanted them stored in a document management system that would automatically index them in a way that would make them easy to find and retrieve.

Not a job for ring-bound notebooks. It would take a flexible document management software package and an installer that knew how to take advantage of that flexibility.

Champion Workflow Systems in Pine Brook, NJ, has 18 years’ experience in document solutions and network and Web services. Laserfiche is an industry pioneer whose document management software is helping thousands of government and business offices worldwide run more efficiently.

Robertet’s business applications—accounting, inventory, manufacturing and the like—ran on a MAPICS ERP with an IBM DB2 database. Champion wanted to install the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ Real-Time Lookup module to handle Robertet’s scanning and storage needs for the material safety data sheets.

Innovation Bridges the Gap

That’s where the innovation came in. Quick Fields could automatically populate several document index fields simply by having users scan and type in a short product code number. The only problem is: Quick Fields doesn’t support DB2. There was no way to get the material safety data sheets into Robertet’s MAPICS DB2 without typing them in by hand.

"No problem," said Gary Loew, Champion’s president. Working with Robertet Systems Manager Ed Lykins, Champion designed an interface between DB2 and Quick Fields that has Robertet staffers singing its praises.

They developed a table view in DB2 that contains all of the indexing information required to populate the Laserfiche template. The information required for indexing resides natively in the MAPICS DB2 database.

Any time a MAPICS transaction results in a relevant data change to the indexing information used by Real-Time Lookup, the view is updated, Loew says. Moreover, that updated view is automatically exported to a comma-separated variable file.

It is that CSV file that Real-Time Lookup utilizes for automating the material safety data sheet indexing process, Loew says. Employees need only enter a product code number. Real-Time Lookup accesses that number and looks up the remaining index information.

“Users love the fact that they are only required to make 3 mouse clicks and type a short code number. Quick Fields and Laserfiche take care of the rest,” Loew says. “This ensures minimal opportunity for data entry errors and standardized information in template fields.”

The emphasis on simplicity is not lost on Robertet staff trained on the new system, Lykins says. Simplicity was a prerequisite for the installation and Champion and Laserfiche came through with flying colors.

"One of the big things we needed from this system was it had to be easy to use, and Gary made sure it was," Lykins says. "We didn't want to have to train people for days to use this system. We needed to get the information on these documents fast and this system does that well."

Champion is equally impressed with Laserfiche.

“It speaks very well of Laserfiche when you can make that much happen with so little effort,” says Loew. “It’s really a very efficient system that we installed there.”

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Laserfiche Throughout City Government Makes HTE Integration a Success

Bob Trammel, IT Director, City of Bakersfield

Shortly after I came to work in Bakersfield, the IT division installed Laserfiche in the city. I had already installed it in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with advantages of the program. That was eleven years ago, and today thousands of citizens use it to access public documents over the Web. We use Laserfiche in all 19 city departments and that’s part of what makes our integration with SunGard® HTE so successful.

One great example is the way the integration works for the Bakersfield Department of Public Works Graffiti Unit and the Bakersfield Police Department. When someone calls in with a complaint about graffiti in the city, the goal is to get it off the street within 24 hours. The crew that removes the graffiti starts by taking a picture of it. Then they either paint over, sand blast or power-wash the graffiti, depending on the surface. The crew carries a portable color photo spectrometer on the truck to compute the color behind the graffiti, so they can match it if they have to paint the surface. They match the color and mix the paint right in the field. When the paint’s dry, you can’t even tell any graffiti was there and it’s pretty frustrating for the graffiti taggers.

Integration Brings Results

Using Laserfiche in all departments means that the integration really helps the city achieve results. We first integrated Laserfiche with the HTE Work Order module. In the Work Order system, the crew records their location, how much paint it took and how much time it took to remove the graffiti. That ties back into our payroll system for the labor costs and the purchasing and inventory system for the cost of the paint. Then the crew attaches the photograph of the graffiti to the work order, storing it as a JPEG in Laserfiche. When you click on the work order in HTE you can bring up the photograph.

