Laserfiche Recognized by Buyers Laboratory Inc. as a Robust Five-Star Solution

Laserfiche has received the highest possible Five-Star rating from Buyers Laboratory Inc. (BLI) in its latest Solutions Report, which concludes, “Laserfiche 8.1 is a robust, scalable document management solution that offers a broad range of functionality, along with impressive ease of use and ease of administration.”

“The platform’s modular capabilities make it suitable for companies of any size, as it can scale easily from just a few users in a single workgroup to thousands of users across an enterprise,” said BLI Assignments Editor George Mikolay.

IT professionals in particular will note that “Laserfiche’s open architecture allows for easy integration with both software and hardware manufacturers.” In addition, “the intuitive Workflow module”—which is built on the Windows Workflow Foundation—“features an easy-to-use [graphical user] interface that allows administrators to build complex workflows for users.” The Workflow module’s functionality can be expanded to all of the organization’s line-of-business applications.

Laserfiche Senior Vice President of Business Development Chris Wacker said, “It is great to see BLI conduct an in-depth evaluation of our Laserfiche 8 product suite. Their findings confirm that ease of use and enterprise content management are not mutually exclusive.”

Founded in 1961, BLI has been the leading source for unbiased and reliable intelligence for the imaging industry. Today, BLI remains the leading authority and provider of critical intelligence and continually renews its commitment to provide the most credible source for global competitive intelligence—allowing consumers to make informed and profitable business decisions.

Casino Document Management

Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino
Lemoore, California

The Casino gaming industry requires a level of efficiency, security and accuracy of ten beyond the scope of a traditional business. The never ending flow of money coming in and going out of a casino creates a need for technology that can consistently and quickly manage the data directly linked to the life-blood of the gaming community. ProIT and Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino have developed a series of applications which increase efficiency, security, and accessibility while providing a major step towards a paperless work environment.

SUMMARY

Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino recognized a need to implement a streamlined system to collect, validate and reconcile slot machine payout tickets throughout their facilities. Technology Consultants International, working closely with Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino, developed a sophisticated document management system to maintain and manage the cumbersome accounting process associated with payout ticket management.

The solution is comprised of Laserfiche Document Management Systems, a .NET Rich Internet Application and a ‘GO GREEN’ attitude. This brings Tachi Palace one step closer towards a paperless work environment. Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino is realizing the benefits of increased productivity, increased accuracy, advances in security and more reliable data.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Established in 1983 by the Tachi Yokut Tribe of the San Joaquin Valley of Central California, the Tachi Palace is a quality Hotel and Casino destination. Tachi palace features a 255 room & suite hotel with a complete full service spa facility in addition to weekly entertainment ranging from music & comedy shows to high profile sporting events. The biggest draw however is the full complement of casino gaming featuring over 2,000 slots, 42 table games, 1,200 seat bingo facility and other classics.

THE PROBLEM

Historically, Tachi Palace has collected and manually entered data associated with the payout tickets from their gaming tables and kiosks. Additionally, an automated accounting system, Oasis, tries to maintain similar records, however discrepancies occur depending on the time and date the tickets are accounted for. These discrepancies and the possibility for mis-keyed data and other human errors create a difficult accounting and reconciliation task for Casino employees which is both time and labor intensive.

The primary objectives laid out by Tachi Palace and ProIT were to eliminate the need to maintain physical records of the payout tickets in addition to streamlining the data entry process of gaming tickets while maintaining accurate reconciliation records. Additionally, report generation, back-up technology and digital documentation of archive records were required.

THE E-SOLUTION

Phase One - Scannable Payout Tickets

ProIT has created a custom software solution to streamline the collection, recognition, and reconciliation of slot machine payout tickets at the Tachi Palace Casino through the use of Laserfiche’s Document Imaging Solutions. These solutions help to ensure that all of the tickets collected and paid out to customers are accounted for.

The heart of the process lies within the barcode and OCR recognition process configured within Laserfiche Quick Fields. The recognition process is able to extract key information from the payout ticket, this data is then used to look up the ticket in the Casino management system and to identify it as having been archived.

ProIT has also delivered an intuitive, web based interface to assist the vault operators in identifying the occasional ticket that was not able to be read automatically because the ticket was damaged. This provides Tachi Palace with a permanent electronic image for every ticket that is processed through the system.

