iManage Work vs. Laserfiche

iManage is well suited to managing the large volume of documents and emails that are created on a daily basis. Lawyers can get dozens if not hundreds of e-mails a day, and we need something to do with them. Deleting them is often not practical, because you may require the information a year from now. Leaving them in Outlook is also impractical, because a large Inbox will slow Outlook down. Outlook has an archiving feature, but this doesn't really help for collaboration (and your colleagues are likely out of luck if you end up unavailable due to emergency). iManage is less well suited to small organizations (ex: sole practitioners and small firms) because it is does require a significant investment in implementing and maintaining the software. iManage Work is well suited for large law firms, because it is great for collaboration, including between different offices.

Incentivized

Laserfiche is perfect for businesses that need a place to appropriately store their documents digitally and want an environment to grow from. Adding Laserfiche Forms helps grow a business' ability to process their work and reach their customers easier. Laserfiche could be used for all sizes of businesses but may not be as worth it for very small businesses.

Incentivized

• Very reliable, once setup it is usually pretty flawless outside of Outlook-related issues.
• Simple and easy to use organization of files and groups.
• Customizable for different departments or sections to divide up access and partition document system.
• Allows collaboration with outside parties and makes sharing documents quick and easy.

Incentivized

• It's very good at giving a wide range of options for importing and exporting data, the Windows Client software alone can pull files from a windows folder, has a software printer to print documents into Laserfiche instead of to paper, has Office integration, the ability to pull photos from cameras, and has a scanner component.
• Laserfiche Workflow is an automation tool that is very flexible and powerful, and allows a wide range of options for automating document flows and procedures.
• Laserfiche is very good at communicating with other systems, though some systems, like big iron minicomputers, take some extra work and effort. Setting up integrations with SQL server databases are as simple as any complex IT procedure can get.

Incentivized

• The system can be fairly buggy. I have issues with freezing, and a lack of responsiveness each time I use it ( although not for long and does not prevent me from getting what I need to be done, it's just annoying).
• It has a slightly larger learning curve to use than other more simplistic records managers

Incentivized

• The could have better options for read only users, the minimum option for read only users is 200.
• More competitive material of why Laserfiche is better than the other products out there.
• They could use a more robust capture engine that could be used for unstructured documents.

Incentivized

It has been what our firm has always used, and overall everyone seems to be pleased with it. It is user friendly and intuitive and it doesn't appear we have any intention of changing what we use for our purposes.

Incentivized

We plan on renewing Laserfiche for the coming year but also have been considering a scanning and document management solution that can be purchased from our new accounting system company, we are implementing the accounting system this year. It will be a couple years before we make a decision to stay with Laserfiche or change.

Incentivized

To me iManage is very intuitive and user friendly. The switch from the application vs the Outlook extension was an adjustment, but it was one I made pretty easily once it happened.

Incentivized

It has an intuitive design that feels very natural to any user that has ever used Outlook or Windows Explorer. There are multiple ways to perform every action in order to help users with various software experiences find the shortcuts and actions they seek quickly and effectively.

Incentivized

I am very satisfied with Laserfiche. I have found that certain larger jobs may are slow. This may also be related to our infrastructure environment. We have been able to tune Laserfiche to increase performance on larger jobs.

Incentivized

Performance, of course, is largely dependent on the underlying environment. Laserfiche does its part with multi-threading, taking advantage of multi-core servers on scanning, workflows, and bots. A SQL-Server back-end is suitable for small to medium-sized company, but may not scale to large, where Oracle would be the better choice. Workflows can be poorly written and perform recursive work slowing down the system. It's better to run batch type workflows at night when possible.

Incentivized

We had an issue a few years ago where a plug-in of some sort which allowed the viewing of PDFs got updated and then whenever some people previewed PDFs in iManage then Outlook would crash. My outlook crashed over 20 times in a single day once. It was a pretty bad time. I know one of our information technology professionals in another office worked non-stop with iManage to get it resolved, and it seemed like they did take the issue pretty seriously.

Incentivized

I have never had to wait for help from Laserfiche. If I cannot find the answer online, I can easily send an email to a customer support representative. I have always been helped the same day and my questions have always been resolved. The Empower conference is always a great learning opportunity and the online resources and webinars are top-notch.

Incentivized

Easily accessible 24/7 so am able to complete courseware whenever time allows: Commute to work; waiting for friends or family; at night while relaxing [with a delicious glass of wine!]; whenever and wherever time and circumstances permit. Courseware is well written and presented in an easy to follow and understand format.

Incentivized

MS SharePoint requires a lot of time to integrate and efforts are expensive compared to iManage product. iManage is quick setup and well integrates with existing on-premise environments and integrates well with major iDP systems for authentications and manage RBAC systems for permissions via API calls.

Incentivized

Laserfiche is a much more focused product that simply and accurately fills our need for routine reporting and record keeping. By taking time to work on the design of the form you can anticipate the user's needs and possible areas where further explanation may be required. By prefilling the most likely/desired report responses you can greatly reduce the amount of time a user spends completing each report.

Incentivized

• Since our policy is that all client documents are saved into iManage, we have been able to keep an email retention policy for Exchange to 90days to delete. This has saved us significant resources in both Exchange management and hardware to support excessive email storage for archived databases or extremely large databases.
• The ability to search documents quickly by text inside the documents allows to review previously created contracts and use similar language that is well suited to a new project over again without having to spend time manually opening and searching ourselves. The software does it for us.
• We used to store old files at an offsite storage facility for a monthly fee. We have implemented a new procedure, where we now scan these old paper files into our iManage system, making them text searchable PDFs. Since the software has such robust searching capabilities, this makes the documents much more accessible when needed than requesting an offsite storage delivery and having to manually pull paper files. In addition, we have saved thousands of dollars a month by not storing paper files offsite any longer. If the searching were not so powerful, we would not done this because our old paper storage system worked well for us previously.

Incentivized

• The centralized repository of digitized documents allows users from different departments to collaborate and use the same documents, effortlessly and seamlessly. This has been a tremendous value to organizational efficiency and accuracy.
• Business Process Automation has increased the capacity of a fixed workforce. By reducing the workload of individuals on repetitive tasks, it allows them to work on higher-value tasks.
• Business Process Automation increases accuracy as well by defining a clear process with forms, emails, and document routing on each step. This leads to greater worker productivity.

Incentivized