Then the Bakersfield Police Department goes through the records and reads the graffiti. They’ve found that graffiti taggers frequently use the same language all over town. So everywhere they find that signature “tag,” they record it into the template as well. When they arrest the culprit, and in most cases it’s a kid, they search in Laserfiche for all the pictures that show that tag. Then they go back into the Work Order system and print out the cost of cleaning up all those instances of graffiti. The city files a civil lawsuit against his parents for the cost of the cleanup. That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures for all the graffiti over the years.

Prior to using Laserfiche this way, the city found itself in the situation of most cities—they could arrest a tagger and frequently the overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until the next arrest. The civil suit is a much better deterrent. We had a kid who was tagging plate-glass windows with a glass cutter. Every time he did that the bill could run as much as $5000 or $6000. He could sometimes do twenty or thirty windows a night. When his parents got hit with the bill, he got hit with a curfew. Adults who tag face even more severe consequences. One man lost his business in a suit.

Uniformity: A Key to Success

A big key to our success is using Laserfiche throughout the city, not just in a single department. We use a common folder structure for all departments. Within the folder structure, each department has its own folder. Within that folder are three more: Public—for everything the department puts out for the public to view, Department Access—available only to departmental staff, and City Access—available to any city employee. Any document that needs to be retained because of public records requirements should be put into Laserfiche.

There’s no need to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use. Sure, it’s great for public records but why stop there? Our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. The structure of Laserfiche enables you to provide security for these documents. For example, the fire department has a HazMat folder that only their personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.

We’re planning on expanding our installation in the future. We’re continuing our integration with HTE. We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that department can store pictures of code violations in the system. Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already “cold-load” auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily. We’re also looking at integrating our GIS system with Laserfiche.

Once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it. For example, you turn the code on in HTE, you tell it the name of the template field you want it to read (such as the work order number) and it searches Laserfiche for the proper value. We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating HTE and Laserfiche. That’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.

Dalhousie Student Union Relies on Laserfiche for Continuity

Q and A with Karen Kwan, Policy Analyst, Dalhousie Student Union

User News: What were the challenges you faced that led you to choose Laserfiche?

Kwan: We have an extremely fast-paced organization with high turnover in leadership. Five student executives and close to thirty councilors command the organization’s direction and, typically, serve one-year terms. The majority of business that the Dalhousie Student Union (DSU) conducts, however, has a life span exceeding the terms of both executives and councilors. Currently, the retention of institutional memory and the responsibility for the yearly carry-over of the DSU’s business lies with its 11 full-time staff members.

User News: What was the process that led to your installation?

Kwan: We actually went through two years of planning and research with council, executives and staff. Beginning with “best practices” research and continuing with conversations with the Dalhousie University Medical School’s IT Department, which was already an avid Laserfiche user, the University and public archives of Nova Scotia and the Dalhousie School of Library Science, the DSU was ready to discuss implementation. IKON, our reseller, was instrumental in helping us choose the right system for our needs and budget and within a couple of months we were up and running with Laserfiche. That made the DSU one of the first student organizations in North America to implement a digital archiving system.

User News: How has Laserfiche helped you meet the challenges you faced?

Kwan: Laserfiche helps us to bring new executives and councilors up to speed on the issues of the DSU by enabling them to access DSU files. By delivering the ability to quickly and individually access files, Laserfiche empowers new leaders to learn the background of current issues and initiatives and make informed decisions. It empowers individuals to do their own research, on the vast records of the organization. As a lobbyist organization, we need quick access to information and quick briefing on the background to an issue quickly. The digital system gives new executives the ability to quickly access information about initiatives and issues from previous years.

