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August 2006

Volume 4, Issue 8

877.790.1600

www.ecsimaging.com

Take advantage of disaster recovery:

Half off Laserfiche Plus

Now until September 29, receive a 50% discount on Laserfiche Plus. With emergency preparedness and disaster recovery as key considerations for all organizations, Laserfiche Plus holds real value for prospects and existing customers alike.

Plus Description:

Laserfiche Plus publishes enterprise information to CDs with integrated search and viewing capabilities. This allows portable access on PCs and notebooks without installing the Laserfiche network client. CDs provide simplified distribution without the costs and inefficiencies associated with paper-based systems. Laserfiche Plus CDs can be distributed to mobile staff, remote offices and clients on a royalty-free basis.

Archiving to CD is also a key aspect of disaster recovery planning. Data volumes backed up on CD can reconstruct damaged or destroyed information repositories, while the integrated search engine and viewer provide immediate access even while other network resources remain offline.

Inside this Issue

· ECS Workshop for IT Professionals

· Canoe Challenge

· Send/Receive Faxes in Laserfiche

· LF 7.2 Viewing Tips

· Image clean up options

ECS Imaging's Canoe Challenge

ECS formed 2 teams to race against other companies on July 30^th in Newport Beach.  A many thanks to Sandy Ching at Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District who invited us to participate in the IMUA Outrigger Canoe Club Corporate Challenge Fundraiser. We had a great time and look forward to next years event.

Team 1- Top Row: Kevin Young, Debbi Richards, Ken Moore

Bottom Row: Michele Waddell and Nikisha Simmons

First Heat: 1^st Place, Second Heat: 2^nd place

Team 2- Top Row: Charlie Groom, Vince Collins

Scott Allbert, Celia Clarke, Jeremy Doyle

First Heat: 2^nd Place, Second Heat 1^st place

User Meetings

ECS Workshop for IT Professionals

Attend a free workshop at the Laserfiche Institute in Long Beach to learn how Laserfiche integrations improve workflow. This workshop is targeted at IT professionals interested in integrating multiple technologies into Laserfiche.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Laserfiche Institute in Long Beach

Lunch Provided

To register email sales@ecsimaging.com

More info click here

ECS Annual Customer Conference

Join ECS Imaging this year at the User Conference for a full-day of training, demonstration, and networking. We're excited to introduce our new industry partners and new integrations to Laserfiche.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

8:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Hilton in Pleasanton, California

Conference Webpage

Laserfiche Webinars

Agenda Manager

Discover the latest features offered by Laserfiche Agenda Manager 7.1

· Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006
(10:00 a.m. Pacific)

· Wednesday, Sep. 6, 2006
(11:00 a.m. Pacific)

· Thursday, Sep. 21, 2006
(10:00 a.m. Pacific)

What's New in Laserfiche 7.2

An overview of the new and improved features of Laserfiche 7.2

· Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006
(8:00 a.m. Pacific)

The 18-min. Executive Session

Get fast facts on document management's value to your organization, the five most important big-picture benefits and the best first steps to take when considering a solution. Followed by Q & A.

· Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006
(11:00 a.m. Pacific)

· Monday, Aug. 28, 2006
11:00 a.m. Eastern (8:00 a.m. Pacific)

Document Management 101

Learn how digital document management helps you find files faster, reduce storage space costs and improve information security.

· Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2006
(11:00 a.m. Pacific)

· Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006
(11:00 a.m. Pacific)

ECS Services

Digital Recorder Importer ECS Search Tool Mug Shot Capture Six-Pack Creator ESRI 2-way Integrations Hosted WebLink Conversions

Custom Integrations ESRI, Permits Plus, CRW, H.T.E., Navision, Eden, Munis, Oracle, DataTel Scanning Services Microfiche/Film/Aperture Card Conversions Servers & Scanners Fax Server Solutions

Would you like to be able to send faxes from Laserfiche and/or receive faxes automatically into Laserfiche?

Here are some of the many benefits to having a Fax Server Solution provided by ECS:

1. Automatically receive faxes into your folder in Laserfiche.
2. Be able to send Laserfiche documents via fax.
3. Faxes received by your Customers/Constituents will never be skewed, have dots or speckles (noise) or lines across the fax. Faxes will almost be as pristine as a printed document.
4. Customers should rarely, if ever, encounter a busy signal sending you a fax. The fax server's lines will automatically roll over to a free line. In addition, the Fax Server can be set up to only allow internal Users to access some of the available lines to ensure some lines are dedicated only to inbound faxes.
5. Faxes should never be lost since the received fax will remain in the system for as long as the Fax Administrator specifies (based on auto-purge rules).
6. Should a Customer call and say they did not receive a fax, a user can re-send any fax with a few clicks of a mouse.
7. Labor Savings by eliminating the manual steps of filling out cover sheets, walking to the fax machine, standing in line and waiting for the fax to go through successfully.
8. Dramatic reductions in paper, toner, printer and maintenance costs.
9. No filing requirements since the Fax Server's Log can be used to provide acknowledgment of delivery and a fax can be printed, viewed or re-faxed at anytime.
10. Faxes can be systematically distributed to groups of users for faster, more efficient processing. You can set distribution to "Linear" (round-robin distribution) or "Balanced" (distribution according to user processing rates).

