Town of Southold, New York - Laserfiche Installation Profiles - document management solutions from General Code; document imaging software; records management; indexing; electronic documents

Southold's official flag proclaims it the oldest English town in New York State. Founded in 1640 by Puritans from the New Haven Colony, Southold celebrated its 350th birthday in 1990! The picturesque Long Island town has accumulated thousands of paper documents relevant to that history, and Town officials wanted to provide efficient access to all of that information and a more efficient way to archive and share it with the public.

An electronic document management system was clearly the best solution, and they chose Laserfiche® from General Code. We worked with Town Clerk Elizabeth Neville, John Sepanowski from the Information Technology Department and Michael Verity from the Building Department to initiate the first phase of the project in the Building department. The goals were to reduce the amount of time it took to:

General Code's backfile conversion specialists scanned 26,000 Building Permit Files (250,000 images) in record time. As each file entered the system, it became fully searchable by permit number, address, hamlet, and Tax Map Number. The instant searches made it possible to fulfill requests for information so efficiently that Southold was able to respond to over 100 requests that came in as General Code was processing the documents. And the Laserfiche system cut the time to issue new building permits by 66%!

General Code provided customized on-site training for members of the Southold staff, who were eager to test the "real world" capabilities of the new system. Betty Neville reports that "Having Laserfiche has allowed us to share documents between departments, and it's made research a breeze. Before, we had to go through actual boxes to find records, now we just scan and search files with the computer. It was easy to learn and the training provided by General Code was excellent."

Southold recently co-hosted an event with General Code to showcase their successful Laserfiche project. Municipal officials from neighboring communities on Long Island met at the Town Hall in Southold to learn more about electronic document management and see a "real time" demonstration of the software in action. Anna Knoeller, Village Clerk in nearby Freeport, attended the event and remarked, "We've had a lot of people try to tell us about systems like this, but actually seeing what Southold has accomplished was amazing. I don't know what else to say - it was just fantastic!" Carol Vanderslice, Southold's Regional Representative from General Code, agreed, "We are definitely planning to have more of these events. It's great to see people get so excited about putting Laserfiche to work for their own communities."