The Township of South Orange Village is a quaint residential community boasting authentic Tudor, Colonial, and Victorian homes, streets dotted with gaslights, beautiful parks, and a bustling Village center. The history of the town dates back to 1666, when Connecticut settlers landed on the shores of the Passaic River. Since those early days the population has grown to 16,964 (according to the 2000 Census).

“We have a very forward thinking community that has an ever-expanding thirst for information,” says John Gross, the Village Administrator and CFO. “Though we have a very good Web site packed with information we still needed to provide more and this required

we invest in a document imaging system.”

A team, consisting of Marjorie Smith, Village Clerk, Mauricio Garcia, IT Manager and John Gross, was mandated to select a document imaging system to not only satisfy OPRA (New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act) requirements but to provide residents with the information they were requesting. “Laserfiche® with WebLink is the tool,” John says, “that will give us the ability to provide a continuous ‘Information Stream’ via our Web site to enable residents to access it on their own.”

The search for the right imaging system began in 2003 and many systems were reviewed before finally selecting Laserfiche. When asked why Laserfiche was selected as the imaging system of choice, Mauricio explains, “Laserfiche was the most complete package we saw. It fit well into our infrastructure and the full text search ability of documents was by far the best we had seen. In addition, General Code fully understood how municipal government works, the type of documents we have and how we need to find them. The support and help we have received from General Code, from installation through operation has convinced me that we made the right choice.”

“It’s our intention,” says Mauricio, “that all departments will eventually be using it.” To date,

it is being utilized by Administration and the Clerk’s office. Jokingly he adds, “For the first time in years we can see the Administrative Secretary’s desktop.” All correspondence prior to Laserfiche was opened and photocopied multiple times before it could be distributed. With Laserfiche, the Secretary scans it once and distributes it electronically to all interested parties. “This alone,” says Mauricio, “has saved a huge amount of time.”

Next on the list of users is Purchasing which will utilize the Laserfiche Workflow module to electronically automate the current manual process of paper routing a purchasing requisition through the approval process, to the eventual mailing of the Purchase Order. “This is an eight-step process,” John says, “that consumes a huge amount of time that Laserfiche can reduce to minutes.”

In the Clerk’s office, Marjorie and her staff have embraced the Laserfiche system and are scanning day-forward all communications, Minutes and Resolutions, having already scanned Minutes and Resolutions back to 1999.

Says Marjorie, “Just two weeks ago a resident was before Council supporting a resolution for the non-lethal removal of deer. A member of the governing body thought such a resolution had already been passed several years ago, but I couldn’t remember if it had. I went to my Laserfiche system, keyed in a few key words and to my delight, in a minute or so, had located the appropriate resolution. That would have taken a couple of days to find without Laserfiche.”

Marjorie added, “Just the other day, I received a request from a Seton Hall University student who was writing an article and needed a particular resolution. Once again I keyed a few key words into Laserfiche and not only found the resolution the student needed, but three separate sets of minutes where the subject matter had been discussed.” This again, she says, would have taken half a day to collect.

"To me," says Marjorie, "the Laserfiche system has already paid for itself, and we've only just begun."

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