#LF2010 The Lowdown on Laserfiche's 2009 Success, and What to Expect in 2010

Energy ran high yesterday during the first keynote at Empower 2010, an annual Institute Conference held by Enterprise Content Management solution provider, Laserfiche (news, site). Armed with good spirits, several analogies and Coldplay on full blast, Laserfiche President and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker addressed this year’s audience—a record 1,200 attendees—with the gusto of a really, really proud parent.

“The toughest times bring the biggest opportunities,” Wacker offered as she began to explain Laserfiche’s growth in 2009. The company managed to close the year with several developments including the renewal of their DoD 5015.2 certification, a new office in Hong Kong, and the release of Rio, QuickFields 8 and WebLink 8.

Consider the Eskimo

The secret to making it during a tough economy? Wacker began to answer this question by displaying a slide of Alaska, throwing a few of us sunny California folk into mild discomfort.

“Eskimos work in a very tough environment all the time,” she explained. Highlighting their own teamwork as a main survival skill, Wacker then began to discuss the sense of community within Laserfiche—a quality she seemingly believes to be the backbone.

Founded in 2007, the Laserfiche Luminaries program directly reflects this conviction. The program, which debuted with a measly six profiles, offers a common ground for users of the ECM to network and help each other with all related subjects. In 2009, the number of participants went from 6 to over 600.

Moreover, Wacker cited Laserfiche’s 25 user groups, 471 tradeshows, 18 regional conferences and hundreds of webinars as important factors of building a proper community.

“It’s almost Lovefest!” she exclaimed.

Laserfiche in 2010

• Resource guzzling
• Too complex
• Inflexible
• Often unused

According to Wacker, these are the main problems with ECM; problems that Laserfiche’s suite manages to avoid by not trying to be everything for everyone, as she put it.

But wait, isn’t a one stop shop solution at the top of everyone's list? And, while we won’t say anything regarding inflexibility or resource guzzling, it’s hard to label Laserfiche, a company that offers such a vast array of different solutions, as anything but complex.

For example, in a separate presentation lead by Product Manager Catherine Ramos and Software Test Engineer Kacy McKibben, we got a tiny peek into what's new in the company and what to expect this year. The updates ranged all the way from repository locking and LDAP authentication in Laserfiche Server 8.1, to digital camera capture abilities in Photodocs 8.1, to a metadata updater and script editor in Quick Fields 8.0, to .NET libraries in SDK 8.1 (formerly named "Toolkit").

Plain and simple, we think not. But thorough and all-encompassing? It appears so.

As for the rest of this year, the company has big plans. In quarter 1 alone, Lasefiche expects to kick out SDK 8.1, Rio 8.1, Import Agent 8.1 and Workflow 8.1. Laserfiche 8.1 and Web Access 8.2 are expected to follow shortly after.

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