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Ok, we just did a little play acting to
talk about a couple of things to keep it going along.
You know what e-doc is.
It is our electronic document management system
and it is supporting, as I mentioned earlier,
multiple local governments including several BOCES.
Undoubtedly e-doc is economical.
As I mentioned our own operation
in the first year we saved $105,000
and that has been rising steadily since.
We have grown not only to incorporate inactive records
but we now do all of our meetings paperless.
Our board meetings, superintendent's meetings
any meeting you do with BOCES now is done paperless,
saving us more than enough money.
It is a state of the art software.
The documents as I mentioned can be imported electronically
from paper, microfilm or microfiche.
So again going back to leading up to how we got here.
We wanted to be sure that we didn’t leave behind
all that we accomplished
but we brought it all with us into the 21st century.
It is easy, you’ll see when we go live that it is
a matter of a couple of mouse clicks
to get the information you want.
We have some competitions around the office periodically
and we’ll have Sheila, the old records management
office clerk, that refuses to work with e-doc.
We’ll call up and say
“who can find the policy on credit cards faster?”
They will be going through the books and we’ll say
“Oh here it is 2252” so we’ve got the policy.
So we need competitions to kind of
let people know to come join us.
So it is extremely easy.
We have assistant superintendents
who shall remain nameless
not the same one that I argued with.
Quite literally she gets scared when
she has to open her e-mail.
She is an avid e-doc user.
It is economical again, we have saved in terms of paper,
mailing, file cabinets, space, and employee time.
In our little skit I kept referring to Sheila
and I am sure in many of your cases when
someone has to go to another building to find the record,
or go down into a basement or back in some closet.
Instead of going through all that or calling
a custodian or whoever you need,
it is simply sitting at your desktop
and in a few clicks you have the information you need.
You never have to leave your desk to get what you want.
And it is efficient,
again these kind of repeat themselves.
Efficiency in the sense, one of the big issues that
we had in our BOCES and
I don’t know if this effects you all.
But that little bit about the policies,
everyone in our BOCES, everyone of our managers,
principals, directors, assistant directors,
and assistant superintendents all had their own policy manual (inaudible).
But nobody had the same policies in effect.
No one knew who did or didn’t up date it.
So no one was ever sure of what the policy was.
So if there was a policy question
it would end up being a big powwow,
well you’ve got that one and I’ve got that one.
Who's got this one? Which one is right?
Now with e-doc everyone knows that this is the latest and
the greatest and there is nothing else to say.
Same thing with the board meeting minutes.
Where are the minutes from the 2001 board meeting?
I don’t know; I thought you filed them; no you filed them.
Who filed them? Well they are on e-doc.
We know where they are.
There’s an efficiency to that.
An efficiency again that staff doesn’t have to
waste valuable time thinking that they have go here,
there and everywhere and double check to make sure
that the information they have is the right information.
Another thing that we do,
and this might be more applicable to school districts
but I don’t know.
Every time we get a resume from an individual,
that resume goes onto e-doc.
In the past, if I were a principal
and I needed to hire a special education teacher
with an emphasis on speech therapy
I would call the personnel office,
and someone in personnel would have to through
all the resumes, pick out the ones needed,
make a copy and send it down to me.
Now as a principal I go on e-doc
and I just search special education speech therapy
and out comes all the resumes.
I can just look for myself no making copies,
no nothing (inaudible) a prime effort (inaudible) paper
and I have the ability to chose someone
that I might want (inaudible).
Enforce, one of the many nice things about e-doc
is first and foremost any of you fear
that gee it is on the Internet (inaudible) password protected.
Sheila wrote up a document about this big about
all the different encryptions and stuff
that makes it safe.
That people can’t get on it so there’s that aspect.
Everyone is assigned a user name and password.
They are revised regularly,
it is scheduled to go back and change them
among our users so that they don’t get out there
and people get access.