Granicus-Laserfiche Integration Available Now

The goal of this integration is to provide Granicus users with ability to transfer data prepared using Laserfiche's AgendaManager software into Granicus' MinutesMaker system, so that users can realize the full benefits of both systems with minimal additional effort.  Simplicity is a key objective, both in terms of the user experience, and in terms of the underlying mechanisms involved.  

Come check it out on October 3^rd at the ECS Annual Customer Conference where Granicus and ECS Imaging will demonstrate and discuss how the integration works.

New VisionAid ADF Kit

VisionAid is a maintenance kit for Visioneer and Xerox scanners. Includes

cleaning supplies and instructions for maintenance of your scanner.

The VisionAid Maintenance ADF Kit supports the following models:
Visioneer Strobe XP 450
Visioneer Strobe XP 470
Xerox DocuMate 250
Xerox DocuMate 252
Xerox DocuMate 262
Xerox DocuMate 272

Contents include:
2 ADF Pad Assemblies

1 bottle of Streak-Free De-Ionized Cleaning Solution
10 Line-Free Dry Cleaning Cloths (white)
3 Dry Cleaning Cloths (blue)
3 Scan Through Staticide wipes
10 Isopropyl Alcohol Pre-Moistened Cleaning Wipes
Cleaning instructions

Retail: $99.99

ECS Partners

Visioneer and Xerox

Licensed Scanners

Kofax Kofax Capture

Lifecycle and Barcoded Forms

Kofax Virtual ReScan (VRS) Recommended on every scanner

Fujitsu Scanners

2-way Integrations with ESRI products and Laserfiche client and web products

Integration with Granicus and Laserfiche Agenda Manager

Laserfiche E-Mail Encryption

Court Case Management

Check Scanning & Remittance Processing

Large Format Scanners

Using Sections in Agenda Manager 7.1

Laserfiche Agenda Manager 7.1 uses sections to organize the items in your agenda.  For instance, you might have sections such as Action Items, Board Recommendations and Other Business.  When a submitter submits an item for approval, he or she places it in the appropriate section. During the approval and preparation process, the item may be moved into a different section; however, the item will always belong to a section.

Sections are created in Microsoft Word using the Agenda Manager add-in. 

To create a section:

1. In Microsoft Word, open your agenda template and select the name of the section in the agenda – for instance, to create a section called Action Items, you would select the Action Items header in your agenda.

2. Click the Section button.

3. The highlighted name will be surrounded by Section tags, indicating that this is a section in the agenda.  Save the template to Agenda Manager to make the sections available to item submitters and agenda preparers.

Laserfiche Support Site

Free for all Laserfiche

Users with current LSAP.

Current Versions:

§ Client-Server 7.2

§ Plus 7.2

§ WebAccess 7.2

§ Quick Fields 7.1.1

§ Agenda Manager 7.1

§ Audit Trail 7.1

§ Email (Mapi) 7.1

§ Integrator's Toolkit 7.1

§ Scan Connect 7.1

§ Import Agent 7.0.1

§ Integration Express-H.T.E 7.0

§ Snapshot 7.0.2

§ WebLink 7.0.4

§ Workflow 7.0

When you submit an item to the meeting, you will be able to select the agenda section to which it will be added from the Agenda Section list.

Text extraction in Web Access 7.2

Web Access 7.2 now allows you to perform text extraction of electronic documents using IFilters just as the Laserfiche Client 7.2 does.  IFilters are interfaces between files of a particular type and an application that is trying to index them.  Web Access text extraction uses this interface to extract the associated text from a file; as with any text-generation method, this will make the file's contents searchable in a full-text search. 

Most IFilters are produced and distributed by the company that produces the application associated with the particular file type. Microsoft Windows includes IFilters for HTML documents, XML documents, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) files, and Microsoft Office files by default with Windows installations. For other file types, you will need to obtain the IFilters from individual companies.  For instance, Adobe writes the PDF IFilter. Many of them can be downloaded for free online.

