FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Elkhart County Health Department and Public Works had used Laserfiche document management for many years. Their usage of the system consisted of document storage, management, and retrieval. In mid 2007 the potential usage of the system grew when Symbiont selected Laserfiche to provide the document management portion of an EPA grant funded project for managing ground water. The projected included contracting the Laserfiche vendor (BOLT Document Management) to scan and index tens of thousands of pages of records and assist with integrating to the Laserfiche system. BOLT had successfully completed the scanning and was testing the integration with Symbiont when things came to a sudden halt.
Acting on a consultant’s recommendation the Elkhart County administrators had decided to consolidate several existing document management systems from different departments into one. Following a cursory review the consult recommended consolidating everything into Docuware. The county administrators followed the consultant’s advice and instructed the Docuware vendor to convert the existing Laserfiche document repository and replace the system with Docuware.
While conversions from one document management system to another are fairly common they do require a reasonable level of competence from the vendor performing the work. It soon became apparent that the Docuware vendor was having difficulty delivering the promised Laserfiche to Docuware conversion In spite of the fact that Laserfiche stores documents in industry standard TIFF image and SLQ table formats, the Docuware vendor claimed that the Laserfiche repository was “too proprietary for direct conversion” and claimed the only solution was for them to re-index every document image by hand keying – at an additional high cost to the county. When this claim raised questions from the county the consultant and the Docuware vendor contacted BOLT for help. BOLT responded by creating a conversion table specifically for performing the conversion operation.
Even after receiving the conversion tables the Docuware vendor continued to delay implementation of a functional system. Boxes of unscanned documents were piling up in the health department and now the EPA grant program had been stalled for almost a year. To make matters worse county employees missed the powerful and intuitive Laserfiche system and they were not pleased with what they had seen of Docuware. Faced with increasingly unhappy county employees and a stalled federal grant project, the county IT department repeatedly contacted the Docuware vendor with no results. Finally the decision was made to return to using the original Laserfiche system. The following day the Laserfiche system was once again functional, much to the relief of the county employees. At the same time the grant program designed by Symbiont came back on-line – now functioning as intended connected to a Laserfiche Web Link server. Over night the year long delays were resolved simply by re-enabling the system that was already in place and working fine in the first place.
Things are finally back on track in the Elkhart County Health and Public Works departments after more than a year of lost time and many thousands of dollars wasted on poor consulting, Docuware licensing, and pointless vendor fees. Regardless, the staff that uses Laserfiche every day couldn’t be happier.
