Document Management-Laserfiche Mobile Released

LONG BEACH, CA (Laserfiche)—June 20, 2011—Laserfiche today announced the release of Laserfiche Mobile™, an app for the iPhone that provides people on the go with the freedom to view and approve workplace documents, as well as capture and upload new documents with the iPhone camera—a more convenient and efficient form of Document Management.

“Laserfiche Mobile gives you the freedom to do everything you can do in your office from wherever you are, empowering you to work smarter and more efficiently,” said Tom Wayman, Laserfiche Vice President of Product Strategy. “In this day and age, you shouldn’t have to be tied to your office because all your information is locked away in paper files or the approvals you need are still based on paper processes.”

Laserfiche Mobile takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch screen, gesture recognition and high resolution interface to provide an immersive user experience with another outlet for Document Management. With Laserfiche Mobile, users can:

Create and upload new content with the iPhone camera.

Automatically crop, straighten and enhance captured information, with full text recognition.

Copy, move, rename, download, e-mail, print or delete content.

Browse for documents in a folder structure or search the entire repository.

Participate in workflow automation processes by accessing metadata fields.

“Laserfiche Mobile significantly changes content capture,” Wayman added. “For twenty-five years, Laserfiche has invested heavily in the development of innovative ways to capture information as quickly and efficiently as possible, with patented PhotoDocs™ photograph processing technology, lightweight Web interfaces and, now, an iPhone app that extends Laserfiche to one of today’s most popular mobile devices with a mobile form of Document Imaging Software.”

Laserfiche Mobile, which includes a built-in demonstration, is available for free download from the Apple App Store. Laserfiche Mobile operates with Laserfiche Web Access as a part of Laserfiche Avante and Laserfiche Rio systems. To accept connections from Laserfiche Mobile, Laserfiche users can download the free add-on, Laserfiche Mobile Add-On, from the Laserfiche Support Site.

About Laserfiche

Since 1987, Laserfiche® has used its Run Smarter® philosophy to create simple and elegant enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. More than 30,000 organizations worldwide—including federal, state and local government agencies and Fortune 1000 companies—use Laserfiche software to streamline document, records and business process management.

The Laserfiche ECM system is designed to give IT managers central control over their information infrastructure, including standards, security and auditing, while still offering business units the flexibility to react quickly to changing conditions with Document Management Software. The Laserfiche product suite is built on top of Microsoft® technologies to simplify system administration, supports Microsoft SQL and Oracle® platforms and features a seamless integration with Microsoft Office® applications and a two-way integration with SharePoint®.

Integration Improves Information Flow

The Virginia Port Authority hired Angela Ellis as its SharePoint Administrator in 2007, but it wasn’t long before her boss, Deputy Executive Director of Administration and CFO Rodney Oliver, enlisted her to start looking into enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management Solutions.

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint Document Management Software could do many great things for our organization, records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM solution it selected had a seamless Document Management SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

Robust records management functionality.

The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.

Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.

Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on documents, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche Document Management allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”