When we go live and you see the electronic file cabinets
you as the user could determine
what part of the file cabinet, if not all of it
any individual could have access to.
So if there is a personnel file cabinet
maybe you would want someone to only see teaching staff
and someone else could only see support staff.
It can be arranged so that you can distinguish
within the file cabinet who can see what.
Of course documents cannot be altered.
Once they are up there, that’s it. They are put up
in a TIFF format so no one can alter them.
You don’t have to worry about someone going on
and deciding to make your policy that it is
OK to smoke on school grounds when it is not. (inaudible)
The e-doc solution, it is everything
for everybody, we think.
Is there any questions? Yes.
(Inaudible.)
Yes. Yes and it is aligned with ED1, so when
Sheila, and correct me if I’m wrong,
Sheila as the systems administrator sees that
there is a complete review of record series
from the Village of Monroe
that has reached its legal retention period.
Sheila then informs them that this
particular record series (inaudible)
and what do you want to do with it.
So it is an electronic
clock if you will that goes off
to alert you that this could be deleted
if you want it to be. Yes.
(Inaudible.)
Yes.
(Inaudible.)
Yes it OCRs overnight.
We have the schedule set up with the IT people
to have each file cabinet updated each evening
so it goes through a back end OCR prop.
(Inaudible.)
We haven’t purchased that module yet
but there is a module that allows you to manage your
e-mails and again key word
search of the e-mails themselves.
We are waiting, I don’t know how many of you are
struggling with the whole e-mail situation.
We are kind of waiting for some decision.
From a records management standpoint Sheila and I
have our opinion but then you get the lawyers
and everybody else involved and it seems to me that
the consensus among the legal beagles
is that we have to keep everything.
So we are trying to reign them in a little bit
I am not sure we will be successful.
But we don’t know where we are going yet
so we haven’t purchased the module
because we don’t know where we are going yet with that.
(Inaudible.)
Yes. I think the (inaudible) at this time. Yes.
(Inaudible.)
Sullivan BOCES and Southern Westchester BOCES.
(Inaudible.)
I could just tell you we were very sensitive
to that issue when you talk about
it from a process standpoint.
We have always been sensitive
aside from e-doc bear in mind 1989 until today
we are in local governments purging files,
looking through personnel files,
payroll records, and board minutes.
We are constantly seeing personal information related
to staff, students, the business operation
so this is now just an electronic extension of that.
When we do purging, Sheila’s operation is
large believe me, she has three different
offices in her operation, staging areas.
I’m sure you know that if you needed to have a
huge series of records purged in your offices
you’d be hard pressed to (inaudible)
that would help you do the work.
So our practice has been to take the records back to
Sheila’s operation and do it right there.
So again in our mind we are moving from a paper
process now to an electronic process.
But being sensitive to that
all the staff in Sheila’s office are
civil service people, we don’t hire kids from
clear technical (inaudible) to do internships.
They are all full-time or part-time civil service people.
All of them sign a confidentiality statement
that they understand that disclosure of any information
will be punishable by law.
So any staff member in Sheila’s operation
signs off on that confidentiality agreement. Yes.
(Inaudible.)
I’m sorry could you repeat the question.
(Inaudible.)
The information is being housed,
excuse me the question is
“do we have individual databases
or a single repository for all the school districts
and local governments that we work with?”
The information is all housed on a single server.
You will see when we go live that we create
what we call file cabinets for each client
and within their file cabinets is the electronic
information that we are storing for them.
(Inaudible.)
It is manageable but as I said it is required.
In our particular experience Sheila,
a full-time systems administrator,
plus the support of, what is Phil’s title?
The big server IT guy whatever his title is.
Plus another little server IT guy who works with, sorry.
You can see I am the front man for this operation.
Anyway we have two
high-level technical support people associated with us
because there is so much back end information that
has to be maintained regularly.
Then the upgrades are, every time we go to a new version
it is really out of Sheila’s realm as well
and she requires that IT support.
