Item: Laserfiche
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Edwards

Overall Satisfaction with Laserfiche

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Laserfiche was being used in our City Government to comply with state public records laws. While the heavy users was the City Clerks department, all departments in our city used the system to store their records. The building department used it to store large building plans while the HR used it to securely store HR documents. We also had the WebLink piece and allowed our residents to view select documents via the web from home. This greatly reduced the number of public records requests for things like meeting agenda and meeting minutes. This allowed us to clean out over 4 rooms that were being used as storage and turn them into new office space. This also greatly reduced the time to locate documents since everything could be indexed and searched for. A large public records request went from taking weeks to only a few days to complete.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Document Security
Organization Wide Access
Redactions
Search Indexing
Document Scanning / Clean Up of Scanned Documents

Cons

Connection with Scanner (Often would loose connection to the scanner)
Weblink Sessions (Often would open multiple sessions for each AOL user)
Better Whitelabeling / More Customizations

Return on Investment

Time to locate records was greatly decreased.
Self service across multiple departments and even for residents. No longer needed staff to pull documents.
Ability to clear out record rooms and utilize the space for offices.
Less fines for public record violations.
No longer needed off site secure document storage. We were able to scan these documents and store them securely in Laserfiche.

Alternatives Considered

MS SharePoint

I was not a part of the initial decision making process for this software, however, we did compare if we could replicate the features of this software with Sharepoint. While we did have Sharepoint and had a Sharepoint developer on staff, we found that this software had many more features. Sharepoint was a glorified file system, while Laserfiche was built for document management. There are not a lot of strong competitors out there for Laserfiche and I do not see anyone easily being able to offer what they offer.

Likelihood to Renew

The support team at Laserfiche is great. They are quick to respond and can have the right person work with your team to fix any issues that come up. The other reason is our heavy use of the system has over half a million documents stored, totaling tens of millions of pages stored. Simply put, it would be very difficult to switch, but then again, why change from something that works great.

Likelihood to Recommend

Laserfiche is a great system for organizing a large amount of documents. The ideal organization that would use Laserfiche would be someone who has many documents that they want to be searchable and stored digitally. Laserfiche is amazing when it comes to governments and complying with public record retention schedules. This software is easy to manage, however, you will need a tech team to help set it up and support it. Laserfiche is not a great system for "working" documents. It is better suited for record keeping of documents that have been finalized. If you have a large amount of paper documents, Laserfiche is very easy to scan in all your documents and store them. There are also many services that will do the scanning for you and can easily be uploaded into Laserfiche.

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Local Government Public Records Savior!

Software Version

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