Once you have obtained an IFilter for a particular file type, you will need to install it on your Web server.  When the IFilter has been installed on the Web server computer, Web Access will be able to use it without any additional configuration.  Users will be able to extract text from the file types that the IFilter is associated with using Web Access.  They can do so by selecting the document, right-clicking and choosing Extract Text, or by clicking the Extract Text button.

The text extraction button in Web Access 7.2

Viewing electronic documents in Web Access 7.2

You can now choose whether you want electronic documents to open in their native application by default, or whether you would prefer to open them through the Document Viewer.  Opening them in the native application will launch the electronic document immediately, while opening them through the Document Viewer will allow you to view and edit the document's metadata, its extracted text, and its images if it has been printed with Snapshot. 

Individual users can specify whether they want to automatically open the electronic document in its native application or view its pages in the Document Viewer.  To do so, select Document View from the Settings menu.  Select The associated application to open electronic documents in their native application, or Standard document display to open them as pages in the Document Viewer.  By default, electronic documents will open in their native application. 

An administrator can also configure the default globally.  To do so, navigate to the folder where Web Access was installed on the Web server and open the ASPs folder.  The default location is C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Web Access\ASPs.  Open the file settings.inc.  The line that controls the manner in which electronic documents are opened is:

Const DEFAULT_AUTO_OPEN_EDOC = N

If N is set to 0, electronic documents will be opened as pages in the Document Viewer; if N is set to 1, electronic documents will be opened in their native application.  By default, this value will be set to 1.  Note that setting this option will not prevent users from customizing the way electronic documents open in their own Web Access instance; it will simply change the default behavior.

Viewing document images in Web Access 7.2

Web Access 7.2 provides several new options for viewing image pages in your documents.  These options allow you to customize the way you see and work with documents in your repository when using Web Access.

Image Zoom
By default, documents in Web Access 7.2 will open with the image zoomed such that it fits the width of the image pane.  Web Access 7.2 now also features a list of zoom percentages and the option to fit to height or fit to width, available from a dropdown box in the Document Viewer.  Simply select the zoom level you wish to use in order to zoom in and out.

High and Low Quality Image Viewing
Web Access 7.2 features two image viewing modes.  Users can choose whether they wish to view high-quality images (which may be slower to load), or faster-loading, low-quality images.  Previous versions of Web Access only allowed you to view images in the low-quality mode.  This setting only affects the way the image is viewed in Web Access, and has no effect on the image page itself.  Because of this, it can be individually configured for different users, depending on the way they work with images.

To configure document-view quality, open the Settings menu and select Document View.  Under Open images using, select either High quality but slower speed or Low quality but faster speed.

Image Clean-up Options

The Image Clean-up Options dialog box allows an image to be temporarily enhanced prior to OCR processing. These temporary image enhancements allow the optimization of OCR results.  

Line removal

This image enhancement allows the removal of lines from an image.

o Horizontal:  Removes horizontal lines from the image. Characters that are damaged due to the line removal will be repaired.

o Vertical:  Removes vertical lines from the image. Characters that are damaged due to the line removal will be repaired.

The Line Removal enhancement does not ‘remove the lines' permanently from the image.  Consider it more like ‘Line Ignore'.  OCR hates lines around the letters and words it is trying to recognize.  Having lines ignored during the OCR process helps accuracy.  The stored image is not affected

Displaying only the latest version of a document

With Laserfiche 7.2, you can configure your Client so that you will only see the most recent version of a document.  This is useful in situations when there may be several versions of a document but only the most recent is relevant – for instance, if all versions of a document are saved in order to provide a history of changes, but you will commonly need to work only with the most current version.

By default, the Laserfiche Client will display all versions of a document in the folder browser, and will return all versions of a document that match your criteria in a search.  You can set the folder browser to display only the most recent version, and you can configure your search to return only the most recent version that meets its criteria.  These settings are configured separately, and do not affect one another.  If you configure the folder browser to display only the most recent version, this setting will affect all the folders in the repository; if you set this option in search, however, it will need to be set every time you wish to filter your search in this fashion.  As with all client settings, these options are specific to a particular Windows user on a particular computer, and will not affect other Windows users or other computers.

To display only the latest versions of documents:

1. In the Laserfiche Client, open the Tools menu and select Options.
2. Select Browser.
3. Under Options, select Display latest versions only.
4. Click Ok.

To return only the latest version of documents in search

1. In the Laserfiche Client, open the Search pane.
2. Under Customize Search, select Version.
3. Select the Limit search to latest versions check box.

