Laserfiche – Empower Conference 2013

Laserfiche held it’s yearly Empower Conference in Anaheim, California January 7 – 9. This was the first year Sygnvs was able to attend and we were very impressed with the knowledge, classes, and opportunities provided. This years Empower Conference was especially exciting as it coincided with the release of Laserfiche Version 9. This new version includes some great new features and modules. We’ll have some more info on this below.

What is the Laserfiche Empower Conference?

Empower is Laserfiche’s yearly conference for Customers, VAR’s, and partners. This year it was held at the Marriott Hotel in Anaheim. The conference consists of general product demonstrations, hands on labs and classes, related sessions, and vendor demonstrations/booths. The conference started unofficially on Sunday with registration and an informal “meet and greet” that evening with Laserfiche providing appetizers and drinks. Then Monday morning began with a Keynote presentation for all attendee’s where the CEO, Nien-Ling Wacker, officially announced the release of Laserfiche version 9. After the Keynote attendee’s were then able to attend various presentations and classes of their choosing. The hands on lab courses were impressive as each attendee was able to use a laptop provided by Laserfiche, or their own, and follow along as the presenter demonstrated how to accomplish certain tasks within the application. We felt that the costs associated with attending the conference were well made up for with the content provided in the first day alone. Monday evening then had a special dinner and event themed “Nathen Owens Motown Legends” where guests were entertained by Nathen Owens and a 10 piece band performing Motown classics.

The second day of the event started with a General Session for all attendee’s. This years “Run Smarter” awards were announced and presenters went into more detail regarding how Laserfiche 9 can take your organization to new heights in 2013.

The rest of Tuesday and Wednesday were jam packed with additional classes and presentations. By the end of Wednesday, we were definitely worn out, but had learned many new procedures for using Laserfiche ourselves, and providing new functionality to our Laserfiche clients.

Whats new with Laserfiche 9

The biggest topic of this years conference was obviously the release of version 9. This new version brings additional functionality to the core product, and provides a couple new modules like the Forms package that are really exciting.

A few new features of the core product are the ability to start Workflows and Business process manually from within the Laserfiche client. This is a great addition as it allows you to create workflows for things like automatically creating the folder structure for a new employee and launch them from within the client. Business Process are another new feature that builds on the Workflows that you are used to. Basically it allows you to add more detailed notifications to your workflows and then track how long it took for a workflow to complete. For the email notifications, you can now include detailed instructions on what the user needs to do to finish their part of a workflow, instead of just a general announcement that there is a workflow waiting on them. Once a workflow with a business process is complete, managers or decision makers can then look at reporting on the process and see what steps took the longest, or where an employee took an abnormal amount of time to finish their part of a task. This is great for something like a Sales department where you can track how long each stage of a Sales Process took.

A lot of excitement was generated by the new Forms module and the mobile tools now available in Laserfiche 9. Forms is a web based solution that allows you to easily create an electronic form, have it accessed and filled out via a web browser, and then either create a document within Laserfiche with the information provided, tag documents attached to the form with info provided, or use the information in other applications or stored in a database. This new module provides some impressive ideas and it will be interesting to see how this is used and improved in the coming year. Mobile access was another big concept with Laserfiche improving on there iPhone/iPad applications and web based products. A lot of work has gone into integrating the Photo Docs module into the mobile scheme. So you can take photos of documents remotely with your iPhone, and using the Laserfiche app, get them transferred into your repository, cleaned up, and even OCR’ed. We saw a really good demonstration of the mobile tools and were impressed.

Be sure to plan to attend next year

We certainly hope to be back next year for Empower 2014. Laserfiche is a solution that makes a lot of sense for many of our customers and the continual evolution of the product makes it better everyday. We would highly recommend to anyone who uses Laserfiche to attend next years event as the training and information provided is invaluable. There are also user group meetings, staff from every department of Laserfiche, and Industry specific group meetings available to allow you to see how others are using this great product.

Stay tuned as we hope to have some more information about Laserfiche coming soon!