Again that is why I emphasize, it is wonderful
it is fantastic, but you have to go in
with your eyes wide open.
Even Sheila and I did not realize the amount of support.
When we first started it was Phil is our big IT guy.
Hey Phil could you answer this question
and Phil would answer the question for us
and it turned into, not to belabor how BOCES works
but we had to purchase the services of Phil
and his little IT guy for several days a week
to do nothing but support the e-doc system, so it is technical.
Sheila went off to some big heavy duty e-doc training
a couple of years ago and she was
very upset that everybody gets to go to good places
and she got to go Newburgh.
I said [joking] “What are you complaining about?
You're on the water.”
Any other questions?
OK lets go live and I’ll let Sheila take over.
You can speak and we can share.
We can share.
As I mentioned e-doc is accessible on the web through
the Orange/Ulster BOCES website.
There is a link of course on the web site.
The first thing we do is our acceptable use policy that
you accept the fact that
you are going into a secure location.
Any user has to log in with a user name and password.
You can see all of the individual cabinets listed.
If you look on the left side of the screen
Orange/Ulster BOCES policies, personnel office, business office,
Pleasantville School, Curious Jewel,
Greenburg Seven, Mount Pleasant Blythe.
Those are all the different individual file cabinets
of clients that we are working.
Just to show you board minutes,
just how efficient we can be,
we are going to go to the Minising School District.
You will see an awful lot of, it was referred to earlier
what kinds of fields should you have?
What kind of indexing?
This particular file cabinet incorporates all
the different files that the
Minising Valley School District has in there.
As I mentioned earlier, that you could restrict
information within a file cabinet.
So if you want a staff member to see policies
but not board minutes or vice versa.
If you look there is not only board meeting information
but also policy, you could distinguish
as to which staff member could see either one.
But in this particular case we were looking
for information on Trooper Pirtell.
There was an incident at the Minising School District
a couple of weeks ago that involved Officer Pirtell
and the question came up
“what was discussed at the board meeting?”
Well as you all know in the past
oh gee who remembers when Pirtell was here?
What did we talk about?
What did he say?
There would be a couple of guesses as to which
board minutes we should look in.
Who has them? Where are they?
So in this particular case using e-doc
we would type in
May I just join in here.
The document type is how we delineate access.
If you have access to the student records then it would
appear in the document type.
If you have access to payroll,
it would appear and say payroll.
So if you are a user
that only has access in a file cabinet for resumes,
that is all you are going to see.
I, as the administrator, have access to all of them.
That is why this looks a little bit cumbersome.
So if I go into the board minutes here
and submit them, now this particular file cabinet
as you can see down below we have the modify date,
security date, and sort order.
I have made that visible so you can see it.
Typically the end user would not.
We just wanted to show you
that we have that piece built in
but we typically hide it in the back end
simply because the users and the superintendents
don’t want that out there for their users.
So if we were looking as
a full text search for Trooper Pirtell.
Trooper Pirtell’s name is mentioned
in at least six documents.
So I can just scroll through the documents
to find Trooper Pirtell’s name.
This takes all of five minutes.
Where it would have taken perhaps as much as an hour
to find just his name one time.
If someone had the recollection or the resident knowledge
about when he was at a board meeting.
Now if you could just go please on the BOCES board.
Just to show you a simpler version
because in our particular case
where just our board meetings alone sit
within their own file cabinet.
So you can see we have the meeting dates,
the agenda items, the full text and information.
So we could go in and say
“I’d like to see what happened at the
January 10, 2008 meeting and I’d like to
see the agenda for that meeting.”
Here is all the things that happened at that meeting
and here is the agenda.
So you could see within seconds
you have access to any information that you would like.
Same thing on your policies
because we kind of made fun of that in our presentation.
Within our policies they could be searched by
the policy name, the category, the number,
the date or a full text search.