Since installing Laserfiche, we’ve been able to electronically store and fully search decades of DSU archive material. In addition to enhancing the research capabilities of the DSU through improved filing and quicker retrieval of information, we’ve used the system to better preserve the organization's institutional memory. The DSU plans to expand this system to other departments and staff.

We rely on Laserfiche for speedy document retrieval. The DSU has over 30 internal committees and 220 student societies as well as a very extensive relationship with media, all levels of government and the university. The DSU also has revenue-generating contracts and services, so it’s an absolute necessity for us to know past precedence on all legal and financial matters. Laserfiche helps us keep historical records of these relationships.

We also use Laserfiche as a tool to achieve more financial and operational accountability as an organization. With Laserfiche, we have streamlined our archives and made retained documents available in a more rapid and systematic way. This access is especially useful during reviews of certain policies, services, financial audits, legal and regulatory matters, governance and the like. Access to DSU financial and operational information can act as a preventative measure against potentially unreasonable decisions.

User News: Was space for paper storage an issue?

Kwan: Yes, and Laserfiche helped us to both save paper and become more organized. The DSU is housed in a fairly small office for an organization of its size. It’s unlikely that we will be expanding into a larger physical space in the near future, but the DSU continues to produce and collect many files. Laserfiche helped minimize paper by accommodating systematic file sharing. We’ve been able to make people conscious that sometimes there is no need to print a document stored on the system. We’ve begun to ask, “Do we want to keep the file? What value does this file have on our organization?” The tendency in the past was to keep everything, and to keep multiple copies with no unified filing structure. Multiply that by eight offices, and you begin to see a need for a digital document retrieval system.

We are the first established student union organization in Canada with documents dating back to 1844, and are part of a school that is one of the oldest universities in Canada. Our student newspaper The Gazette is the oldest in Canada, which speaks to the significant weight we place on our records and archival material. We are still in the planning stages of determining retention periods for our records as well as determining what will be archived, and/or transferred to the University Library Archives (where all of our vital, historical records and artifacts end up).

User News: Are there any practices you’ve developed that might be useful to others setting up a Laserfiche repository?

Kwan: For the DSU, keeping things centralized is the key to maintaining a successful file system. Because of the high transition rate in our organization, we need to organize our files centrally and locate them easily. Within the Laserfiche repository, we have a “dump and run/holding” folder where people can temporarily put documents in the system before they’re categorized. This encourages people to be active participants in the system, without worrying about misplacing files. We then have a separate person follow up by OCRing documents, creating templates and placing the files in the right folder. All our organizational filing mirrors the Laserfiche repository structure, including the file structure on each computer desktop. We encourage everyone in the organization to file using the same file folder names.

The Research Department, which keeps track of all of the original hard copy files, makes all the repository composition decisions and relays the changes to everyone else. At every chance, those involved with Laserfiche champion the system by reminding people to file frequently and correctly by doing “spot checks,” having informal conversations or playing “search games,” where the first person who retrieves a certain document gets a prize! These practices are useful in reminding people that the system is active and is fulfilling an educational component by actively engaging them in learning how to search for documents.
 
User News: What other concrete benefits of Laserfiche can you share with us?

Kwan: As a result of installing Laserfiche, all DSU staff members have cleaner offices and cleaner hard drives. And we’ve added a more professional image to our organization and are gaining a reputation as an innovative leader among student organizations across Canada. Gaining the capability to scan and share documents and retrieve them quickly has boosted our efficiency, helped the organization keep up with leadership changes and given us quick, easy access to the information we need.

User News: How does Laserfiche figure into your future plans?

Kwan: As we move into the future, we anticipate rolling out the system to our service departments, such as room reservations or the DSU bar. And as we expand, we also anticipate increased success in expanding our lobbying efforts, internal document management and the operational efficiency of the DSU, based on the positive track record of the Laserfiche system.

