Ventura County

August 25, 2022

Streamlining and Automating Across 8 County Departments in 8 years with Laserfiche

The County of Ventura is home to nearly 850,000 residents. Located northwest of Los Angeles, it is large by area next to the Pacific coast made up of residential cities, agriculture, and protected lands. Many of their county agencies need a digital solution that can make document management easy while automating manual tasks. Some of the larger departments use a legacy solution, but the cost and lack of new features have discouraged others from its use. Thus, their journey with Laserfiche began.

The County of Ventura has been using Laserfiche Rio enterprise platform since 2014 in various departments including the CEO, Risk Management, Public Works, Planning, Health Care Agency, District Attorney and Public Defender.

The County’s IT Services host the enterprise infrastructure, hardware, and management of the overall 510-user system. The District Attorney hosts their own Laserfiche application server with a secured trust with the County data center. Notable implementation elements include the integration with ESRI GIS for Public Works and the Laserfiche Hybrid Cloud Direct Share feature to easily share Laserfiche content with outside parties.

A large part of the success of the implementations in the County has been led by Ed Althof, the Deputy CIO for the Enterprise, Application, and GIS Services. He had utilized Laserfiche at various locations before coming to the County in 2011 and knew the value ECS Imaging would bring to the Laserfiche solution. Eight years ago, ECS began the digital transformation with the County.

Public Defender (PD) and District Attorney (DA)

Using Laserfiche Forms and Workflows to Streamline Legal Processes

When the Ventura County Public Defender’s (PD) and District Attorney’s (DA) offices approached us about creating processes that would make day-to-day operations more efficient, we were excited about all of the possibilities that Laserfiche could create for them.

Our team gathered the requirements of both divisions and consulted together to determine the best-automated solutions. In the end, we developed solutions to streamline the processes of both organizations and achieved significant time savings for employees across the board.

For the projects, we used Laserfiche Rio, Forms, Quick Fields, Workflow, Import Agent, and the SDK Toolkit. We were able to create automated processes making it easy for both the DA and PD to input and track subpoena requests, evidence documents, case files, and more. The processes make it easy for all attorneys involved in a case to markup and approve photo and document evidence pieces.

Everything is stored securely in the Laserfiche repository, so finding what is needed is never a problem. Jointly our developers integrated the County’s VCIJIS Judicial system so that users can access content from Laserfiche directly from the integrated criminal justice system.

Joint DA and PD collaboration to store and share new case content

Two-way integration with the County’s Judicial System VCIJIS leveraging the Laserfiche API’s SDK toolkit. Users can access Laserfiche documents from VCIJIS and metadata updated in both systems.
A joint escrow repository for the DA to share new case information with the PD. Workflow manages the process to move content from the DA to the PD repository. Workflow Diagram below
Multiple Laserfiche Forms used in both departments
The DA collaborates with the County’s local law enforcement agencies to be able to receive their reports electronically into Laserfiche rather than being hand-delivered on paper.

With these processes in place, the County of Ventura DA’s and PD’s offices have taken great strides towards maximum efficiency and collaboration!

DA Content Management Data Flow