Phase Two - :Kiosk and Soft Count Ticket Processing

Additionally ProIT has developed a .NET Rich Internet Application which automates the accounting process of monitoring and recording discrepancies between Tickets gathered from kiosks and those reported by their existing monitoring software. These variances create an arduous and time intensive task of complicated manual data entry for the accounting department. Streamlining and automating this traditionally time and labor intensive procedure allows Tachi Palace to recognize numerous advantages both in efficiency and accounting accuracy.

The primary advantage is eliminating the need to retain the physical payout tickets. This is because all of the tickets dropped will be readily available in electronic format via the Laserfiche Document Management System. Other advantages include the ability to generate sophisticated operation and accounting reports by date, game drop zone, type and more. Additionally storage and synchronization with Laserfiche allow for added security and reliability that data will be accessible when needed.

August 13, 2009 Exchange 2010: Changes to Fax Handling

Exchange 2010 won't create fax messages itself. However, there's a twist: You can outsource your fax over IP (FoIP) capabilities to a compatible service provider. Exchange 2010 will honor any existing Exchange 2007 UM fax configuration properties, and it will continue to recognize fax CNG tones. However, instead of answering the call itself, UM looks at a new configuration property defined on UM mailbox policy objects: FaxServerURI. If this property exists, UM tries to hand off the call to the specified fax service. The external fax solution establishes a fax media session with the sender, creates a fax message, and sends it to the UM-enabled user's mailbox.

Messages created by this method look basically just like Exchange 2007 UM fax messages, and they appear in the Fax search folder in Outlook just as existing messages do.

The foregoing discussion might lead you to wonder who's going to offer FoIP services that work with Exchange 2010. ProITRMC.com has the answer with Sagem-Interstar's award winning XMediusFAX

Fax Over IP XmediusFAX. This software supports FoIP Fax over IP

Davidson Consulting claims that the FoIP market is set to grow at a 12.1 percent compound annual growth rate between now and 2013, yielding a nearly $1.6 billion market by then. Exchange 2010 is well positioned to take advantage of that trend by letting you choose a service provider based on cost, service quality, or whatever other metrics are important to you, then handling the work of distributing the fax as an Exchange message.

Contact

Scott Salisbury

Scott.Salisbury@proitrmc.com

Recommendation

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LinkedIn Recommendations

David Menkel has endorsed your work as Regional Sales Manager at Sagem Interstar.

Dear Scott,
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Service Category: Fax Server Product
Year first hired: 2007 (hired more than once)
Top Qualities: Personable, Expert, High Integrity

Is Business Continuity a Moral Duty?

Written by JOHN ORLANDO

Business continuity professionals are forever trying to justify to their organizations the time and expense put into continuity programs. They display graphs and formulas to the suspicious upper management attempting to demonstrate that the effort spent in managing risk will eventually be paid back in terms of the organization’s bottom line, whether it be by preventing immediate loss of revenue or long-term loss from damage to the firm’s reputation.

But these arguments can be difficult to make. For one, it is very difficult to quantify risks. There is a human tendency to overstate risks that have a strong psychological impact. Many people fear terrorism above more mundane risks such as crime, even though crime is a far greater threat to most people than terrorism. Also, statistical generalizations of risk often do not apply well to a particular organization’s situation, which may dictate a very different order of risks.



Measuring the impact of events can be even more difficult. Many business continuity systems advise asking different people within an organization to rank the importance of different functions to determine criticality, but these judgments are highly subjective. A book seller that takes in $5 million in orders a day through its Web site may assume that having the Web site down for a day will cost it $5 million in business, but who is to say that many of those potential customers will not come back the next day? If they shop at the online site because it is more convenient than driving to the store, it is probably more convenient the next day as well.



But maybe there is a different way to justify business continuity. Perhaps business continuity is a moral imperative of an organization. If so, then the continuity professional will have a whole different justification in his or her arsenal, one that does not require appeal to the bottom line. I argue that a case to be made for the moral duty of business continuity management that goes beyond benefits to the organization.