Note: You do not need to run a version comments search to use the Limit search to latest versions feature; this search constraint can be used with any other search type.

Installing ScanConnect for Laserfiche Scanning 7.2

If you have uninstalled ScanConnect or need to reinstall ScanConnect at any point after the upgrade to Laserfiche Scanning 7.2, you can manually update your ScanConnect 6, 7.0 or 7.1 installation files to work with Laserfiche Scanning 7.2.  This process is provided in lieu of a Laserfiche ScanConnect 7.2 installation, as ScanConnect 7.2 is not yet available. This will require your ScanConnect 7.2 license (available on the Laserfiche Support site), and your original ScanConnect 6, 7.0 or 7.1 installation files.  The manual update will modify the original ScanConnect installation package to accept the new ScanConnect 7.2 license file. For complete instructions on manually updating the ScanConnect 6, 7.0 or 7.1 installation.

Note: If you have ScanConnect installed when you upgrade Laserfiche Scanning to version 7.2, your ScanConnect installation will automatically be updated as well. No further action is needed.

Creating rules and criteria in Laserfiche Workflow using Web Access

Laserfiche Workflow in conjunction with Web Access is a great solution.  Laserfiche Workflow routes documents based on changes in template fields.  Since Web Access is a fully functioning client, users with the proper privileges can change template fields in Web Access, just as they would in the Client.  Of course, the rules still need to be created with the Workflow Distribution Manager software, but once the rules and criteria are in place, the day-to-day use can take place over the Internet just as easily as it would on a Laserfiche Client-enabled network.

An additional benefit to using Web Access is the ability to send a hyperlink to the document.  Workflow's e-mail notification can take advantage of this, so users receiving the e-mails can simply click on a link and be taken directly to the document.  This makes participation in Workflow routing quite simple, as approvers need only respond to e-mails.

Save folder structure to be used again in different repositories or parent folders

This functionality can be accomplished by exporting the structure as a briefcase, and then importing it into the folders and repositories where you wish to replicate it.

To create a briefcase to reproduce a folder structure:

1. Open the Laserfiche Client or Web Access
2. Create an empty set of folders with the same structure and names that you will want to reproduce later.
3. Select the topmost folder of that structure. From the File menu, select Export and then Briefcase.
4. Type in your desired briefcase name.
5. If you are using the Client, click Options. Make sure that Current folder and its subfolders is selected in the Range box. Click Ok.
6. Click Save.
7. At this point, you can delete the empty set of folders.

To import a briefcase to reproduce a folder structure:

1. Open the Laserfiche Client or Web Access
2. Select the folder into which you want to place your folder structure.
3. From the File menu, select Import.
4. If you are using Web Access, select Briefcase from the sub-menu.
5. Navigate to the briefcase you saved with the file structure you wish to import.
6. Select the briefcase and click Import, or if using Web Access, click Save and then OK.
7. Your folder structure will appear within the folder, with all subfolders intact. Rename any folders as desired. The briefcase is preserved during this process, so you can use the same briefcase repeatedly to generate as many replicas of the initial folder structure as you need.

Why Meeting Type page doesn't allow select the date from a calendar

In fact, you can select any meeting date from a calendar by clicking on the More link associated with each meeting type. However, most of the time, Agenda Manager users are going to want the next scheduled meeting. This interface allows users to get to that meeting much more quickly than bringing up a calendar and selecting the date. At the same time, the calendar is easily accessible, allowing users to conveniently find meetings that are farther in the future.

The reason a feature like this is interesting is that it shows the level of thought that went into this version of Agenda Manager. Rather than put up the standard interface for selecting a date, the designers of Agenda Manager realized that an interface that presents upcoming meetings clearly would be an advantage for users, as those are the meetings they're almost always interested in. This is something worth pointing out when demoing Agenda Manager, as it's an easy way to show prospective clients that Agenda Manager was designed with a deep understanding of the agenda management process.

Enhanced scanning features in Web Access

Web Access 7.2 now has a full-featured version of Laserfiche Scanning that can be used to scan documents into a Laserfiche repository using Web Access.  Unlike previous versions of Web Access scanning, the scanning application available in version 7.2 is exactly the same as the version available with the Laserfiche 7.2 Client.  Users can download and install the scanning application directly through the Web Access interface. 

877.790.1600
www.ecsimaging.com

support@ecsimaging.com
sales@ecsimaging.com

Southern CA

3720 Sunnyside Dr. Ste.200 Riverside, CA 92506

Tel: 951.787.8768

Fax: 951.787.0831

Northern CA

4737 Imhoff Pl Unit 1B

Martinez, CA

Tel: 925.370.2456