City of San Luis Obispo
Dedicated to Public Service and Laserfiche Automations
Located on the Central Coast of California about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the City of San Luis Obispo (SLO) is home to more than 47,000 residents.
The City of San Luis Obispo started working with ECS Imaging in 2012 when they ran a competitive bid process to consolidate the City and the Police Department to one Laserfiche Solutions Provider. ECS Imaging was selected as the best choice to merge and support their Laserfiche Systems.
In 2019, ECS provided professional services to develop an integration be-tween Tyler EPL (formerly EnerGov) and Laserfiche. The integration was created by ECS Imaging and allows the City to centralize long-term and archival storage of EPL documents by automatically filing them into Laserfiche. The integration automates the process for sending documents to Laserfiche in an intelligent way – through dynamic routing – that stores incoming documents into an easy to browse folder structure in Laserfiche. Additionally, the ECS integration utilizes existing index information extracted from EPL to attach fields in Laserfiche to make searching fast and efficient.
Once documents or files are stored in EPL, they are immediately transferred to Laserfiche. Only a stub of the record (logical document) remains in EPL as the physical file is stored in Laserfiche. When the document is accessed from within EPL the document is opened with any of the Laserfiche web clients, e.g. WebLink or Web Client.
The Tyler EPL Integration by ECS Imaging provides the following functionality:
- The ability to synchronize index information of a document.
- If a document record’s index information in EPL is updated, the integration will automatically update the index information in Laserfiche.
- The ability to synchronize the deletion of a document.
- If a document record in EPL is removed, the integration can also remove the document from Laserfiche.
- The ability to access related documents in Laserfiche from Tyler EPL
- Direct integration using the EPL API and the Laserfiche API
- Direct integration reduces issues with compatibility and long-term stability, upgrading either the EPL or Laserfiche systems.
Prior to the integration, permitting records were stored on several network drives and it was difficult and time-consuming to locate the permanent copies of these final records. The integration ensures that the final copies automatically end up in the same Laserfiche repository.
“Laserfiche has given us a central repository that is searchable and allows us to comply with retention schedules set by the City Clerk,” said Josh Erquiaga, Information Technology Manager for the City. “Our integration with the Enterprise Permitting and Licensing application (EPL) ensures that final documents (like permits) are stored appropriately in one location.”
The public can browse and search dozens of document types on demand using the Laserfiche Weblink Public Portal.
Another integration ECS developed for the City involved the creation of a workflow with a custom activity that pushes data collected from a Laserfiche form into an Excel file in a SharePoint library.
The workflow does the following:
- Sets a trigger and schedule to initiate a process to read index fields in Laserfiche.
- A custom-built REST activity utilizes the SharePoint API to identify the Excel file to be updated.
- Update Excel file based on column fields and empty rows.
To expand the system to other departments, the City uses small pilot projects to show what Laserfiche can do and demonstrates the success of these programs before moving into other departments.
Future projects for Laserfiche include the continued expansion and use of forms within the organization for public facing forms. They will also be looking at integration with digital signature providers.
Josh recommends that organizations just starting out with Laserfiche, “spend time to train your technical support staff and find a good vendor to provide support. Laserfiche is very powerful if you take the time to properly configure it.” Additionally, he said, “We have been pleased for many years with the support that ECS Imaging provides for our Laserfiche system, as well as the training classes they have provided to City staff.”
