Laserfiche vs. Tungsten TotalAgility

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

Less appropriate would be where the customer is mainly concerned in how fast they can get the work done due to the performance issues in Kofax TotalAgility. The customer needs to weigh the overall elimination of functions that were done manually and how long it takes them to do these functions. They have to consider the overall time, not just the act of launching the form and completing it. Many manual functions should be replaced with the automation in the workflow.

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

• Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
• Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
• Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.

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

• Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
• The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
• The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.

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

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

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

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

Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.

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

• The product is a behemoth to stand up and is cost prohibitive well before it can be implemented. Long term vision planning must be done to realize a positive ROI.
• It is costly to locate or train internal resources to implement the product successfully. It is very easy to be lost in a black hole if trying to implement it with no previous experience of an ECM platform.
• Demonstrating the platform to key stakeholders from multiple departments will most likely lead to discussions where business processes can be automated allowing for a faster ROI.

Incentivized