Laserfiche has two main editions: Rio and Avante: Laserfiche Rio is designed to meet the needs of large organizations that have more than 100 users. It combines content management functionality with business process management (BPM), security and auditing, unlimited servers and a thin-client interface. Add-ons include records management functionality, public Web portals and production-level document capture and processing.
Laserfiche Avante is an ECM suite for small to medium organizations with…
$540
per year per user
NetDocuments
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
NetDocuments is a document management solution from the company of the same name in Lehi, Utah.
Laserfiche is well suited to the submission of simple routine reports to create a record repository. We use it for routine transport reports, audit reports, and anonymous citizen complaints. It creates a simple chronological record of routine events that can be reviewed and easily stored and recalled. Because the reports are in PDF format, it is not well suited to anything that needs to be imported into a common database or amended after submission.
It is ideal where security is your number one concern or where there is a need to share securely across different physical locations. Speed is less than ideal in certain usage scenarios. It is limited by the speed of the internet and it can be difficult to pull large quantities of documents when researching or answering discovery requests, although, that being said, it can be addressed by maintaining your own secure server to contain a mirror of your online documents. But then the security for a mirror falls back on the organization.
While Laserfiche has some powerful development tools, it is difficult to manage configurations while promoting code across environments. For example, SQL connections and other environment specific resources have to be manually configured in each environment.
Laserfiche forms are a newer addition to the product family and could use some product maturity. While easy to use for simple forms, once your forms become more complex, you need to accomplish tasks by heavy JavaScript coding.
Delay. At times, there is a delay between saving a document into Netdocuments and actually seeing them in the appropriate workspace. Such a delay is caused by the system indexing the newly added file.
Netdocuments' servers slow down at times causing users to receive error messages. This can be quickly remedied, but can become a nuisance.
We plan on renewing Laserfiche for the coming year but also have been considering a scanning and document management solution that can be purchased from our new accounting system company, we are implementing the accounting system this year. It will be a couple years before we make a decision to stay with Laserfiche or change.
It has an intuitive design that feels very natural to any user that has ever used Outlook or Windows Explorer. There are multiple ways to perform every action in order to help users with various software experiences find the shortcuts and actions they seek quickly and effectively.
The product is simple to learn and adheres to well-known web user protocols. The NetDocuments team spends a lot of time talking to customers regarding how to improve their interface, and are pretty quick about implementing good ideas. The system is reliable and repeatable, and similar functions are laid out consistently and in formats that users are used to.
I am very satisfied with Laserfiche. I have found that certain larger jobs may are slow. This may also be related to our infrastructure environment. We have been able to tune Laserfiche to increase performance on larger jobs.
Performance, of course, is largely dependent on the underlying environment. Laserfiche does its part with multi-threading, taking advantage of multi-core servers on scanning, workflows, and bots. A SQL-Server back-end is suitable for small to medium-sized company, but may not scale to large, where Oracle would be the better choice. Workflows can be poorly written and perform recursive work slowing down the system. It's better to run batch type workflows at night when possible.
NetDocuments is a performant web app. It is reliable and provides all the functionality of a sophisticated document management system. It also can serve, through its APIs, as a base system for other applications, which enhances its value. Other vendors find the company easy to work with, and it consistently seems to be the first to offer new features and technologies to its customers.
I have never had to wait for help from Laserfiche. If I cannot find the answer online, I can easily send an email to a customer support representative. I have always been helped the same day and my questions have always been resolved. The Empower conference is always a great learning opportunity and the online resources and webinars are top-notch.
I've never had to contact support, but I won't give it a ten. We've had a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn't be fixed within 24 hours.
Easily accessible 24/7 so am able to complete courseware whenever time allows: Commute to work; waiting for friends or family; at night while relaxing [with a delicious glass of wine!]; whenever and wherever time and circumstances permit. Courseware is well written and presented in an easy to follow and understand format.
The core infrastructure of Laserfiche, and the end user experience, is vastly superior. OnBase has a TERRIBLE UI and administration console by comparison. The core architecture of OnBase is also more scattered, while all Laserfiche processes go through a single service. Overall, the Laserfiche product is easier and more intuitive to install, maintain, and use.
We switched to NetDocuments 11 years ago. So, to be fair and accurate... the OpenText product at that time was called PC Docs and the company (that OpenText acquired) was Hummingbird. I can't remember who owned iManage at the time. Anyway, NetDocuments was a superior product at the time, in general, and more specifically because the search and remote access features\functions were superior (and still are).
Laserfiche has increased the efficiency of our sales reps by giving making all of the historical sales deal information very simple and fast to retrieve.
Laserfiche has increased our efficiency with our AP department and gave department heads the ability to approve invoices where ever they are.
I would say the biggest ROI came with the transparency of the order process for new deals. Before there would be numerous phone calls made daily to find out where an order was within the process, and now you can simply look at all deals at any time.
