Laserfiche Quarterly Newsletter - Q1 2009

Laserfiche Health Recommendation

In the last newsletter, we discussed the importance of making sure you have backups of your Laserfiche system. I hope each of you looked at your backup strategy and made sure that your data can be easily recovered should disaster strike. This quarter, we’re focusing on some things you can do if you’ve noticed that your system seems to be slowing down.

There are a variety of best practices that will help reduce bottlenecks, improve performance, and make the maintenance of your system a little easier. We’ll start with the structure of your repository and the metadata being stored in it because these are some of the quickest ways to improve performance. Other strategies will be addressed in later issues or snippets.

Folder Structure - The first thing to start with is the folder structure in your repository. Putting your documents in multiple folders rather than allowing thousands of documents to reside in one folder will speed performance. When too many files are in one folder, retrieving, loading, and displaying those files can be very slow. Make use of subfolders and split those files up (i.e. by date, by file type, alphabetically, etc.). Also, making sure that folder structure is intuitive will help users navigate to their files quickly and easily. Tools like ImportAgent, QuickFields, Snapshot, and Toolkit scripts can help you file documents based on a token, and QuickFields can even automatically create directory structures for you.

If you don’t want to split up that huge folder, try making shortcuts to those files in other folders. That way, users won’t have to wait for the thousands of files to load. They just access the files via shortcuts, which are presented quickly in folders with a reasonable amount of entries.

Column Display - Even if you have a reasonable number of entries in a folder, you may still hear complaints from users about how slow Laserfiche is at displaying the folder contents. This could be caused by the number and types of columns that those individual users are displaying. Some columns take longer to load because they have to calculate the values they display, while others load quickly because their values are stored in the database. Some columns that take longer to load are: OCRed Pages, Page Count, Linked (the more links, the longer it takes), and Version (slows as the number of versions in the repository grow). Those using the Records Management Edition/Module need to watch out for these columns: Review and Update Cycle Period, Frozen, Vital Record, Next Review Date, Cutoff Instruction Type, Final Disposition Action, Retention Schedule, and Cutoff Instruction.

Fields and Templates - Metadata like fields and templates can make the system more usable, but if used too liberally, it can also cause performance to slow and confuse the users. So a balancing act needs to occur. Determine which templates are necessary to help users search for data in the future. Minimizing the number of templates allows users to quickly choose which template applies to a document. Minimize the number of fields per template so that only information critical for locating documents will be applied. If it’s possible to find that same data via a full-text search, you may not need to create a field for it. If the fields must be manually entered, make sure that you limit choices and put constraints on fields when possible. This helps to ensure data integrity.

Volumes - The question of volume size comes up over and over, and you’ll hear different answers depending on who you talk to. But the bottom line is that a balancing act needs to occur between the number of volumes you have and the size of the volumes. It’s never good to have one or two huge volumes, nor is good to have hundreds of small volumes. The trick is to keep the number of volumes to a minimum, while allowing the size of your volumes to grow no more than about 10 – 15 GB. Since the server loads information about a volume as files are accessed, large volumes can take a long time to load, making the user wait to access their files. At the same time, small volumes are more difficult to maintain, make it more difficult for users to choose during searches, and too many of them can cause the system to slow down.

What to do? Use rollover volumes. These are logical volumes that appear to the user as one volume. You can configure the size limit for optimal performance (10 – 15 GB). You can start conservatively and increase the size at a later date. When a rollover volume reaches its designated limit, it automatically creates a new volume as part of the logical set, so no administrative overhead is needed (just make sure your backup product backs up all volumes in a particular directory).

While some companies are operating fine with larger volumes, they should keep an eye out for performance issues. Volumes that have grown too large cannot be converted to a logical volume, but their contents can be migrated from the large volume to a new rollover volume.

In terms of backup strategies and volumes, if data in a particular volume doesn’t need to be modified anymore, make it an archival volume. Set it to Read Only so the information isn’t changed, make several backups (on-site/off-site) and keep them in your archives for the future. Then you don’t need to include them in your normal backup routine.

Hopefully, some of these tips will help you rethink how you’re doing things today or plan on doing them in the future. We’ll continue to send Laserfiche “health” tips throughout the year. If there are any suggestions/recommendations you’d like to see, feel free to contact us and we’ll include them in one of our newsletters.

Laserfiche Conference

The 2009 Laserfiche Conference was held in January, and what a success it turned out to be! VARs and customers from all over the world attended and found there was so much great information to be had, but not enough time to take it all in. It was three information-packed days.