So when I mentioned earlier
that we have some competitions
a couple of weeks ago we had a race with some,
as we call it a dinosaur that won’t come over.
Who could find the credit card policy faster?
So you can see that we just typed in the word
credit card and hit it and
there is the BOCES credit card policy.
When we originally conceived this,
and our apologies Andy, we were going to do a case study
but I think the best way to show this
is the versatility of it.
We have local governments using it for
managing everything from their payroll records
which we will show you now.
Their payroll records to their board minutes
to their policies, to paperless meetings, to tax rolls.
Those of you who get involved in payroll searching
you understand what it takes when someone retires
or there is a question and
you have to go through payroll warrants
for 30 years back.
At that point you are grabbing
probably a half a dozen binders,
going into the basement,
the box on top of the box in the closet.
And pouring through each one of them trying
to get the necessary information to put together
a payroll history for the staff member.
Well in this particular situation,
if I were looking for Donna Ewing’s information,
because she is retiring,
I would simply put her name into e-doc
do a search and here is all of her payroll information.
All you need to do is just click on each one.
It opens up and you have all the information
you need on Donna Ewing.
So it is in one repository,
one spot at the click of a mouse button
to get the information that you need to put it together.
So the bottom line is,
I hope I’m not coming across as a sales pitch because
that is not my intent.
My intent was basically to share with you that
everything you heard today is true.
Going into electronic document management
is not something that you enter without risk.
You need a lot of technical support,
human support, and financial support.
There are a lot of options out there.
Options, shared services a la Monmouth County and
Orange/Ulster BOCES or going it alone.
But which ever way you do go,
it is a remarkable way to manage your records. Yes.
(Inaudible.)
The question is, is the information
even within the BOCES
is that entered by the staff person
responsible for that record or by Sheila’s office?
Everything goes through Sheila’s office
for the simple reason that I mentioned.
It is not just scanning a document in.
It is scanning it and then indexing it.
Is this record something that should be microfilmed
as well as digitized?
So the complete process is handled in one place. Yes.
(Inaudible.)
The question is, since we are creating
most records electronically now it is
a mere click of the mouse button
to e-mail the documents to Sheila
and then she puts them in, and that is correct.
The issue really is with old paper records.
We are finding that the big bulk of our work if you will
is just dumping newly created electronic information in
or converting old microfilm,
because there are hundreds of rolls of film out there.
(Inaudible.)
The question is; are you able to have
staff other than a centralized staff process it
and did we try it?
You can do that of course, if that is your choice.
We did try it and we stopped it
and we tried it at a level which
I think was pretty significant,
it was the clerk of the board.
She wanted the ability to put
all the information into e-doc
for her board minutes and for policies.
After it was acknowledged that it wasn’t working
it went back to Sheila.
So now Sheila does everything.
It was a limited modified extension as they use to say.
But we did try it.
Our district superintendent wanted the
clerk of the board to do it.
But I don’t think it lasted
but a couple months and it was reversed. Yes sir.
(Inaudible.)
I will let Sheila answer that question.
The question was, is there a naming convention
when we get records electronically for
any type of meeting or any other entry into e-doc?
What I do before going in
and actually setting up the file cabinet
and setting up the fields
by which they retrieve information
we have long drawn out meetings about
how they want to search,
and what things should be called.
If your office calls your business warrants, business warrants
and another school calls them just warrants
then we want to make sure
that we are addressing what your district calls it.
So if it is going in as a business warrant
every month and then we give it back to that
department to actually start inputting things
it will be called something else.
So that has always been something that was an issue with
the users and the superintendents,
and the town and village clerks.
because there was no continuity.
So that was one reason
that it was drawn back to our office
and the naming convention stayed the same.
Whatever name that we chose ahead of time
was the name that we stick with.
Any other questions?
OK well this has been fun.
I hope you enjoyed hearing us as much as we enjoyed
sharing our success with you.
Everybody drive home safely and it was a pleasure.
Thank you.