Moral Arguments

We first have to understand that there are two general ways to justify a moral position. One is consequentialist, which is the view that an act is right if the balance of good consequences it produces outweighs the bad consequences. I might argue that my town should spend its tax surplus on education rather than park improvements, because there will be more overall benefit to the town from better education than better parks. I am making a consequentialist argument, because I claim that putting the money toward education will produce the best aggregate outcome for all involved.



The traditional justification for business continuity is essentially consequentialist, because it tries to show that the benefits of spending money on continuity programs outweigh the costs; in other words, the money produces the best possible outcome for the organization. But the traditional justification faces the problem endemic to consequentialist arguments, that the consequences of an action are notoriously difficult to predict with any accuracy. It’s hard to say how likely the server is to crash, and the likely costs of that crash, in order to prove that the back-up server will pay for itself in the long run. The data is just not that available.



But there is another type of moral argument, one that does not appeal to consequences. A deontological argument appeals to something other than consequences, such as duties. For instance, I might prefer to live in a warmer climate over the long Vermont winters (which I would), but I have a son from my first marriage that I would not think of leaving. I believe that I have a moral duty to take care of my son regardless of the benefits that I might receive by living somewhere else. A moral duty is not derived from balancing benefits and costs. It comes from another source – such as my position as a father – and trumps consequences. My duty to take care of my son was given to me by my choice to have a son, and is independent of consequentialist considerations.



The Duty to Business Continuity

In recent years business ethicists have challenged the traditional view that a business’ decisions should be driven solely by the bottom line. They have turned away from this consequentialist thinking by claiming that businesses have moral duties to a variety of constituencies, such as customers, workers, and the community. Whereas a business might decide to reduce pollution out of fear of lawsuits, or the hope that reducing pollution improves its image, more and more businesses are coming to see these kinds of choices as resulting from a duty to be a good corporate citizen of the community.



There are a number of reasons to believe that business continuity is also a corporate duty. One comes from the legitimate expectations of others. For instance, as a teacher, my students have a legitimate expectation that I will grade them without bias. If I fudge up a student’s grade because she is the daughter of a colleague, the other students can rightfully complain that I have treated them unfairly.



Similarly, customers often sign on to a service in the expectation that a business has continuity programs to reduce the likelihood of disruptions in service. If my cable reception goes out due to a storm, I assume that my provider has sent a crew to try to restore service. If I call my provider after a couple of days without service and am told they have no interest in fixing the problem because they decided that they did not want to serve my neighborhood anymore, I would argue that they betrayed my trust when I signed up with them. It may not have explicitly stated in our agreement, but it was tacitly implied that they would make reasonable efforts to provide continuity of service when I signed up. Just as my duty to unbiased grading does not need to be spelled out in a contract, the customer’s legitimate expectation of continuity of service does not need to be spelled out, it is often implied.



The business continuity community normally couches its work in terms of the importance of continuity of service to customers, but it forgets that by doing so it also serves the organization’s workers by helping to preserve their jobs through a business disruption. This is not just a secondary benefit of continuity practices, but a duty of the corporation. Just as businesses assume that they have a duty to generate profits for shareholders on grounds that the shareholders have invested in the business, they have a duty to workers that have also invested in the corporation. These investments come in a variety of forms. At the very least, by choosing to accept a position a worker forgoes positions at other companies. They may have also planted roots in the community by purchasing a home and sending their children to local schools. These investments are lost if a company goes under.



Finally, businesses have a duty to the community to make efforts to protect its investment in the organization. The community provides roads needed for supplies and police and fire protection. The community has also benefited the business by providing the infrastructure needed to allow employees to move in to the area and to keep employees around. The community also relies on the tax revenue from the business to provide services like police protection and education. It might have built a new school under the assumption that the revenue would continue. The fact that my son relies on me due is part of what creates my obligations to him, and this reliance creates a duty to preserving business operations on the part of the company.



Continuity professionals have always justified their work in terms of the enlightened self-interest of the organization. But their work is more important than the corporate bottom line. Business continuity is not just good business, but a moral imperative of the organization. A business sits at the nexus of a web of dependencies that result in a moral duty for the business to reduce the likelihood that it cannot serve those dependencies.



John Orlando, Ph.D., is the program director for the Norwich University Master of Science in Business Continuity Management.









"Appeared in DRJ's Fall 2008 Issue"