The conference had something for everyone. There were a slew of hands-on classes, presentations from Laserfiche gurus and customers, and discussions on various relevant topics. Attendees often had a difficult time deciding which session to attend because they all sounded so wonderful. There were also vendors who were showing products that related to Laserfiche. It was kind of like one-stop-shopping for the Laserfiche community.

This year, more TCi clients attended the conference than ever before. At least 6 different companies were represented, and many of those sent more than one person. It was great to see them outside of the workplace and hear about the sessions they attended, and what they were looking forward to. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves, even though it was a little like being back in college … gulp! Going from class to class, listening to hall-talk in between classes, meeting up with people you haven’t seen in awhile, trying to digest all the information being given, and dare I say, note taking.

At the end of the conference, Laserfiche found a great way to summarize everything people had been learning about for the past 3 days by putting on a skit. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “How corny!” Right? Well, it was actually quite enlightening for those who couldn’t quite see how the various components of Laserfiche can fit together to streamline your business processes. In fact, some of TCi’s clients made the comment that they would love to have seen that skit at the opening of the conference because it would have changed the classes they decided to take.

Upon returning from the conference, I had the chance to contact our clients who attended to get their feedback on the conference. I thought I’d share some of the comments I received:

• “This was a moderate priced conference, but had more useful content than most conferences I’ve attended. Next year I’ll be bringing more people from our company.”
• “Loved the hands-on classes.”
• “I learned a lot about the product that I’d never thought about before.”
• “Love the Canon ScanFront 220” (it was being demo’ed at a Canon booth, and is a cool little machine!)
• And one of the most eye-opening comments made by one of our clients was “I learned what a VAR is”. At first I was puzzled, but as I thought about it, I realized that when I have contact with our clients, I don’t introduce myself as their VAR. I’m just the person who’s installing the products, training users, and providing technical assistance and guidance when needed.

The main thing I brought away from the conference is that everyone in the Laserfiche community is changing the world a little bit at a time. While that may sound lofty or grandiose, it’s really not. Each of you are in the forefront of a way of doing business that is more efficient, more streamlined, more flexible and adaptable, and is helping our environment in so many ways. The world won’t change how documents are handled overnight, but it will change, and you’re leading the way.

I’m proud to be a part of this change and thankful for each of our clients. I look forward to working with each of you on your various endeavors to streamline your business.

Technical Advice Corner

Are you ever faced with implementation questions and wonder how other techies in the Laserfiche community have solved similar issues? Well, this new section of the newsletter may help you answer some of those questions. We hope you find the information in these articles helpful. If you have questions that you’d like to see answered in this section, send them to us and we’ll put them in one of the next newsletters.

This quarter, we’re starting with a question about WebLink customization:

How can I present customized default columns to WebLink users, and how can I make sure users can’t modify those columns?

Customize Columns in WebLink 7.0.5

Customize your WebLink installation to give your users the best experience possible when they access your WebLink site. In particular, you can display specific columns by default so that users don’t have to add columns themselves. You can also prevent users from modifying those default columns.

You may want users to see the creation dates of documents, see who authored documents, or see what the associated invoice number is. While the “Name” column is the only one displayed by default, you can add other columns and prevent users from changing them by following the steps below.

Note: The following instructions use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. If using a different programming environment, these steps may vary.

Note: Make a copy of the Web Files folder just in case you need to revert to it.

To add “Date Created” and “Author” as default columns:

1. Browse to C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\WebLink 7\Web Files and open WebLink7.vbproj.
2. From the Solution Explorer, expand the WebLink7 project, right-click on Login.aspx, and select View Code.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the file.
4. Under Insert code to set the default columns below, add the following code
5. conn.AddDefaultColumn(Column_Type.COLUMN_TYPE_EVENTDATE)
6. conn.AddDefaultColumn(”Author”)
7. Save the Login.aspx page.

To prevent column modification, remove the Browse and Search Options:

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\WebLink 7\Web Files and open WebLink7.vbproj.
2. From the Solution Explorer, expand the WebLink7 project, right-click on MyWebLink.aspx and select View Code.
3. Scroll down to line 80 of the file.
4. Comment out lines 80-84 by adding an apostrophe (’) at the beginning of each line.
5. Save the MyWebLink.aspx page.
6. In the menu, select Build, then Rebuild WebLink7.
7. Users will now see the Name, Date, and Author columns when opening WebLink. The Search and Browse options will be hidden from users preventing them from changing the default columns.