Experience interfacing with Laserfiche document mgt anyone?

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01-14-2011 04:42 AM
DodyAdkins-Perry
New Contributor
Specifically with the vendor GeneralCode?  Town Clerk's office is leading the charge to get all municipal permitting documents stored on Laserfiche via software by the vendor GeneralCode.  GeneralCode claims they provide integration with GIS, through custom integration software created specifically for the client for an annual service fee.  This sounds to me like it could be an expensive way to link documents to our GIS.  My instinct would be simply to require them to provide coding in the records to enable lookup by map/parcel and a standardized street address format.  Any municipal GIS folks have any experience with this?  Anyone have any countersuggestions to propose?  This is not a done deal yet and I have been asked to attend GeneralCode's pitch to the Town.
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9 Replies
davidvan_pelt
New Contributor III
Hey Dody,

We are exploring this option now as we too are Laserfiche user. We are looking into the Laserfiche Toolkit which (we hope) would allow us to send a SQL statement over to Laserfiche and pull back the documents as selected on the ArcGIS map. We are pursuing this through ArcServer as a web service as we are trying to move away from Desktop solutions.

We have set up common keys between the GIS and the indexes in Laserfiche so in theory it should be fairly straightforward, but like I said we are just begining to explore our options. It does sound like the vendor is trying to lock you into ongoing fees....

-David
City of Encinitas GIS
DodyAdkins-Perry
New Contributor
Hi David,

Thanks so much for your response.

You might conceivably be interested in what the Laserfiche people recommended, for integrating Laserfiche with other applications (they gave the examples of financial software and GIS):  A third-party tool called Affinity, which you can use to integrate Laserfiche with anything.  It might (or might not) facilitate what you all are doing.  Unfortunately I didn't get a contact from the LF people for Affinity, and a google search didn't turn up anything that looked promising to me.  But you might want to check with Encinitas's Laserfiche contacts (it was the tech person, the "solutions architect," who told us about Affinity), to see what you think.

All best,
Dody
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davidvan_pelt
New Contributor III
Thanks Dody, we will check it out. I'll post if anything positive comes from it.
Thanks again.
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AaronRowzee
New Contributor II

As I admire my own abilities to resurrect dead threads, I'd like to find out what, if any, solutions you each found. I am also representing a city which uses ESRI products, as well as, Laserfiche and the only option I've found is GeoDocs but I'm not convinced its as great as it looks. The software is a third party integration and consumes a Laserfiche user license, plus it only integrates with ArcGIS Online according to the website. Any one have experience with it?

AndrewFarrar
Occasional Contributor

I am with a county government, and being an ESRI and Laserfiche shop, we tried implementing geodocs a couple of years ago.  That was when they utilized now defunct silverlight and flex apps, and it appears that they now have an html5 app.  For what it was, it was pretty neat.  The key feature in my mind was that it creates an index between your spatial features and the laserfiche documents, utilizing laserfiche metadata to do so.  

Unfortunately, the project never really took off for us.  The department that we set it up for doesn't do much in terms of laserfiche organization, so the search results that the app was returning weren't particularly useful.  This was not a fault of the app though, just poor LF organization. 

As I'm typing this of course, we are looking at giving geodocs or some kind of custom integration between GIS and LF another go.  These things never die... 

EDIT:  And to your point on it only using AGOL, when we set it up, it did not use AGOL at all.  We had a REST service setup on our ArcGIS Server that it utilized, and then weblink on the LF end.  Looking through their sparse documentation on their website, that portion does not appear to have changed.

KaraUtter
Occasional Contributor III

Andrew, I can't find your name to tag you so hopefully you are still a part of the community! Did you ever figure out a solution for the integration? If so, what was it? I am looking through the options currently.

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GailJorgenson
New Contributor III

I am interested in the same information.  I work for a county highway district and we have both Laserfiche and ESRI technology which we deploy to end users via Geocortex and ArcGIS Online.  I have found DocuNav's GeoDoc product and City Digital also provides some sort of Laserfiche/ESRI integration, but I don't think their product is branded.  I also found via the Laserfiche Empower conference in Long Beach (February 7-10, 2017 Long Beach) that there is a way to complete the integration without a third party vendor using the SDK tools provided via Laserfiche.  Documentation is sketchy so far and if you have any additional information I would be happy to hear.

Thank you,

Gail

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EricAndersen5
New Contributor

We have linked Laserfiche to our proprietary business system and to our website via ColdFusion. It is possible to send SQL directly to the laserfiche database server. In our case we do one of three things;

Show a list of documents that match the search criteria

Run a command line command to open the document using the Laserfiche desktop client

Example:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Laserfiche\Client\LF.exe" -L"Statelands" -W -E2143115

NOTE: The -W to use windows authentication, -E is for entry ID, -L is the repository name. 

Provide a URL that opens a specific document via WebLink the Laserfiche web client

To see an example;

http://www.statelandsonline.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Comments.AppListLF&county=Multnomah 

(click on a link to view an application in Weblink)

Eric Andersen PMP, ACP

Special Projects Manager/ Dept of State Lands

www.oregon.gov/dsl

AndrewFarrar
Occasional Contributor

ericanderson‌, This is very helpful, thank you for sharing!  Weblink URL queries are a great and easy way to get started on an integration, as you can drill down to the repository, folder, or document level just by passing a URL.  I do like your command line option with the client though...I'm sticking that one away for future use.  

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