Run Smarter Awards Deadline Getting Closer

But you still have time to let us in on your cool Laserfiche innovations. The deadline for the Laserfiche Run Smarter awards has been extended to June 29, 2007. Winners receive a spotlight in an industry publication, a case study focusing on their ingenuity, and free registration at next year's Laserfiche Institute Conference. Details are available on the Laserfiche Website.

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The PDP Marketplace

The Marketplace is a component of the Professional Developer Partnership™, a new initiative from Laserfiche to make integrations more approachable for our customers. Our customers understand the value of integrating Laserfiche with the other applications they use regularly. They’re often reluctant, however, to move forward because of the difficulties associated with custom integrations. Cost overruns and even outright failure are not uncommon when attempting to create an ad hoc integration.

With the PDP, we’re inviting vendors of other software applications as well as independent integrators to create integrations with Laserfiche that customers can have demonstrated for them before they buy. This makes the integration much more out-of-the-box, and provides a much higher comfort level for the customer. As Laserfiche CEO Nien-Ling Wacker mentioned in her keynote speech at January’s user conference, we want the PDP to help turn the idea of integration from a monster to a teddy bear.

The Marketplace builds the Laserfiche community by expanding its knowledge base and publicizing innovative customizations and integrations. It’s where PDP members post the integrations and customizations with Laserfiche that they’ve created. It’s where users can share successful innovations for template fields, Quick Fields sessions, folder structures or other helpful configurations. Customers can take advantage of it to learn how better to set up their systems. They can also find out what integrations are available, read more about what each integration does and learn how to take the next step towards actually acquiring integrations they’re interested in. Customers can also request integrations they don’t see. It’s pretty easy for a software vendor to make a business case for an integration with Laserfiche if several of our customers have requested it. As we move forward, we’re also going to give customers the ability to post comments and rate offerings on the marketplace.

By giving our customers more options to run smarter, we strengthen the user community and offer more opportunities for innovation. Integration with Laserfiche can save a lot of time and money, so the more integrations that are available, the more opportunities our customers have to bring useful functionality to their organization. Sharing the success of particular configurations and strategies creates opportunities for other users to streamline their work processes and get the most from their installations.

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New Support Site Materials

The following publications are newly available on the Support Site. You must have a Support Site account to view these materials. Register your new account at https://support.laserfiche.com/reg/register_form.aspx or https://support.laserfiche.com/RegisterNewUser.aspx

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Using Local Image Enhancements in Laserfiche Quick Fields

Laserfiche Quick Fields allows you to configure image enhancements in two ways: as permanent enhancements, which will be saved as part of the image file itself, and as local enhancements, which are applied to the image for processing and then removed later. While permanent enhancements are useful for making the image more attractive and readable to the eye, local enhancements are good for changes that you do not wish to permanently save to the image, but that you want to apply to improve processes such as Zone OCR or Bar Code reading. For instance, you might want to remove a form from an image using Form Extractor to allow a Zone OCR process to more accurately read a section of the form, but you might still want the form to be visible in the image when you open the document in Laserfiche. For this, you would use a local image enhancement.

Local image enhancements are associated with one specific identification or process. For instance, if you configure a local image enhancement for one OmniPage Zone OCR process, the enhancement will only affect that Zone OCR; any other Zone OCR process will be unaffected. This allows you to configure exactly the local image enhancements you want for each process.

To apply a local image enhancement:

1. Create and configure an identification or image processing process, such as Bar Code or OmniPage Zone OCR.
2. Right-click the process and select Insert Local Image Enhancement. This will expand a menu with available image enhancements. Select the one you would like to add to this process.
   
   Note: You can also reach this menu by selecting the process, opening the Action menu, and selecting New Process and then Local Image Enhancement.
3. The local image enhancement will appear in the Session pane, under the process or identification to which you applied it. You can configure it normally in the Task pane.
   
   Note: Local image enhancements cannot be added to other image enhancement processes. If the Insert Local Image Enhancement command is unavailable when you select a process, make sure it is an identification or processing process, not an image enhancement.

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